If you just happened to be in the crowd at a super featherweight bout in Indio, Calif., on Saturday evening, you might not understand the importance of that particular boxing match.

But for Patricio Manuel, it represented 12 minutes of triumph. With that fight, Manuel, 33, became the first openly trans man to compete in a professional boxing match in the U.S.

It was moment of joy following a long journey after Manuel first stepped into the ring as a high schooler in Gardena, a small city south of Los Angeles.

“The first week I fell in love with the sport and never looked back,” Manuel tells NPR. He was drawn by boxing’s rigor — “the specific, very grueling training from boxing, as well as the opportunity to compete consistently is what really attracted me to the sport.”

Boxing entered his life at the same time as another fateful event for Manuel: puberty.

“I had always seen myself as a boy, even though society basically kept telling me no,” he says. “And when I started going through puberty, it was like nature being like, no — you actually are a girl, no matter how much you don’t want to be.”

Manuel trained hard, developing a high-pressure style, throwing lots of shots at his opponents. He worked up the ranks of women’s boxing, winning five amateur championships – and qualified for the 2012 Olympic trials, the first time women’s boxing would be in the games. But after sustaining an injury in the first round at the trials, Manuel had to withdraw.

It was a career setback, but it forced a personal reckoning.

“Boxing was this thing I love, but it was also a distraction from me really looking at myself, and being like ‘Who are you, really? What will make you happy?’ ” he says. “I was just always like, ‘Boxing makes me happy.’ But there’s more to me than just a sport. And when the sport was taken away from me, I really had to look at myself, and be like, ‘There’s more to this than just losing the fight.'”

Manuel realized he had been lying to himself about being known as a female athlete and competing in women’s boxing: “I really was a man that wanted to be in boxing, but I was afraid that I would lose my ability to compete.”

It was time. Manuel decided to go by the name Pat, to use he/him/his pronouns and live publicly as a man. He also began taking hormones and medically transitioning, having a mastectomy and then surgery to give him a male-shaped chest.

But other complications arose now. His longtime gym told him that he could train there, but only if he didn’t tell anyone — an impossibility for Manuel. “I’ve never lived my life in a closet, and I refuse to compromise that way. So I walked out of that gym and I never came back.”

He found a new gym that welcomed him, and he fought two amateur bouts in 2016 – winning one, losing the other. But it was hard to find opponents, and he had to get used to taking on boxers who fought in a style more like his own.

“A lot of the male fighters — especially in Los Angeles, which is a primarily Mexican-populated boxing area — a lot of it’s hunting someone down and ripping them to the body, which used to be my style in the amateurs,” Manuel says. “But I faced a lot of female fighters who were really excellent boxers who worked on getting their distance, getting their points, moving out of the way. So it was an adjustment to turn from being the person who was always chasing down and breaking down the body of other fighters, to having someone do that to me.”

But he kept up his training regimen, and with some new support from Golden Boy, Oscar de la Hoya’s boxing promotion company, Manuel was able to get his pro license to box as a man. Golden Boy also found him an opponent.

So on Saturday evening, in an eight-fight card at a casino in Indio, Manuel battled a man named Hugo Aguilar. After four rounds, the judges declared Manuel the winner.

As Manuel was interviewed in the ring about what it all meant, boos and whistles could be heard from the crowd. But Manuel wasn’t shaken, and he says he wasn’t angry, either.

“I’m a black trans man. I’ve had people saying cruel, hateful things to me my entire life. People booing me – it’s more about them than me. They don’t know me. They don’t know what I’ve been through. They don’t know how much I love this sport, how happy I was in that moment. I refuse to give them power over me by feeling even angry toward it.”

And, he says, he’ll be back.

“This wasn’t a one-show, this wasn’t a publicity stunt. This is something I love, something I’ve invested my entire life to, this is something I’ve sacrificed for. This is just the start.”

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A professional soccer player is being held in a Bangkok prison while he awaits extradition to Bahrain, where he was convicted in absentia of vandalism and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.

Hakeem al-Araibi, 25, formerly on the Bahraini national soccer team, denies he vandalized a police station and says he fears political persecution and torture if he is returned to Bahrain, according to the Associated Press.

