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Neither does a mentally disabled Upstate man who has considered himself an 11th grader for the past 43 years.
But the little girl who can barely see and the man who can barely talk get the same attention from one of the Lowcountry's best writers as superstars Tiger Woods and Mia Hamm.
Gary Smith has told their stories for Sports Illustrated, writing from his home along one of Charleston's storied downtown streets.
He spends a couple of months digging into his subjects, then pours stuff that only their mothers might know into four stories a year -- 8,000- to 9,000-word spreads that prompted a recent New York Times headline to call Smith "The Sports Whisperer, Probing Psychic Wounds."
It said Smith is "the most decorated journalist you've probably never heard of," citing his four awards that are the magazine equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize.
The soft-spoken 54-year-old writer shows us there's much more to a ball game -- and life -- than film at 11.
Scattered through his new book, "Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories by Gary Smith," are hints that Smith and his wife, Sally, a psychiatrist, were smitten by the Lowcountry 23 years ago and decided to rear their three children here.
He tells us about the indomitable spirit of Rebecca Veeck, even as the reader stumbles with her down crowded hallways of her middle school just outside of Charleston. "It's a different condition, blindness at 13, from blindness at 8," Smith writes. "A whole new kind of darkness for her and her dad to negotiate."
Rebecca's father, Mike Veeck, is better known in the Lowcountry as a third-generation baseball executive whose philosophy that fun is good runs amok at the Charleston RiverDogs minor league games. He once let pregnant women in free on Labor Day. The idea of a free vasectomy for a lucky fan on Father's Day got shot down.
The Veeck spunk prepared father and daughter for a lot in life, but not everything.
"I accept that I'm blind," Rebecca told Smith for his 2005 article that's part of the book, "but I never totally accept it. You can't. You don't. Because pride will be lost if you totally accept it. Accepting means I'm OK with it -- and I'm not. You give in if you accept it totally. One percent of me -- no, one and a half percent of me -- doesn't accept it. I keep that one and a half percent for me. I want my sight back. I'm only 13, but I'm sick of waiting. I just want my vision back. I'm at the age where I'm realizing I'm not going to be able to drive or maybe even see my own kids when I have them. I think God did this for a reason. I just don't know what it is yet."
The "11th grader" from Anderson is named James Kennedy, but you probably know him by his nickname, "Radio." That was the title of the movie that sprang from Smith's story about the disabled young man who never graduates, and pours his soul into being a T.L. Hanna High School assistant football coach, trainer, manager and cheerleader.
But it's really about Harold Jones, the remarkable football coach who, for no obvious reason, gave a screaming misfit from the outer margins of society his unconditional love -- and still does.
When I talked to Smith about his new book, he said that 21 years of peeling back layers of people's lives for Sports Illustrated has taught him a lot about mankind -- and himself.
"There are a lot of reasons for hope, and there are a lot of reasons for deep concern," he said. "You see both in full bloom in human beings."
Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a wrestling match like that was going on inside Smith's own gut.
Everybody was looking for answers. Smith writes that on that Lowcountry Friday night he and his son, Noah, then 11, climbed aboard a bus with Summerville High School's mighty Green Wave football team. The bus glided behind the team's customary police escort to Goose Creek, where 8,000 fans packed the stadium.
"Now, with a kickoff scheduled to rise into the air at eight o'clock and join the smoke and human ashes riding in the wind, with sports and suffering suddenly teetering on the scales of a national debate over who we are, I too was craning for a glimpse."
It's only in the craning, his book seems to say, that one can find the real score.
