AN INSPIRING ESPY CHOICE.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH The Media

Wade long enough through the endless self-aggrandizement of the red-carpet entrances, dangling diamond jewelry and whatever other freebies draw presenters and athletes to be seen at the annual ESPY Awards show in Hollywood, and there'll be a moment of reality that occasionally hits home. Hopefully, it reminds everyone there's more than just another network promotion and summer filler TV programming at stake here.

During Wednesday's ESPY presentation at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, the incredible stories of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah and Jim MacLaren opened the eyes of the audience, and will do so again with TV viewers when the ceremony is televised Sunday on ESPN at 6 p.m. If it took a special trip by Oprah Winfrey to present the Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Yeboah and MacLaren to make anyone take notice of something special here, so be it.

Yeboah was born with a deformed right leg in Ghana, a country that considered the disabled to be cursed and would often hide, or kill, them off. His father abandoned him after his mother died, which would normally lead an orphan in his situation to become a street beggar. Instead, he found a job shining shoes for $2 a day. Wanting to prove more, he heard about the Challenged Athletes Foundation thousands of miles away in Del Mar and through an e-mail asked if it could donate a bicycle. His goal was to ride it on one leg through his country to raise money and change stereotypes of the disabled.

Yeboah eventually met up with MacLaren, a former football player from Yale who worked with the CAF. MacLaren became a disabled athlete when he lost his left leg below the knee in a motorcycle accident at age 22 but learned to race in triathlons on one leg and a prosthesis. Then, in 1993, he was hit by a van during a competition and left paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair.

In the three years and hundreds of miles he has rode since he received the donated bike, Yeboah has met African kings and United Nations leaders and slowly changed the way two million disabled people are treated in Ghana - with MacLaren serving as one of his biggest supporters.

Yeboah and MacLaren were reunited on stage Wednesday with Winfrey. Following an eight-minute video on their lives, the standing ovation was a sincere, tear-filled experience.

``What brought us together 10 years ago kind of makes it like Homer's Odyssey,'' MacLaren, who does motivational speaking and has a Web site (www.jimmaclaren.com) to help other disabled athletes, said to reporters after the presentation. ``You look at my life when I was a so-called `stud athlete,' but 10 years later all the gifts have gone. I feel like I have wings right now.''

--The inspiration: Yeboah's story is the stuff for movies, as an 80-minute documentary narrated by Winfrey called ``Emmanuel's Gift'' has generated tremendous buzz during film festivals and fund-raising screenings across the country. The film is scheduled be distributed in theaters nationwide in September.

Considering that twin sisters Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern are responsible for producing, directing and writing ``Emanuel's Gift,'' the quality of work done on it is a given.

Lax has won more than a dozen Emmy Awards as a producer and director for NBC Sports, supervising almost 150 profile features shown during the NBC's Olympics coverage since the Atlanta Games in 1996. Stern is a successful TV producer as well, becoming the first woman to produce Tour de France coverage before moving over to do ABC daytime TV shows.

Southern California viewers may already be familiar with Emmanuel's story after KABC-Channel 7 sports reporter Curt Sandoval did a piece on it last February, when the documentary debuted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Sandoval has close ties with the Challenged Athletes Foundation, having first met MacLaren about 12 years ago when he did a story on him. That inspired Sandoval to become a triathlete and raise money for CAF.

Sandoval had heard about Yeboah's story a year ago but wasn't sure if he could tell it in a typical minute-and-a- half time frame for on a local sportscast, but when Yeboah came out for the film's debut, Sandoval figured out a way to do it, riding a bike with Yeboah for the piece. It aired as a three-minute segment during an expanded ``Sports Zone'' Sunday show following an NBA playoff telecast.

``I've had hundreds of people, even months later, say they saw that piece, and it's nothing I did, it's the power of Emmanuel,'' Sandoval said. ``You just start telling his story and you get out of the way. He is so humble, but yet so powerful when you meet him.''

SOUND BYTES

WHAT SMOKES

--Two shows debuting next week on the Game Show Network (GSN) rely heavily on the celebrity aspect of televised sport, which isn't always bad. ``Ballbreakers,'' an elimination series featuring 9-Ball pool players (Mondays at 10 p.m.) has a $20,000 pot up for grabs each show. The series will include an episode with actors Noah Wyle, Dorian Harewood, Goran Visnjic and Julie McCullough. The latest incarnation of ``Extreme Dodgeball'' (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.) will use athletic participants such as beach volleyball star Kerri Walsh, the Philadelphia Eagles' Jeremiah Trotter, boxer Mia St. John and world-class snowboarder Tara Dakides. They've also added actor Rip Torn, who starred as Patches O'Houlihan in the movie ``Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,'' as the league's commissioner.

WHAT CHOKES

--Maybe TV historians will determine the moment when coverage of the Major League Baseball All-Star game jumped the shark was after Fox's little cable sister decided to include a red carpet pregame show in what was mostly a desperate effort to please a certain car sponsor. Included in the hour-long advertisement had to be this gem from the broadcast that came from Boston Red Sox outfielder Johnny Damon, when asked by Carolyn Hughes about his ensemble: ``You can polish a (bleep) sometimes, as we like to say in this business.'' Which made it on the air without the bleep, even while tape delayed.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Jim MacLaren, left, and Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah share the Kodak Theater stage Wednesday after winning the ESPY Arthur Ashe Award.

Mark Terrill/Associated Press

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SOUND BYTES (see text)

BY TOM HOFFARTH