On Tuesday a Thai court ruled that Araibi could be detained for 60 days pending the completion of Bahrain’s extradition request. The court also denied a request for bail.

The London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy said it was in contact with Araibi, who communicated this message on Dec. 4:

“This might be my last message. I still don’t know whether I will be deported to Bahrain tomorrow. I appeal to the United Nations, individual states, FIFA, footballers, and all people, as my fate is now in danger and my future will soon be over. If I am deported to Bahrain, don’t forget me, and if once I’m there you hear me saying things, don’t believe me. I know what will happen to me and I know I will be tortured to confess things that I have never done. Please continue your fight to save me.”

Araibi fled his homeland four years ago. Since the failed Arab Spring uprising in 2011, the Bahraini government has become known for harshly repressing its critics. Araibi, who has criticized Bahrain’s ruling family in media interviews, made his way to Australia, where he was granted refugee status and, in 2017, permanent residency.

Araibi was arrested at a Bangkok airport on Nov. 27 upon entering Thailand with his wife for a vacation. Since then, there have been widespread calls for his release, including from the Australian government and international human rights organizations.

Thailand’s Immigration Bureau commissioner, Surachate Hakparn, told the Bangkok Post the detention of Araibi abides by international law on human rights.

When Araibi was detained in Bangkok, there was an Interpol red notice attached to him. Such a notice is meant to alert nations about individuals with active arrest warrants. They are not legally binding, but according to The New York Times, red notices have been “abused by authoritarian governments that want to bring home critics who have fled abroad.”

Thai authorities detained him “in response to the red notice alert received from the Interpol National Central Bureau of Australia and the formal request from the Bahraini government for his arrest and extradition,” the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

Interpol rescinded the red notice for Araibi about a week after he was detained, the Times says.

Araibi’s Australian soccer club has urged the Thai government to free the Bahraini athlete. But FIFA, soccer’s governing body, which told The Guardian it supports his release, has been criticized by Human Rights Watch and other groups for not doing more to gain his freedom.

Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf nation ruled by a Sunni monarch, has been the focus of concern by human rights groups for some time. Last year Amnesty International warned that Bahrain was “heading towards total suppression of human rights.”

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, told The Guardian that “The Thai government must know it’s crossing a red line if it deports Hakeem.”

The Bahrain rights group notes on its website that Araibi “has been very critical of the current president of the Asian Football Confederation,” Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Khalifa, a member of Bahrain’s royal family, especially during his 2016 candidacy for the position of president of FIFA. Khalifa did not win but is a vice president of the organization.

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Tim Green first noticed the symptoms about five years ago.

The former NFL player, whose strength was a job requirement, suddenly found his hands weren’t strong enough to use a nail clipper. His words didn’t come out as fast as he was thinking them.

“I’m a strange guy,” Tim says. “I get something in my head and I can just run with it. I was really afraid I had ALS. But there was enough doubt that I said ‘alright, I don’t. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s not do anything.'”

Denying pain and injury had been a survival strategy in football.

“I was well trained in that verse,” he says.

But a diagnosis in 2016 made denial impossible. Doctors confirmed that Tim, also a former NPR commentator, had ALS, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The degenerative illness attacks the body’s motor nerve cells, weakening muscles in the arms and legs, and the muscles that control speech, swallowing and breathing.

Tim tried to keep it private — he didn’t want people feeling sorry for him.

But he says, “I got to a point where I couldn’t hide it anymore.”

So Tim went on 60 Minutes and revealed his illness.

“What we said is, you either write your own history or someone’s going to write it for you,” says 24-year-old Troy Green.

When one isn’t enough

I was one of Tim Green’s producers for his Morning Edition commentaries back in the 1990s. We went to dinner once when he was in Washington, D.C. for a game — his Atlanta Falcons were playing Washington. Tim had a huge plate of pasta and when we finished, the waiter came over and asked “anything else?” Tim pointed to his clean plate and said, “yeah. Let’s do it again.”

That was him. One entrée wasn’t enough. One high-profile career wasn’t enough – he’s also a prolific author, has a law degree and works for two firms.

