During Saturday night's Old Dominion Football game, the Monarchs announced they'll retire Taylor Heinicke's #14 jersey October 15th at halftime of the Georgia Southern game.
He'll become the first ODU football jersey retirement @WAVY_News
Back in January 2023, Peyton Hillis took his kids to the beach in Pensacola, Florida.
There had been a bad storm the night before. It was windy that morning but the sun was out, and he didn't think much of it.
Later that morning, his mother started screaming.
"I looked at her and she pointed out to my son, and she says, 'Orry and Camille are drowning.'"
His son Orry was 9. His niece Camille was 8. A rip current had them.
"I didn't even think. I reacted and started running into the water."
Then came the part of this story almost nobody tells.
Hillis reached his son first. And he had to keep swimming.
"I think the scariest point was when I'm swimming to my son and I have to pass by him because my niece is in more danger," Hillis said. "I knew that I had to pass him up to get to Camille first. Because if I didn't, then there's no way she would've made it."
He swam past his own child.
When he got to Camille, she was screaming that they were going to die. He got her onto a boogie board and pointed her toward shore.
Then he turned around and went back for Orry.
By that point his son was, in his words, pretty much limp. Hillis carried 130 pounds of dead weight through a rip current while watching his kid's eyes roll back in his head.
"Lord, please. I really don't care about my life. I don't. But if we can get him out of here, that's the only thing I'm going to care about."
He got him to shore.
Both kids lived. Hillis collapsed.
He was airlifted to Baptist Hospital in Pensacola with lung and kidney failure. Doctors sedated him and put him on a ventilator.
He didn't wake up for about 10 days.
"The first thing I remember is my mom, daughter, and sister standing around me. To their credit, they all act like everything was normal, everything was fine, which calmed me down. I couldn't move. I mean, I couldn't move my body."
Two more weeks in intensive care after that.
Emmitt Smith visited him in the hospital that January and posted a photo, which was the first time anybody outside the family had seen him since it happened. Smith called him a hero.
Hillis stayed quiet through all of it. He gave no interviews for over a month.
When he finally spoke, in February, it wasn't about the rescue.
"I haven't taken any interviews on this because I'd like to keep my family out of the public eye because it was a very traumatic time for us. But I did want to come on here and show my appreciation for everyone who helped save my life. I left the hospital with no worries and concerns and should make a 100 percent recovery. I'm a very lucky and blessed man."
He was a seventh round pick out of Arkansas who ran for 1,177 yards for the Browns in 2010, got voted onto the cover of Madden NFL 12 by fans, and was out of the league by 2015.
Five months after the rescue, he sat down with Michael Strahan and summed it up in one line.
"It is 100% a miracle that somebody didn't die."
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🚨WOW: A 12-year-old Texas girl became an absolute hero after doing the unthinkable to save her dying puppy.
While home sick from school, she noticed her brand-new puppy was gasping for air and suffocating. Panicked and unable to reach her mom at work, she knew she didn't have a second to lose.
Even though she had never driven a car before, she grabbed the keys, put the puppy in the seat, and managed to drive nearly a mile toward the nearest vet clinic.
An officer pulled her over after noticing the erratic driving, but instead of a lecture, he saw a crying child and a puppy in critical distress. The officer immediately grabbed the dog, put it in his patrol car, and rushed it to the clinic.
Thanks to her quick thinking and a compassionate police officer, the puppy survived! 🐶❤️ Instead of giving a ticket, the police praised the young girl's incredible bravery and love for her pet.
In her latest sciolistic letter to me, @SenWarren made it clear that she knows even less about foreign exchange markets than she does about banking.
What is equally shocking, but not surprising: not a single member of the media mob has a rudimentary-enough level of financial market literacy to spot her remedial error.
To reiterate: under @POTUS, the United States delivers for America’s trusted partners.
For a fuller explanation, I recommend Senator Warren take any entry level course in international finance for her and her staff, or I can personally give her a tutorial on Foreign Exchange for Dummies. Although I am not holding my breath, I hope her next letter will demonstrate that she has learned the difference between a currency purchase and a swap or a loan.
The anti-datacenter psychosis sweeping through both sides of our national politics might be the worst mass movement I've seen in my lifetime. The magnitude of lies underpinning it, the threat it poses to our economy and civilization, and the sheer scale of its popularity are totally unprecedented. It should be an enduring national shame that the country that invented the airplane, landed on the Moon, and created the Internet is descending into superstitious panic at the very moment growth matters most