His name is Zoltan Mesko and he's a professional American football player at Michigan University. "University of Michigan punter Zoltan Mesko has several characteristics that distinguish him from your average college football player. He was born in Romania and emigrated when he was 11 years old. He is fluent in four languages. He will appear in the September issue of Playboy— as a member of its preseason All-America team."
This is the start of the article featured by the Detroit Free press, dedicated to Zoltan Mesko, a totally unusual athlete, bearing in mind that he only missed one class in 16 years of school, according to American journalists. "I actually put that on my résumé, but people looked at it funny, so I took it off", Zoltan claims further in the article.
The young Romanian and his family settled in Twinsburg, Ohio, graduated a BA in Finance last year and now he's pursuing a sports management masters. He has a course presence worthy of the Guinness Book and he's proud of it. He learnt to work hard from his parents, Michael and Elisabeth, who were both engineers before leaving Romania, where they used to earn about 100 dollars a month. When their son complained he was tired from working hard for school, they used to tell him: "We'll sleep when we're dead".
Mesko spent his first years of life in Timisoara (West Romania), the city where the revolution started in 1989, leading to the death of dictator couple Ceausescu and the fall of communism. He was only three years old when the Revolution occurred. He remembers lying flat on his belly on Christmas Eve, while the bullets were flying around the building. "I grew up around a very tough situation, a tough environment. A lot of players that come out of tough environments have more appreciation of where they are now than others", Mesko concluded. His name is Zoltan Mesko and he'