And ultimately, it wasn’t enough for Tim to deal with ALS in silence. Last month, in conjunction with his 60 Minutes appearance, Tim helped launch a fund-raising website, Tackle ALS.

Writing his own story

I recently visited Tim at his lakeside home in upstate New York, in the village of Skaneateles.

We sat down in a room with a huge picture window that normally offers a gorgeous view of Skaneateles Lake. On the day I visited, all you could see was driving snow. Troy Green sat next to his dad — Tim’s speech is slow and raspy and sometimes Troy helps repeat or reinforce Tim’s words. During our talk, a tube connected to a port in Tim’s chest provided an infusion of Radicava. Last year, the FDA approved the new drug, which has been shown to slow the progress of what’s currently a fatal disease.

The history Troy encouraged Tim to write is positive and hopeful. They stress that ALS can be cured, it’s just underfunded.

The history certainly includes family. Tim and his wife Illyssa have been married for 29 years. They have five kids — all with first names starting with “T” — that’s Illyssa’s doing, Tim says. And the family is incredibly close. Literally.

“My brother lives on the same lane as us. I’m their neighbor,” Troy says, adding, “my little sister’s at school, my little brother lives here and then my older sister lives the furthest away. She’s about a three minute drive.”

“We’re going to reel her in,” Tim laughs.

Football, a complicated love

Of course, any Tim Green history has to include football.

For better and worse.

Tim believes football gave him the disease. His eight years in the NFL in the 1980s and 90s, as a defensive lineman and linebacker, were before protective rule changes and concussion protocols.

There were “countless” head collisions, Tim says. I mention that he had decades of those collisions, from an early age through the NFL.

“But in the NFL,” he says, “the violence and the impacts are extraordinary. Every day.”

Troy adds, “when [Tim] played, practices were worse than the games. Because in the game, you typically would see 45 to 65 plays. In practice, you could run 100, 200 by the time you’re done with drills.”

Researchers say repetitive head blows may play a part in causing ALS. The recent NFL Concussion Settlement acknowledged a link by including payouts to former players with the disease, including Tim.

His Morning Edition commentaries regularly took listeners inside the violent game. In 1992, Tim wrote one about about a teammate, former Atlanta defensive end Rick Bryan, who’d had enough of the physical toll and was retiring.

The piece ended with this:

“Back at the locker room, I checked my protective neck padding and pumped some extra air into the padding of my helmet. Like a gypsy gazing into a crystal ball, I looked at my own distorted reflection in the glossy black surface of my helmet. The smile let me know I was glad to be there, but there was nothing I could see that told me how long it would last.”

Tim could articulate what many players couldn’t. Why, I asked him, with his insights, would he play a sport that had the potential to do permanent damage?

Tim says as a kid, he had two passions. Writing and football. From the earliest age, he says, he worked incredibly hard to succeed at both, and he did.

“I was just impassioned,” he says. “That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I got.”

“If [this disease] is part of the bargain, I don’t know,” he continues. But back then, he says, he had “no idea” of the potential long-term damage of football. “So the temporary pain and discomfort, I knew that was worth it. Some pain in the future with my back, neck, knees, I knew that was worth it.”

“Can I say getting ALS was worth it? I don’t know. I don’t know.”

His ambivalence illustrates Tim’s profound and complicated love for the game. Still. He says it gave him the disease. But it also taught him so many life lessons growing up. It allowed him to vent anger and violence in an acceptable way.

“I’m not indicting football or the NFL,” he says.

He passed on his love – his two oldest sons played football. His 12-year-old, Ty, plays now. And it has split the close-knit Greens. Illyssa doesn’t like it. Tim says he wants Ty to play if he wants to.

Tim and Troy say the game now is different than it was. It’s much safer with less contact in practice. Both of them coached Ty’s junior team.

“We trained [so in] every tackling drill your head’s out of the play,” says Troy. “In practice we would penalize our players if they had their head in the drill. We really just encouraged the modern day football, not the 1980’s edition.”

Still, football is inherently dangerous, and so far Ty wants to play.

“I don’t want to wrap him up in a bubble,” says Tim, “because where do you stop?”

