Features on the Sept. 16 (7pm ET) edition of ESPN’s sports newsmagazine series E:60:
Touchdowns and Tornadoes — Parkersburg, Iowa, is a small rural town of 1,900 residents where high-school football is king. Despite its size, under the stewardship of head coach Ed Thomas, the football program has produced four current NFL players (Jacksonville Jaguar Brad Meester, Detroit Lion Jared Devries, Denver Bronco Casey Weigmann and Green Bay Packer Aaron Kampman). When the town was hit by a tornado on May 25, the community rallied around its coach to get the Aplington-Parkersburg High School football field ready to host the school’s Sept. 5 home opener. ESPN reporter Steve Cyphers and E:60 follow the story of football and the rebirth of a small town from the devastation of a tornado. It includes the return of all four NFL players to their hometown, gripping footage of the tornado, and Aplington-Parkersburg High School football players digging graves to bury some of the six residents killed in the tornado. The story also takes the viewer inside the locker room on Sept. 5 as coach Thomas, for whom the field is named, gave a stirring pre-game speech before his team convincingly won their home opener 53-20.
Eminent Domain — For more than a century, the children of the South Bronx have played on a pair of large, tree-lined parks in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. These urban oases have been a critical asset for a community suffering from high asthma and obesity rates. But now the richest team in baseball is building a new, $1.3 billion ballpark on 22 acres of this green space, forcing kids in the poorest Congressional district in America to look for recreation elsewhere. And taxpayers are subsidizing the massive project — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. E:60 correspondent Tom Farrey reports on who’s really paying the price for most expensive stadium in U.S. history, and puts the question to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Would this have happened to Central Park?
Turf 2 Surf — E:60’s Lisa Salters tells the story of Manny Raya and J.J. Ortiz, two former gang members from the barrios of Santa Barbara, Calif., whose discovery of surfing helped them turn their lives around. Today, Raya, a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Ortiz, a California State University Northridge graduate, are giving back — returning to their childhood neighborhoods to comb through local juvenile facilities, inviting some of the most troubled youngsters to their surfing camp, Turf 2 Surf. Their camp takes these members of rival gangs to legendary surf beaches such as Rincon and Malibu.
