Myles Turner Helping the Homeless in Indiana Through WARM
By Ben Gibson
Myles Turner’s work with the homeless in Indiana will always matter more than anything he does with the Indiana Pacers.
I love Myles Turner’s play on the court. I love watching him block shots and then make his own on the other end. I love watching him knock down 3-pointers with ease.
But none of that really matters if we are honest.
Every time I write about charity and giving back on here, I use that cliche, that sports don’t matter. It is true, to a certain extent, but I do mean it. As much as I love basketball, the work these players do and the money they donate should matter more to us — as far as our opinions of them as human beings — than their free throw percentage.
That’s why I love seeing Myles Turner’s work helping the homeless in Indiana.
Marc J. Spears of the Undefeated checked in on Turner and the work he is doing with WARM, an organization Turner founded to help the homeless.
Turner shared one of what is likely an often repeated moment during his work.
"“We came up to some guy and he had to be in his mid-to-late 20s. And he looked in the bag and said, ‘You have no idea how much this helped me. I didn’t know what I was going to eat tonight,’ ” Pacers center-forward Myles Turner told The Undefeated. “That kind of hit home with me. [Some people] don’t know when their next meal is going to be. That was pretty tough to see.”According to a www.endhomelessness.org report, there were 564, 708 people in the United States living on the streets, in cars, in homeless shelters or in subsidized transitional housing during a one-night national survey last January. Out of that total, 206,286 were people in families, 358,422 were individuals and a quarter of the entire group were children. And with the winter season in full swing, the homeless are in the midst of the roughest of their already rough times in the cold nationwide.“It’s definitely an epidemic,” Turner said. “I want us to get better. The way the economy is struggling at times, you never know what is going to happen over the next couple of years. It’s something that is very sad.”"
Turner is a young man with plenty of disposable income, so seeing him put his money where his mouth is a good sign when it comes to charity.
But even better than that is that within Spear’s story, we see that helping the homeless is something that Turner and his family has done for some time. They have been handing out food, clothes, and other supplies for years.
Even if Turner wasn’t playing for a couple million dollars — and a whole lot more when he signs his next contract — he would still be finding a way to help the homeless where ever he was.
Next: 8p9s Roundtable: Are the Pacers Going To Make a Move?
The fact that Myles Turner does this as a personal mission‚— not one that works conveniently for a foundation or tax write-offs — says a lot more about him than his stats ever will.