Dr. Theodore Fulton

On Thursday, Alex Golesh's son asked him a question. Could he come out onto the field after Auburn won. Tonight Auburn beat Georgia, the number one team in the country, in Athens. Golesh found his son, pulled him in, and said this. "We're on the field, bud." Here is the whole thing. Auburn was not supposed to be there. Georgia was ranked first in the country and had not lost. The game was tied with three minutes to go. Auburn kicked a field goal at the end and won it 27 to 24. Then Golesh sat down in front of the cameras and told everybody what his kid had asked him three days earlier. Not if they won. After we win. So he went and found him. "We're on the field, bud." Then he said this about the job. "We're going to build Auburn back to where everybody wants it." Now here is the part that makes it land. Thirty five years ago Alex Golesh was somebody's seven year old. His parents took him and his brother out of Moscow with four hundred dollars, a few bags of clothes, and not one word of English between the four of them. His father had been a telecommunications engineer. In New York he drove a truck. His mother had been a medical aide. She cleaned houses. Here is his father on why they left. "We were scared." "We didn't know exactly what life would be like. We just knew we had to get to America." An aunt in New York sponsored them and met them at the airport. They lived in a two bedroom apartment above a bodega in Brooklyn, and Alex learned English at school. Here is his wife Alexis, who married into the story. "I'm absolutely astonished every time I hear the story." Here is what he remembers about America at seven years old. Bananas. That you could have as many of them as you wanted. "They were really hard to get. They were like a delicacy almost." His father never stopped working. He drove for a pizza company, then managed a store, then ran a warehouse. And his mother, who got off that plane unable to say one sentence in English, works for a language translation service now. Here is the line from him that explains all of it. "When you're a kid, you don't really know what you don't have." So that is the whole thing, in one night. A man carried his seven year old out of Moscow with four hundred dollars and no way to ask anybody for help. Thirty five years later that kid stood in the middle of a field in Georgia, in front of eighty thousand people who came to watch somebody else, and waved his own son out to stand next to him. The boy asked on Thursday. The answer was yes.