Wesley Korir won last year's Los Angeles Marathon and dozens cared. Marathons are noticed in Olympic years, or if they are held in your neighborhood and your driveway is blocked.
In our self-indulgent, Web-hit-driven, celebrity-is-king approach to what is important in sports these days, you are Kobe, Manny, LeBron, Tiger or nobody.
Korir is none of the above and far from nobody.
He is a 27-year-old Kenyan with an amazing story. He comes from poverty, which is not unusual in sports. He has excelled beyond expectations, which is not unusual in sports. And he is handling it all with grace and humility, which is unusual.
His basic bio reads that he got out of Kenya because, like so many others there, he was a talented runner. He took a scholarship to Murray State in Kentucky, then transferred to Louisville after one semester when Murray State dropped its men's track program.
In 2008, he graduated from Louisville with a degree in biology pre-med, and his running resume was topped by an 11th-place finish in the NCAA cross-country meet and a third in the NCAA 5,000 meters.
That's only a snapshot. Korir's story is best told in three segments.
The killing
Korir says that his early life in the village of Kitale was happy. One of eight children, Korir says his family never had much, but never wanted for anything.
"There were some nights we didn't eat," he says. "But we always got by. We had shoes. When I wore a hole in my shorts -- we didn't sit in chairs at school, just on the ground -- my mother would sew it up."
Korir ran five miles to school in the morning, five back home to lunch, five back for the afternoon and five home again.
"If my mother was cooking or washing dishes, and she needed soap," Korir says, "she'd send me to the shop."
The shop was three miles away and Korir ran. This is extraordinary in places other than Kenya.
He came to the United States for an education. His running skills sponsored that. He settled in under the guidance of Ron Mann, who not only coached Louisville track, but had been the coach of Beijing Olympian Lopez Lomong at Northern Arizona and was the U.S. Olympic middle distance coach at the 2008 Games.
Korir took a part-time job during school in maintenance and was, by his own account, a distance runner with big hopes and limited success.
At Christmastime 2007, Korir needed to renew his visa, so he flew back to Kenya. Elections were held shortly after Christmas, and the results were immediately controversial, with accusations of fixed results. Korir felt little of that in his village of Kitale, nor did he ever really understand the convergence of politics and tribal life.
"All my best friends were from tribes that my tribe was always trying to kill," he says.
Several days after Christmas, Korir went to the big city, Eldoret, where he would take care of his visa and participate in a running clinic for youngsters. He stayed at his brother-in-law's house, in a part of town where they were rioting over election results.
"One morning, the people from my tribe came and got us and made us join the group," Korir says. "Some of them had machetes, but I had no weapons, so they gave me two stones to throw."
Korir says there was no escaping, that he and his brother-in-law were surrounded and pushed forward as the group moved on.
"I watched them burn the lady's house next to my brother-in-law's," he says. "She wasn't a member of our tribe, so they burned it. She had worked her whole life to build it and they burned it down in five minutes."
Korir's brother-in-law faked an ankle injury and managed to drift out of the group, telling Korir to seize any opportunity to escape and run.
"This was just like living the movie 'Hotel Rwanda,' " Korir says.
The group moved along the outskirts of the city and Korir saw people he hadn't seen for years. One was Lucas Sang, who had been on Kenya's eighth-place 1,600-meter relay team in the Seoul Olympics.
"I talked to him," Korir says. "He asked me, 'When did you come from America?' "
Minutes later, another tribe ambushed them and Korir watched Sang being killed.
"He was only a little in front of me," Korir says. "I saw a machete swing and then I saw them burning his body."
In the aftermath, some reports said Sang was hit by a rock. Korir says he saw a machete swing. Sang was eventually identified only by an unburned piece of his track suit.
"I remembered what my brother-in-law said," Korir says. "There was a church on fire, and I ran through the smoke. I used it as a shield and ran into the cornfields to hide."
It took weeks for Korir to get out, to Uganda, to acquire a new visa and fly back to Louisville.
"I've never felt the way I felt when I got home to Louisville," he told the Courier-Journal. "I said to myself, 'I'm home, at last.' "
The marathon
In the fall of 2008, Korir entered the Chicago Marathon. His coach, Mann, had convinced him that marathon running was his future. Korir said he'd try.
