BEREA, Ohio — Gabe Davis spends his morning as most 17-year-olds do. He gets up, gets on the bus, and heads off to school. His classes come with challenges, to be certain, but Gabe approaches those with a positive mindset and, of course, a smile.
As Gabe enters the classroom each day, that smile always finds its target.
"The first thing I hear is Gabe, 'Morning, Mrs. Banka!" his social studies teacher said. "And you just, you can't not light up."
Laurie Banka teaches at Albert Einstein Academy, where Gabe is enrolled. She's watched him overcome some of the difficulties in the classroom without losing any joy. Things might not always come easy at school for Gabe, but nothing in his life ever did.
"Gabe surprised us in life. We weren't sure what he would be capable of," said Summer Davis.
Summer and her husband, Ryan, had been preparing to adopt Gabe for some time. They were told about the boy they'd be meeting to adopt thousands of miles away in Ghana, and the second they laid eyes on him, they said they knew he was meant to be their son and that they'd be bringing him home to Northeast Ohio. They also knew that Gabe faced a long journey ahead of him.
"When he was born, it was immediately obvious he was born with a birth defect, and so his biological family decided to give him up for adoption," Ryan said.
For the first four years of his life, Gabe lived in an orphanage—but because he was born with limb differences, he spent all of that time in the infant ward. He wasn't allowed outside, and he wasn't allowed to feed himself. When Summer and Ryan met Gabe, he didn't know how to speak Twi, his native language, or English. It felt like Gabe had gotten a late start on life, but from the beginning of his journey, sports were there to catch him up.
"He learned English by playing Madden," Ryan said. "From playing the video game, learning, and he played video games while he was having the surgeries. And in the recovery in the hospitals, there was nothing else he could do, so he played video games, and that started a love of sports."
While Gabe could play sports through video games, the birth defect he was born with seemed to make playing sports physically impossible.
"One of my clearest memories is, before he left Ghana, he had to see a doctor, and the doctor had to write up a report, and it says on it very clearly, 'This child will never walk," Summer said.
Gabe's spirit, as it turns out, doesn't handle limitations well. The word impossible doesn't register to him, and his parents knew that early on, too. So over the years, Gabe has had 17 surgeries on his legs to help Gabe do the things he loves to do and always knew he'd be able to.
"All very massive surgeries, even the little ones are still massive surgeries because [they] help me actually walk and wear prosthetic legs to help me run," Gabe said.
Those surgeries aided in Gabe's mobility, which he has taken full advantage of by doing the things he loves the most.
Football, wrestling, basketball, skiing, rock climbing, soccer, track and field, and pickleball—Gabe does them all.
"I'm a huge sports guy. I love the NBA, WWE, and, I know I'm a little kid, but Monster Jam," Gabe said.
From hiking Machu Picchu to tackling football dummies, hitting a spin move to pin an opponent on the wrestling mat or diving to save a goal on the soccer pitch, Gabe has defied the odds and tried a little bit of everything along the way.
Doctors said Gabe would never walk, but whether he's using his arms to carry himself along, his prosthetics, or his wheelchair, Gabe has pushed past his limitations and proved them wrong. And, like every day in school, Gabe has done it with a smile and an infectious personality.
"We just call it the Gabe Factor. People are just drawn to him because he has such a positive outlook on life," Ryan said. "He just wants everybody to experience the best in life that they can."
"I've been around a lot of a variety of different students, but I've never met a student with as much daily joy and a positive viewpoint of the world as Gabe," said his teacher, Laurie Banka.
Gabe continues to impress everyone around him. He recently made the Cleveland Cavaliers' wheelchair basketball team and has big plans for himself after high school is over.
"I want to go to either the University of Georgia or the University of Texas for most likely to be a WWE wrestler, because I love it," Gabe said.
But amid the many things Gabe can do, there's only one thing his parents believe is just too difficult for the 17-year-old boy.
"He can’t clean his room," Gabe's parents joked.
