Despite leading the Eagles to four straight NFC Championship games and one Super Bowl over the last eight years, Donovan McNabb has been a constant lightening rod for criticism in sports-crazed Philadelphia. As the 2007 season gets underway, McNabb is already facing more questions about his health, leadership skills and ability to win the big game. Correspondent James Brown sits down with the high-flying quarterback.
On Oct. 13, 1972, a chartered flight carrying the Old Christians rugby team from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the Andes mountains, leaving the survivors trapped on an unreachable, snow-covered cliff. Stranded for 72 days, they endured freezing nights, a devastating avalanche and the threat of starvation by consuming the only food available to them: the flesh of dead teammates. Thirty-five years later, Real Sports host Bryant Gumbel visits several members of the team as they relive their heroic, widely discussed story and talk about life since the tragedy.
Over the last decade, a host of wrestlers have died before age 45, some from injuries sustained in the ring, others from drug overdoses and others from complications brought on by years of steroid and other drug use. Following the recent suicide of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, Real Sports revisits this disturbing trend. Often, young athletes lured to the industry by the promise of fame and fortune discover a truly lonely existence: On the road for as many as 300 days a year, with no job security, and performing in debilitating pain, they can spiral into depression and drugs. With some in the business saying the industry is to blame, correspondent Armen Keteyian examines why the problem persists and what is being done to remedy it.
After years of running from the dangers that haunted his childhood in the war ravaged country of Sudan, Lopez Lomong now runs towards a much different goal: making the 2008 U.S. Olympic team. Taken from his home at the age of six and imprisoned by rebel soldiers, Lomong escaped the only way he knew how...by running. After years in a Kenyan refugee camp, Lomong was brought to the United States and raised by a new family. Now, on the heels of Lomong's 1,500m National Collegiate Championship victory (while attending Northern Arizona University), Real Sports correspondent Mary Carillo travels back to Africa with Lomong to be reunited with his biological parents for the first time in 16 years.
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