The Jeffrey Glazer Athletic Scholarship

New College of Florida
 
In ancient Greece, home of the first Olympics, Aristotle prized athletics as a marker of character. Excellence in sports was a metaphor for life. The true athlete was competitive but honorable.
 
Jeffrey Glazer was such a man. 
 
As a kid, growing up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, he played in every sport — baseball, football, basketball, track & field and swimming — excelling in many. It was said that he could watch a game he'd never seen before, pick up the essentials and join the fray within minutes. He had 20/20 vision and remarkable eye-hand coordination. And he thought it wrong to pile up the score against a losing opponent, or to give up on a game you were losing. Because you could also come back.
 
He had character. After college he went into the construction trades. At the age of 47 he was working on an exterior restoration project when the man-lift he was on rolled over a curb and spit him out of the bucket, leaving him with a spinal cord injury. At first, paralyzed from the neck down, he vowed to fight back, to regain his mobility. Most spinal cord patients leave the hospital in a wheelchair. Six months later Jeffrey left walking. His kids thought he was Superman. 
 
He fought his last battle against disease later in life, when a diagnosis of MDS, a form of leukemia, brought him face to face with his own mortality. He could have opted for two or three years of chemotherapy. But he chose a bone marrow transplant — the most arduous, the most dangerous option but the only one that offered the promise of a cure— because he believed, with the heart of an athlete, that he could overcome the odds. And because fighting for life was noble.
 
He was also a man who loved people, especially children, who prized American values of fairness and democracy and was grateful for the sunshine and liberty Florida gave him for the last 10 years of his life. 
 
This scholarship honors his legacy — in life as in sports — and challenges its recipients to abide by the drumbeat of athletics — in victory, to show humility and magnanimity, and in defeat, to get back up on your feet, and keep celebrating life.