But there’s a deeper, more complex reason behind Tim’s support. Troy says his dad doesn’t want the illness to be a burden on anyone. So Tim doesn’t want Ty not to play, just because the game hurt him.

Translating science into treatment

“I do want to point out that most people who play football don’t develop ALS.”

So says Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, who treats Tim’s disease. Cudkowicz has researched ALS for nearly 25 years. She thinks football probably is a factor that led to his illness, but not the only one. The studies so far haven’t established a direct cause and effect.

“And that’s why we think there’s something else,” Cudkowicz says. “It’s a combination perhaps in someone’s immune system or something in their genetics that makes it more likely that if you also hit your head repetitively that you might come down with the disease.”

Cudkowicz directs the Healey Center for ALS at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She says Tim’s and other prominent people’s involvement and publicity present a great opportunity, as a follow up to the viral ice bucket challenges that raised money for ALS a few years ago.

“Absolutely I think this is a huge next step,” Cudkowicz says. “The ice bucket challenge came at the right time. The science was exploding but there were no resources for it. And suddenly there’s this $220 million resource for ALS and it fed this great science and drew in all these new people and new companies for the field.”

“But there’s still a [funding] gap in getting that great science to patients. And that’s where Tim’s Tackle ALS initiative and the Healey Center are going to partner and hopefully with many other groups, translate that great science into treatment for people.”

“If you have a good life, it’s never long enough”

Later, on the day I visited, Tim sat down at a desk in a large wood-paneled den, indulging his other passion in life — writing.

He can’t type, so he has a sensor on his glasses that highlights letters. Then he clicks a mouse and the letters show up on his laptop screen. He’s working on a kid’s baseball book. It’s a third collaboration with former New York Yankees star Derek Jeter and Tim says they both provide specific areas of expertise. Jeter brings baseball realism to the book; Tim draws on his many years of being surrounded by young people. Disgusting young people, he laughs.

“These are kids 10 to 14 years old. Tweens,” he says. “They think vomit is funny. [So] somebody has to throw up [in the book], and it’s best when they throw up on someone.”

“Writing [these scenes] is easy. It’s convincing Derek to keep them is where I earn my money.”

On cue, Troy looks up from his phone and makes an announcement.

“Just got an email that Jeter, and [his] Turn 2 Foundation donated $10,000 [to Tackle ALS]. His ears are ringing,” Troy says, laughing. “He heard about the vomit scenes!”

Tim says the fundraising is a chance to help others. He says he’s one of the lucky people with the disease. It’s relatively slow moving.

I ask Tim what keeps him positive through this time. He answers by recounting a period 12 years ago, when Illyssa was diagnosed with cancer.

“She was out of her mind,” Tim says, “and I remember saying to her, you’ve got great doctors, we’re gonna beat this and do everything we can. But in the meantime, I don’t want you to wallow in fear and anxiety and misery. I said, because we have a very good life and if you have a good life … and a lot of people do, maybe they don’t realize it, but they do… but if you have a good life, it’s never long enough. We all know it’s finite.”

“So whenever the end point is, I ask to be strong enough to maintain that positive attitude no matter what the challenges are.”

Today, Illyssa is cancer free. And it’s Tim trying to live by his own advice.

As I leave, I stop to look at two large sculptures outside their house. One is of five kids, playing. The other is a lone figure. A helmeted football player, running and catching a pass over the shoulder. Tim says it’s an homage to the game, that let him “buy this amazing property and build a comfortable home.”

A home, and family, that now mean even more than they have all along.

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A judge has accepted a plea agreement under which the former president of a Baylor University fraternity, accused of raping a female student, will serve no jail time and won’t have to register as a sex offender.

The deal allowed Jacob Walter Anderson, 23, of Garland, Texas, to plead no contest on Monday to the lesser charge of unlawful restraint. In pleading no contest, a defendant does not admit guilt and does not offer a defense.

The woman who brought the charges expressed outrage at the decision.

“He stole my body, virginity and power over my body,” she said in court, according to a family spokesman, the Associated Press reports.

“I not only have to live with his rape and the repercussions of the rape, I have to live with the knowledge that the McLennan County justice system is severely broken,” the family statement quoted the woman as saying. “I have to live with the fact that after all these years and everything I have suffered, no justice was achieved.”

