As a Native American warrior, your ultimate triumph in battle was not to kill your enemy. It was to use your speed and your smarts and your wiles to get close enough to touch him, and then to slip away. The message was irrefutable: There was still breath in his chest only because you allowed it. Talk about power. Talk about speed. Talk about pride. Native Americans had a term for their definition of victory. They called it counting coup. When Billy Mills was 8, his mother died. His father, a member of the Lakota nation in South Dakota, stroked the boy's arms and told him, "You have broken wings." He used a stick to draw a circle in the dirt. "Step inside your soul," he said. "It is the pursuit of the dream that will heal you."

He encouraged his son to find his dream in sports, which were providing the Indian with a new way to compete against the white man after centuries of slaughter and treacherous treaties. Native Americans could play by the white man's rules, but leverage the quickness, endurance, and cunning that had always been central to their ancestors' hunter-gatherer ways.

Read the rest of it here.

Tags: baseball, jacoby ellsbury, billy mills, counting coup