David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

hospital bed. “Daddy can fix everything,
and when this happened to our daughter,
it was something I couldn’t fix,”
Reynolds said. What he promised his
daughter was that he would stand up and
say, Enough. He cannot be faulted for
that. But the tragedy of Mike Reynolds
was that in fulfilling that promise, he left
California worse off than it had been
before.
Over the years, many people have
come to Fresno to speak to Reynolds
about Three Strikes: the long drive up
from Los Angeles into the flat fields of
the Central Valley has become a kind of
pilgrimage. It is Reynolds’s habit to take
his visitors to the Daily Planet—the