Just keep swinging. That's what Jake T. Austin, 11, learned while playing Yankee Irving, a struggling baseball player, in a new computer-animated film, Everyone's Hero. Jake told TFK that his character taught him to "try to bounce back and do your best."
Christopher Reeve, the movie's first director, would agree with Jake. Reeve broke his neck in a horseback riding accident in 1995 and was paralyzed. Still, he continued to act, direct and work to help people with spinal-cord injuries. He died in 2004, before Everyone's Hero was completed.
Jake didn't have a chance to meet Reeve. But he believes the film's director was indeed everyone's hero. "With all he had done for charity and how he believed in himself," Jake says, "he really lived the story of Yankee Irving."