Life
De la Rosa befriended then Boston Red Sox pitcher and fellow Dominican, Pedro Martínez, who began to take de la Rosa to playoff games as a good luck charm during the 2004 MLB playoffs. He was often referred to as "Pedro's Lucky Midget."
He was a main attraction in the "Hermanos Mazzini" and "Las Águilas Humanas" circuses, which marketed him as the Guinness World Record-holder for world's smallest man at 54 cm (21.25 inches), though this organization does not endorse this claim.
While no official diagnosis of the cause of de la Rosa's short stature is known, it has been speculated that he was born with the genetic syndrome MOPD II (microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II). The primary symptoms of the syndrome include extreme proportional short stature, as well as distinct facial features similar to those exhibited by Nelson de la Rosa. A recent documentary by Granada Television highlighting the syndrome was aired on TLC several times in 2006. There are approximately 100 known cases of MOPD II in the world at this time, spread throughout various races and ethnic backgrounds.
He also went by the American name of Phil Stone while acting in the U.S.
Read more about this topic: Nelson De La Rosa
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it self is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Faeroe, no more than without Sense.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)