Wright Thompson could potentially be the best sports journalist and writer in the US right now. He delivered this epic portrayal of Michael Jordan at age 50. We featured his last major piece about racism and soccer on Lucid Practice. He has done magical work again. His latest article on Montana, Tom and Gerri Morgan, and fly fishing is all-time.

Check it out — here.

It’s a story set in Manhattan, Montana.

“A man named Tom Morgan lives here, making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He’s revered for what he calls “thought rods,” where the instrument functions as an extension of the mind, delivering the fly where you imagine it will go, not where a series of clumsy physical muscle movements try to direct it.

Tom’s wife? She read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and decided that she needed to make a change or risk living an ordinary life. She looked at a map, found Livingston, Mont., and applied for a job. She felt restless there, too, overhearing the sad conversations in the teacher’s lounge, where her colleagues counted off the years until retirement and the beginning of their lives. Gerri quit and joined the Peace Corps. When she returned, a friend set her up with a newly single rod designer. She noticed that he limped.

“I choose to be happy,” he says.

He’s always been disciplined. In the morning, he plays exactly one game of solitaire, using his voice-activated software. He’s calm at his center, palpably so, making the space around him feel peaceful. Being with Tom is like being with a bodhisattva. That’s what sticks with people who meet him, even more than the inspiration from how he handles his disease with grace. There’s something comforting about him. His discipline and calm allow him to control his world, even his desire to retreat into his memories. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Tom,” his friend Bruce Richards says, “and I’ve seen him down one time, and that I think was the first time I came over and was casting some new rods for him. He was outside on the porch. I was casting. I noticed he had tears in his eyes. He just wanted to cast so bad. He said, ‘I just wish I could do that one more time.'”