Father’s Day: My father, my Daughters, and Sports

Author’s Note: I won’t go in the details about everything, because I prefer to keep a lot of this private, but I think a lot of people will get enough of what I am going to try to say here regarding Father’s Day, my father and my daughters.

Father’s Day is a weird holiday. While Mother’s Day is a day about appreciating all moms out there, Father’s Day is somehow only about the “real dads” or the “ones who did right by…” etc. That is fine. I mean, I do get it. People, for whatever the reason, do not hold their father in the same holier than thou esteem as they do their mother. Maybe it has something to do with being in that lady’s womb for almost a year, stealing her nutrients, and making her sick in her tummy that keeps Moms on that other-worldly pedestal. But we do, and it is fine, because moms.

Ranking a father’s dad-abilities is like taking attendance at school. We ask such important questions while analyzing our fathers’ skills as a dad such as: Was your dad around in your younger years? Was he always at work? Did he abandon your family to eat snails with hippies overseas? Did he spoil you? Did he spank you on the butt with a belt? And other weird things we do not do to mothers. But we do, and it is fine, because dads — or something.

I can’t speak on other people’s experiences with their fathers. I can only speak on mine. My father and I have always had a pretty complex relationship. Which, if I were to be honest, is mostly my fault because I am — at heart — a Mama’s boy. To make a long, somewhat sad story short: My old man always did the best he could. As flawed and complex a person I have ever met, my father’s early days of being a parent are talked about by other family members with the fondest of memories. I can’t say I remember any of them, but I get what they are trying to say.

Time goes on, things change, and so did my father. A businessman at heart, he would be (and still is) looking for the next angle on some sort of fad or entrepreneurship possibility. Not exactly a hardworking person, my father would much rather find some easier scheme than working hard from 9-5 — even if, technically, his next con was far more work than going to work for a normal company would be.

I can’t even tell you what motivates my father. I don’t know what his dream’s were as a child, if he always wanted to own his own business(es), or if there was something else in the stars for him before my sisters and I came along. And, well, I don’t think I want to know. Even though it took me 25 years or so to love him unconditionally, I prefer the myth of my father, the one family members talk about with the highest of regards, rather than whatever the less sensational reality is.

What is funny about all of that, though, is that my father is still alive and kicking. I could ask him what his dreams are, or were, and if there are things left in his life he would like to accomplish. Now that he is an older man, very much feeble looking and still battling personal demons that he has dealt with since I can ever remember, I almost feel like it would be insulting to him if I did ask him such questions. I have already seen him fail at so many of his business ventures. It would be pretty shitty of me to bring them back up. Instead, it is much easier to just listen to him talk about his next step, the next con, all while remembering the idea of whatever my father supposedly was when I was too young to remember what was actually going on.

Still an incredibly flawed and complex man now, even more so than when I was a child fearful of his return from work, our relationship has somehow become stronger as we both have gotten older. I can’t say if it is because we have both matured or if we both became more accepting of each other’s flaws, but there’s less bickering between us now. The days of us arguing over, well, I can’t even tell you what, are long gone. In its place is a more friend-to-friend relationship than there is one that normal sons and fathers have. I could be wrong, because I don’t know what is considered a normal son and father relationship, but I am okay with this. In fact, I am more than okay with it.

I can tell the exact moments for every pivotal growing point with my relationship with my father. Mostly because they all coincide with sports, which was our first — and for a long time our only — thing we bonded over.

The very first moment when I got to see a glimpse of my father as a person — not as a dad — was when he and his friend took me to a Penn State football game. Again, another long story short, my father had convinced his father that he needed his car. So, yeah, we ended up going to the PSU game in Grandpa’s car (a really nice Lincoln). My father and his friend were drinking out of paper bags on the way to the game. My father’s friend’s son was in the backseat with me. We were only 12 at the time. We had no idea what they were drinking, but we had a pretty decent idea that it was booze. The giveaway was when my father asked his friend for more orange juice to add to his vodka. Before you judge him for not hiding his drinking and driving better, it is a few hour drive from my hometown to Happy Valley, I can only assume he was a few screwdrivers deep when he gave up pretending they were drinking soda out of a brown paper bag.

Eventually we got to PSU healthy and safe. The first few hours our fathers were looking to buy some scalped tickets. They would find some students who could give them single tickets, but our fathers wanted all of us to sit together. After a period of time, which felt like forever back then, my dad was able to buy an autograph from a guy for $1k and get four tickets for free. I remember thinking at the time that it was really nice of that guy to throw those tickets in for free with his autograph. You have to remember that I was only 12, it never dawned on me the con the guy was running to avoid getting arrested for scalping tickets.

I can’t remember a single second about the game or immediately after. That’s probably because of what happened on the ride home. Honestly, the only memory I have after the game was of my father and his friend hitting on some 20-ish year-old coed. I remember thinking how gross my father was (at the time he was still married to my mother, so there was that too). I mean, he was my dad — he wasn’t suppose to be attracted to women, right? Eh, I digress.