The McLennan County’s district attorney’s office, which dismissed four counts of sexual assault against Anderson, told the alleged victim’s family it was not confident enough to take the case to trial, according to NPR’s Wade Goodwyn.

Goodwyn reports the alleged victim told Judge Ralph Strother she was furious the prosecutors who struck the plea agreement did not attend the hearing. “If I had the courage to come back to Waco and face my rapist and testify, you could at least have had enough respect for me to show up today,” she said.

Strother, on at least two other occasions in the past couple of years, dealt leniently with men accused of raping or sexually assaulting Baylor students, AP reports.

The offer of a plea deal was made public in August, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald. Baylor is a private Christian university in Waco.

“The way the victim’s family found out about the plea deal is they read it in the local newspaper,” Goodwyn reports.

Upon learning the news, the woman and her family urged Strother to reject the plea agreement and send the case to trial, according to the Tribune-Herald.

At the time of the alleged rape, the woman was a 19-year-old Baylor sophomore.

NPR does not name individuals who are the alleged victims of sexual assaults, with some exceptions, such as when the individual goes public with her or his identity.

In the affidavit for Anderson’s arrest, the alleged rape victim told police Anderson raped her in February 2016 when she attended an off-campus party hosted by his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta.

After sipping some punch, “she became disoriented and felt very confused,” according to the affidavit. Anderson led her to a secluded area on the grounds so she could get some air, and then repeatedly raped her, leaving her unconscious, alone and “lying face down in her own vomit.”

Anderson was kicked out of Baylor and the fraternity was suspended.

Baylor University has been roiled in recent years by charges of sexual assault by its students, including the 2016 scandal involving members of Baylor’s football team. As Goodwyn reported, the scandal led to the firing of Baylor’s president, Kenneth Starr, and its head football coach, Art Briles.

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The challenge: Sail 30,000 miles around the globe, non-stop, alone.

What could go wrong?

This week, Susie Goodall found out. The 29-year-old British woman was the youngest participant in the annual Golden Globe Race which sends sailors from the coast of France around the earth and back to the same port. Or at least that’s the plan.

On Wednesday morning, Goodall was 2,000 miles west of South America when her boat flipped in heavy wind, broke its mast and knocked her temporarily unconscious. She activated her emergency beacon and a series of troubling updates were posted to her Twitter account:

Chile’s Maritime Coordination Center received her distress signal and ordered the Tian Fu, a cargo ship on its way from China to Argentina, to divert from its course and rescue Goodall.

Meanwhile, all Goodall could do was wait — trying to keep her boat steady in the choppy South Pacific and pumping out water that was leaking into the damaged cabin.

When the 600-foot rescue vessel finally reached Goodall, deploying a small boat to retrieve her was deemed impossible because of 10-13 foot waves rocking both ships. Instead, crew members on board the Tian Fu executed a kind of high-stakes version of Candy Crane, lowered a cable from one of the ship’s massive cargo hoists, and plucked Goodall from her deck, hauling her to safety.

The good news was posted to her Facebook page: “From Susie, at 15:14 UTC: ON THE SHIP!!!” Goodall is expected to arrive at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas on Wednesday.

She is not the first sailor to run into trouble in this year’s race. As NPR reported, an accident in the Indian Ocean in September forced the evacuation of a naval commander; skippers from France and Ireland have also had to be rescued.

In a post from Nov. 30 titled “Half way round the world,” Goodall wrote about how challenging the experience had been at that point as she faced fierce seas.

“To say I’d had enough by this point is an understatement. They were the hardest and loneliest days I’ve ever had. All I wanted was a break from it. But being under Australia, half the world from home I might as well sail home again instead of taking a break.”

Her family thanked rescuers and race organizers Friday, and said farewell to her ship, the DHL Starlight.

“It was with a heavy heart Susie left DHL Starlight to fend for herself, before she fills with water and rests on the Pacific Ocean floor. DHL Starlight has been her home for the past few years; a faithful friend who stood up valiantly to all the elements, a guardian until their last moments together.”

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