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Paul Harvey
Of the Story Michael looked down at his basketball jersey. It was drenched with blood. All around him were the shocked expressions of teammates and opposing players. What had happened in those initial eternal moments? Michael wasn't sure. Then, like a hammer crashing on an anvil, the pain struck. The 16 year young basketball team captain reeled into the arms of a nearby forward and was helped from the court. A doctor was on the sidelines to confirm the now obvious Michael, having collided with an opponent jaw first, had bitten off his own tongue. This is the rest of the story. From the beginning, Michael Phillip was everything that a gung ho physical education instructor could expect of a son. Throughout his childhood, he was a hyperactive blur, climbing trees and fences and throwing and catching balls and never sitting when he could walk and never walking when he could run. There were they predictably consequential injuries, like the time he fell two stories out of a pine tree he was scaling for the time he was vaulting from one backyard of another and impaled his hand on an iron fence spike. But such minor calamities never stopped Michael. By the age of 12, he was teaching physical education at a local army base to the children of personnel there. Michael adapted well to military style regimentation in school. He entered officers training, wherein he marched and drilled with an enthusiasm that overwhelmed his superiors. In his spare time, Michael sang with a little group called the Blue Boys. That is, until that painful collision on the basketball court when he bit off and unwittingly swallowed the tip of his tongue. Afterward, Michael would not even attempt to speak, and for many days he suffered in silence. His buddies in the group visited during his convalescence. I suppose you're seeing days are over, one of them said sadly, and Michael nodded. Nobody had imagined the frightening extent to which his injury had altered his voice forever, and not just his enunciation, but his entire voice. For weeks later, when next the Blue Boys met to rehearse, Michael did try to sing, but the crisp, refined intonation the others had known so well was gone, and in its place was the weirdest, the grittiest sound that any of them had ever heard. Good thing Michael was athletically inclined. The others agreed, because no way would he be able now to allow people to hear what his friends had just heard. But how very wrong they were. For once upon an ordinary high school basketball game, an ordinary teenage jock literally swallowed his own tongue and sealed his future from that day to this. That was many million sellers and many millions of dollars ago. You see, the polite, articulate tongue Michael was born with might have been anyone's. Yet what was left behind when it departed is. Is, well, one of a kind. A hard edged vocal style that forged a rock and roll institution. A brash, brassy presentation that formed the cornerstone of the Rolling Stones. Of course, you know the teenage athlete who injured himself rich and famous as Michael, Philip, Jagger, Mick Jagger. Only now you know the rest of the story.