Cox Finds a Tree Growing in Brooklyn
March 21, 2005
by M.C. Antil, ©CableFax
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
The first thing you notice about Ralph Green is the smile. Okay, maybe the first thing you notice is that he is a large black man with one leg. Then you notice the smile.
But in combination, there is something about Ralph Green that grabs you and won’t let go. Not only is his physical presence unmistakable, but his enthusiasm for life is so palpable that on a cold night you’d swear you could warm your hands by it.
That’s along the lines of what SkiTAM co-chair Joe Rooney thought in 2004 when he first met Green, then a fi rst-year member of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team. At the time Cox was getting ready to launch an internal campaign, “Take it to the Max,” to ratchet up employee focus on Cox’s customers and its competition, and Rooney saw the perfect spokesman in Green, who will be at SkiTAM March 30-April 2 in Vail, CO.
Of course, Green’s presence was only one reason Rooney was interested. He was also affable, well-spoken and had one hell of a backstory.
In 1992, Ralph Green was one of the best 15-year old athletes in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He was a great quarterback, and could dunk a basketball with ease. But one day a car sped by, a gun barrel popped out the window and the next thing Ralph knew he felt something hot. The bullet severed an artery, and soon both his dreams of athletic greatness and his left leg were gone.
When he first heard about the disabled skiing program in Winter Park, Colorado, Green had never been on skis. In fact, he’d never been west of the Hudson. After high school, with a few hundred dollars in his pocket and a kiss from his mother on his cheek, he hopped a train west and changed his life forever.
Now Green works for Cox – not full time, but as a spokesman, and in a very real way, as a symbol. Cox is one of Ralph’s major sponsors, allowing him to pursue his dream of becoming a champion skier, while taking advantage of both his incredible story and his remarkable ability to tell it.
Green calls what Rooney and he deliver to Cox employees (and, recently, to Boys & Girls Clubs in Cox systems) “the old one-two punch.” And to hear Rooney tell it, he warms up the audience and then Green brings the house down. Rooney said one of the keys to Green is that he is so candid. “It’s not often these days that you see a public speaker being real, and Ralph, fi rst and foremost, is real.”
Green told me about being backstage once with then-CEO Jim Robbins and soon-to-be CEO Pat Esser. “At first Jim Robbins didn’t know who I was, but when we started talking he treated me like I mattered. And I treated him like a fellow Cox employee. I think he liked what he saw in me.”
While I’d like to tell you that Ralph won a medal in this year’s Paralympics, which just ended in Turin, I can’t lie. He fell during his best event, the downhill. As he knows, life, like the streets of Bed-Stuy, can be all-too real at times.
After that race, Green mustered up a big smile for Rooney, who was in Italy to watch his friend race. He said: “I would rather crash (trying to win) than speculate about what I could have done to have…Especially when I know the medalists gave it their all to get on that podium.”
M.C. Antil, who will be attending his ninth SkiTAM next week in Vail, can be reached at m.c.antil@att.net
