Sunday, December 13, 2009

Flint's Mark Ingram Wins the Heisman Trophy


   
Ingram runs for 319 yards against Midland Dow in 2007. (Photo by Stuart Bauer/The Flint Journal)


Dan Nilsen of The Flint Journal reports:
Art and Barbara Johnson felt like crying, but they knew they had to hold it together.

Shonda Ingram already had tears streaming down her face after her son, Mark Ingram Jr., was named the Heisman Trophy winner Saturday night in New York.

And when Mark himself struggled to get through his emotional acceptance speech, his grandparents came to the rescue.

“I was pulling on him (mentally) to get through it, to get through his tears,” Barbara Johnson said by phone from the Nokia Theater Times Square, minutes after Ingram won the closest vote in Heisman history.

Ingram, the Flint Southwestern Academy graduate and now a sophomore running back at Alabama, edged Stanford back Toby Gerhart by 28 points for college football’s most prestigious award.

When the announcement was made, Ingram hugged his mother and grandparents (“He knocked my earring off with that hug,” said Barbara), then went up on stage.







1 comment:

  1. It's time to celebrate. He was a worthy candidate and deserved this award. If the potential keeps keeps rolling along, Mark can be one of the greatest of all time. I'd like to see it happen.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.