My father was in the driver’s seat on the way home, in his father’s really nice and probably expensive car. Maybe an hour in on the drive home when one of the tires on his father’s car explodes and we have a flat. I am not sure what happened, but I remember my father’s friend asking him if he was okay. Not physically okay, but okay enough to drive. My father would shake his head, talked about his dad killing him for doing this, and then the two decided their first objective would be to put a spare on before the police saw us on the side of the highway. At least that way, guessing what my father was thinking, his dad would not know he was drinking and driving. Their next decision would forever change how I thought about my dad. The two of them, in their infinite drunken wisdom, decided that I should drive the rest of the two hour-ish way home. So, naturally, I did while the two of them slept. When I dropped my dad’s friend off at his house, with his wife waiting in a bad mood at the door around 3am, there was a weird silence in the air. His wife saw me in the driver’s seat, looked at her husband, shook her head, and just went inside. Never said a word to my old man about that not being a great idea. So, bonus points to my dad because, really, hell is probably the fury coming from your friend’s wife about you being a shitbag. Avoiding that is like avoiding getting an STD from a professional streetwalker. Near impossible, but rewarding.

That might sound horrible to some, but to me it was one of the greatest days of my life. I got to go see a Penn State game with my father, watch him be the real version of himself and not the dad persona all us dads put on, see him hit on a girl (pretty successfully I might add), and even let me drive home. Tell me that’s not a 12-year-old’s wet dream. Hell, I even appreciate it more now that I am older than I did back then.

That is as far as I am willing to go about my father and I. Some of our shared experiences and stories are not as neat and some would require me to give more details than I would like. Let’s just say that it took a long, long time, but the old man and I are not only good friends, but pretty similar as men — not so much as fathers, though.

All of that brings me to my daughters. If you follow me on Twitter, then you see me talk about them often, send out a few random pictures here and there, as well as bragging about their love of Daddy. Since , I have no idea, they love me unconditionally.

I am more of a hands on father than my own. That’s not to say he did it wrong or people who do that way are either. I just prefer it this way. I like playing with them, dressing up as whatever movie character they are into at the moment, and acting all goofy with them. That is just one example of the many girly things I do with my daughters, and I don’t mind doing them one bit.

They probably do mind some of the things I do make them do, however. School work, eating properly, and making them watch sports. Yup. I am that guy. The person who forces their children to watch sporting events with me. Now, I don’t push them to play sports — well, to be honest, neither are old enough to participate in them — but I do push which sports teams they are forced to root for.

My oldest daughter, now five, was brainwashed at an early age. I got her to root for the S. John’s Red Storm. She did so without much hesitation either. I mean, it was her daddy’s team and she was likely eager to please. She would watch a lot of the games with me the last few seasons, decided D’Angelo Harrison was her favorite player, and wonder why Steve Lavin wore such nice clothes but would wear sneakers with the suits. It was glorious.

Her favorite D’Angelo Harrison picture ever. How he came her favorite player.

The highlight moment of her St. John’s fandom (to this point) came this past winter. My cousin, her sister’s Godfather, is the head coach of a high school boy’s basketball team in our area. Their uniforms have the same colors and similar designs to that of St. John’s. Her and I sat there, watched the entire game, with my daughter rooting incredibly hard for a team she never saw play or knew anyone on it outside of the head coach. It wasn’t until after the game that she asked me why St. John’s looked a lot different in person than on TV and why the head coach lost his job in favor of my cousin.

My youngest, now two, doesn’t get sports at all. At least not yet. She is still just starting to use full sentences, find things of her own that she likes, and things of that nature. It is pretty hard to brainwash a youngster whose only daily routine is to make sure she watches Frozen a few times, with a healthy dose of Wreck It Ralph in-between. However, having my father’s conman ability in my genes, I have been able to trick her into thinking Frozen has something to do with basketball. In her eyes, because I am an evil dad, she thinks that Frozen is basically the origin story of basketball. How did I pull off such a miracle? Because my five-year-old was in on the gag. The two of us were able to make her truly believe that Olaf was the way LeBron James originally looked like. Sounds like a stupid, long stretch, but that is what we did. Honestly, and it probably sounds horrible, it is not that hard to trick a two-year-old into ideas — even if those ideas are not plausible, at all. Especially when her big sis is helping to push the story.

I have no idea what the future holds as far as my relationships goes with my Father and daughters. I can only hope my dad and I continue to talk and see each other every once in a while, while using sports and business as the foundation of our relationship. If it gets to the point where we can discuss other topics, that will be great too, but I am not a greedy asshole. You shouldn’t be either. Think about how hard it is for you, as a man or woman, to function on a daily routine. Now pretend you’re a parent (if you’re not), and think about how hard it is to do everything you have to do to be a good parent, while chasing your dreams, and times that by infinity because I heard you were a giant jerk as a child.

My daughters, on the other hand, are the world to me. I know. I know. Every parent thinks their kids are the best, but mine really are. Seriously, just ask them, they aren’t that modest. While the foundation of our relationships are not structured the same way as mine with my father, it does have that sports aspect — for however long they allow it to be there. As much as I don’t want them to grow older, they most certainly will, and my interests will no longer be theirs.

Here is to knowing, though, that theirs will be mine.

Random Notes to All Fathers

To dads of daughters: Don’t buy a shotgun to ward off boys when they are old enough to date. Take my approach instead. I make them eat a lot in the hopes they get fat and magically become really ugly between the ages of 13-40 (or until I die). So, yeah, root for your daughters to be hideous beasts. Not forever or anything, just until they are old enough to date normal enough men. I have estimated that will around their 40th birthday.

To dads of sons: Keep your grubby, smelly, disgusting son away from my daughters or I will call those dads who didn’t take my advice concerning their daughters, grab that shotgun, and make your son less of a man — if you know what I mean. Happy Father’s day, though.