ESPN on Joe Cook and Baseball in Cambodia

Patrick Hruby wrote an extensive article on Joe Cook and Baseball in Cambodia for ESPN Outside the Lines. Check it out. It is worth the read.

An excerpt:

I thought this would be a feel-good story. Of course, that was before I shook hands with a dead man. Before two heartsick peasants begged me to find their missing daughters. And before I learned the Khmer words for “help me” and “motherf—er.”
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Yes, I definitely thought this would be an elevating assortment of words, a triumph of the human spirit with lots of pretty prose and a bright, happy ending. Sports. Uplift. An emotional shot in the arm. Tonic for a world forever going wrong. But that was before this. Before I ventured halfway around the planet to drink from a half-empty glass of half-curdled joy, before I discovered that a tale too inspiring to be true — Cambodian refugee escapes the Killing Fields, comes to America, takes hope and baseball back to his homeland (and yeah, someone already is filming a documentary) — is probably too deranged to make up.

Read the full article on ESPN.com