Put simply, this is just another striving, improbable, poetic American Dream story: How a family, venerating work and education, traveled from the notorious South Central LA of “Boyz In The Hood” to settle in Spielberg Americana in the shadow of the soaring San Bernardino Mountains—a family with not one but two brothers recruited to play Division I football at Washington State University, followed even more notably by NFL careers.
But this story has taken many more remarkable turns. Tonight on Rock Center with Brian Williams (10p ET), in a remarkable journey from Southern California to Saudi Arabia, correspondent Mary Carillo tells the story of Husain and Hamza Abdullah, who, at their athletic peak … associated with America’s most glamorous, most popular sport … walked away, for the glory of God.
“We’ve been playing football since we were 8 years old,” Husain Abdullah told Carillo, “from Pop Warner to high school, and to college, and into the NFL. And although we’re knocking down all these barriers, doing things that people said you can’t do, all of a sudden, it was like there’s more to life than this. There’s more. And we had to go for it.”
