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By Thomas Gerbasi - It isn’t very often, but when former middleweight champion Gerald McClellan wonders why he’s blind and how he ended up that way, his sister Lisa is always the first one by his side to say “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be your eyes.”
For 17 years, she has been. Ever since one of the most feared fighters of his era returned home from England far different than the way he entered the country after suffering a brain injury in his February 25, 1995 bout with Nigel Benn, it’s been his sister who has never left him, never walked away and left Gerald in the hands of strangers. It’s heroic no matter how you look at it, but the way she sees it, this is her blood, and this is what their mother would have wanted.
“It’s all in the way that my mom raised us to look after one another,” she said. “And at the times where I feel like giving up and walking away, I feel my mother kind of tugging at me from the grave and letting me know that that’s not what she would be pleased with.”
It goes without saying that if you called Lisa a patient woman that would be understating things. But even her patience is being tried with the family’s latest dilemma, as Gerald is scheduled to go in for colon removal surgery on June 22, just three days after her oldest brother Todd donates his kidney to Gerald’s other caregiver, his sister Sandra. The old saying is that God will never give you more things to deal with than you can handle, but surely the creator of that adage never took a trip to Freeport, Illinois. [Click Here To Read More]
For 17 years, she has been. Ever since one of the most feared fighters of his era returned home from England far different than the way he entered the country after suffering a brain injury in his February 25, 1995 bout with Nigel Benn, it’s been his sister who has never left him, never walked away and left Gerald in the hands of strangers. It’s heroic no matter how you look at it, but the way she sees it, this is her blood, and this is what their mother would have wanted.
“It’s all in the way that my mom raised us to look after one another,” she said. “And at the times where I feel like giving up and walking away, I feel my mother kind of tugging at me from the grave and letting me know that that’s not what she would be pleased with.”
It goes without saying that if you called Lisa a patient woman that would be understating things. But even her patience is being tried with the family’s latest dilemma, as Gerald is scheduled to go in for colon removal surgery on June 22, just three days after her oldest brother Todd donates his kidney to Gerald’s other caregiver, his sister Sandra. The old saying is that God will never give you more things to deal with than you can handle, but surely the creator of that adage never took a trip to Freeport, Illinois. [Click Here To Read More]
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