Singleton Excels Despite Physical Odds

By Tim Stevens


Jerome Singleton Jr. hopes he doesn't remember when his extra thumb was amputated. He fears that he remembers waking up in surgery when he was five years old and seeing the thumb being removed, but he hopes that it is just a dream.

"If what I remember really happened, that would be too much," Singleton said.

Singleton was born with an extra thumb and he recalls that it was cool at times to show his friends.
But he also was born without the fibula in his right leg, fibular hemimelia. His parents, Jerome and Jacqueline Singleton, faced the decision of having their son face surgery once a year for the next 18 years or so, or amputating his leg below the knee.

Singleton, the commissioner of the South Carolina High School League, weighed the options and opted for the amputation.

So the 18-month-old boy had his right leg amputated below the knee, but the missing limb has never hindered him from sprinting after his dreams.

Singleton, 5-foot-9 and 170 pounds, was a three-year varsity football player at Columbia (South Carolina) Dutch Fork High. He was the point guard for the basketball team for two years and was an outstanding hurdler in track.

Singleton was ranked among the top 100 senior football prospects in South Carolina by the High School Sports Report during his senior year, and he expected to play college football at either Davidson College in North Carolina or Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Football left the picture when he learned of an academic scholarship package that would cover his college expenses at Morehouse. He had a grade-point average of 4.0-plus on a 4.0 scale with extra credit for advanced placement classes at Dutch Fork.

"I decided to concentrate on my studies for at least the first year," he said. Few students have ever grabbed an opportunity with as much enthusiasm.

Some of the lessons he learned participating in high school athletics have helped him earn a 3.9 overall GPA at Morehouse, an all-male historically black college, and have helped provide international educational opportunities.

This past summer he studied in Geneva, Switzerland at CERN, the world's leading laboratory for particle physics research, the answer to a trivia question from the movie, "The Da Vinci Code" and supposedly where the World Wide Web was born.

During the summer, he also studied at the Park City Mathematical Institute in Park City, Utah, where he studied Brownian motion.

Singleton expects to graduate with a double major in math and physics at Morehouse and will complete his triple major by adding an industrial engineering degree at either Georgia Tech University or the University of Michigan.

But Singleton is still an athlete. His desire to build a better artificial limb was the catalyst for his areas of study and also was his pathway to the Paralympics, a competition for athletes with physical, mental or sensorial disabilities.

"I was researching artificial limbs when I came across a reference to the Paralympics," he said. "I read about it, saw the times and figured I can run that fast."

Singleton had always used a regular artificial foot in his sports, but obtained a sprinting limb while at Morehouse and soon was among the fastest Paralympics runners in the world.

Last summer, between his studies, he competed in the Parapan American Games in Rio de Janeiro and finished third in the 100 meters (:11.55) and second in the 200 (:23.9). He has been competing for fewer than two years.

"Running with the sprinting leg makes you faster," he said. "With an artificial limb, it is like running with a weight around one leg. The energy just dies. The sprinting leg allows the energy you produce to work with you instead of against you."

Looking back on his high school career, Singleton said the friends he made are a great memory.
"We became like a second family," Singleton said. "I made lifelong friends. I was always busy and it was hard to get close to a lot of people. But my teammates became my closest friends. We still keep in touch."

Tim Stevens is high school sports editor of the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. A sportswriter for nearly 40 years, Stevens was inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame last summer.