A Straightforward Plea for Help

Over the past few months, I’ve been involved in an amazing correspondence with Rex Miller, a gifted photographer, documentary filmmaker, and tennis professional (Miller attended Trinity School in Manhattan and trained at the Port Washington Tennis Academy with John and Patrick McEnroe). Among other things, Rex has become an authority on the Mississippi blues music scene, and he independently published a combination book and CD on that subject, All the Blues Gone.

While Rex was in Uganda recently, he learned of some of the gruesome atrocities that are part of everyday life in that war-torn nation. One source of those stories was Uganda’s No. 1 tennis player, Patrick Olobo. Rex is working on a story about Patrick and his life experience for a Tennis Life column that we’ll publish in the November/December issue of TENNIS Magazine, so I don’t want to go into too much detail. But trust me—the horrors that Patrick has lived with pale only in comparison to the inspirational story of how he has clung to his almost surreal dream of becoming a tennis player.

Anyway, Rex is trying to help get Patrick out of Uganda and it seems to me that the kid would be a marvelous asset to any college program. Here’s the letter Rex sent recently to those on his e-mail distribution list: