Sports are more than games people play. They have meant more to me than most people could know.

I absolutely love sports. As a little boy, I found my passion for sports was only starting to kindle.

To understand how much sports mean to me, you must know the circumstances that I grew up in.

Since I was born, I have had health issues. I was born jaundiced with high blood pressure. My parents feared for my life.

I developed stomach issues and eventually started to get daily headaches that would incapacitate me. I would miss so much school that I had to repeat the seventh grade.

The headaches really took over my life at that point. But there was always sports there to help me cope with the pain and keep my mind off of how incredibly bad I felt.  Having sports there to do that just strengthened my love for them.

I will always remember how it felt when my Giants finally won the World Series in 2010, after the team had not won a title since 1954. That is the type of moment that made me appreciate sports ability to take my mind away from the pain and focus on something that I love.

By high school, my head pain was still bad but things still took a turn for the worse. I had started to get bad neck pain to go with my headaches.

This was the most miserable period in my life. Things only got worse from there.

When I was 18, I had perhaps the biggest health scare of my life.

I remember like it was yesterday. I sat down at my dining room table to do my homework during my senior year of high school. Suddenly, I noticed that I couldn’t keep the pencil in my hand. I couldn’t coordinate my hand to hold onto it and write.

It came from nowhere. I wasn’t in any accident but suddenly I have very little coordination, with my hands especially.

Imagine how scared you might have been. I was terrified.

One memory that will always stick with me was of me at a doctor’s appointment with a neurosurgeon. I will never forget the moment that he sat down and told me that I have the neck and back of a 70-year-old man. The discs in my spine were that degenerated.

Hearing that was so jarring. I, a young man in his early 20s, have a spine of an old man? But how?

After countless MRIs, CT scans and other tests, it was discovered by my doctors that I had a spinal cord bruise.

I had to have a spinal fusion of two of my cervical vertebrae in 2011 to help ensure that my neck does not get damaged any further.

Along with family and friends, sports were there to help me get through that. No matter what happened, I still had my Giants, Lakers and Raiders.

When the Lakers were in the midst of their dynasty in the early 2000s, I was having some of the best times of my life. Shaq and Kobe were the kings of the court at the time and I was loving every moment of it.

Now, as all of these health problems were manifesting themselves, I was also trying to make my way through high school. I was scared that I wasn’t going to be successful in life and that my life was being ruined by these issues.

I also didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living, and I really was uncomfortable with that.

From a very young age, I had always been told that I have good writing skills, including grammar and punctuation. I also have really enjoyed expressing my thoughts about sports on paper.

Then, one day it just occurred to me that I should try to become a sports journalist. I already had an extensive knowledge about sports that I wouldn’t have any trouble adjusting to the sports language, I was fluent in the jargon already.

So, I enrolled at Reedley College in 2012 as a journalism major. My quest to fulfill my dream had begun and I was on my way.

Now, as I sit here at age 26, in my third semester writing for The Rampage, I realize that what I have gone through and what I still go through is a test of my resolve.

Sports writing has given me a reason to want to continue, to keep trying to improve in different aspects of my life. Sports have had that profound an impact on my life.

I still deal with daily neck pain that I have to take pain medication for and I still have some very bad days, sports are still what helps me get through the times where I am in intense pain.

Yes I would much rather not have to deal with these health issues, but dealing with them has helped me find a purpose for my life, and for that I have to say that I am grateful.