Random acts of kindness are a beautiful thing.
Yahoo Lifestyle reports that Tinyia Frank, a young woman shopping at Champs, was talking to a sales associate when a young boy excused himself to ask the price of basketball shoes under $75.
“He asked the man if they had any basketball shoes that are under $75, because that’s all that he had,” says Frank. “He kind of put his head down and looked disappointed to say it, not like he was saying it disrespectfully or anything, just kind of sad because that’s all he had.”
Frank then found out that the young man, Jordan, is in fifth grade and plays on a traveling basketball team and was impressed that youth in his town had activities that he could engage in unlike her town.
“It was a little traveling basketball team, because where I live, they don’t have anything for the young people. We’ve got one of the highest rates of overdoses in the country in our city, and we have nothing for the youth. They took away our centers that we had for young people, our dancing teams; nothing gets funded. So when he told me that he was on the traveling team and couldn’t afford the shoes that he wanted, I couldn’t do nothing but feel bad because the way that I was raised: If you got it, you give it to people.”
“His dad started crying,” Frank says. “The worker at Champs — they know me because I come in there and get shoes so much — he was like, ‘This woman is not playing with you.’”
After a half-hour of careful deliberation, because he wanted shoes that he could also wear to an upcoming school dance, Jordan picked out a pair of red LeBrons. Frank didn’t seem to mind that they cost $180.
“If I was going to get him some shoes, I wanted him to get what he liked,” she says. “Money is just money. Not to say it’s not important. I work a lot for my money. I’d rather go without getting my 15th pair of shoes and give it to a little boy who clearly only had one.”
Frank then bought the sneakers for the young man herself with the condition he sends her a picture when he wears them.
Well done. We need more of these types of stories these days.