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Filling The Gap

By Chad Nielsen

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Late one evening in the mid-1970s, in a white-plank house on Oahu's northeastern side, a man in his late 30s folded a gold-and-green Packers blanket. Carefully aligning the corners, he laid it flat inside the last of several cardboard boxes he had been filling with jerseys, game balls and newspaper clippings. Two decades earlier, football had lifted Joe Francis out of Kalihi, a poverty-ridden Honolulu neighborhood, and sent him to college and the NFL. What remained of that life was in those boxe ...

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