Exhausted after a workweek, I’ll be on autopilot, watching some basketball game between two college squads. My son prances into the room and immediately wants to know who’s winning. At his insistence, I explain that gold and black is Purdue, green and white is Michigan State. Based simply on color preference, he begins cheering wildly for the Boilermakers.
Within minutes, he is utterly distraught at some perceived bad break for his newly chosen team. He slams his small fist on the top of the coffee table. His eyes redden in anger. In no time flat, he has gone from blessed ignorance to total despair. Is this a fan, or is this a fan?
He’s a chip off the old block, and you’d think I’d feel good about that. But I don’t. I’m becoming afraid my son will grow into a sports addict like his old man. Don’t get me wrong. I know all the arguments in favor of fandom. In my relationship to my own father, who’s not always been the easiest person to talk to, sports have served as a vital pathway of communication. Our discussions about various living athletes–Ernie Banks, Bill Bradley–were thinly veiled tutorials on striving and achievement, while conversations involving the honored dead–Gehrig, Thorpe–verged on religion, providing an early primer on my father’s complicated value system.
I was a young boy in Chicago when Ted Williams in his final season came to town to play the White Sox. My father, who is a tall, slender, left-handed and sometimes prickly high achiever, took my brother and me to this farewell game. There was something about Williams–a determination, an obsessiveness–that our father wanted us to understand. The Splendid Splinter came through, lining two crisp doubles to the gap in right. You can look it up.
My prodigy of a son can look it up. He has already got the knack. Mornings, he studies the local sports page as if it were the tattered map to buried treasure. ““Dad,’’ he says, glancing up in puzzlement, ““what’s an Average Yards Per Carry?’’ I’m only too tickled to explain. Last summer I told him about passed balls on third strikes and tagging up. This winter it’s three-second violations and what’s an assist. Apparently I have a nearly limitless store of wisdom to impart. That’s a nice thing to have tucked near the heart of a relationship to a son.
Much misty-eyed sentimentality gets spent on the subject of dads passing their love of sports on to sons. That is to say, dads instructing their sons in the rituals of being a fan. Basically it’s wonderful–unless you pause to consider the expenditure of time.
Ah, yes, the massive amounts of time consumed, the accumulated hours spent viewing televised games, flipping channels for the day’s dramatic replays, lured into that thickening quicksand known so benignly as ““sports trivia.’’ Dare we even calculate how much this amounts to over the course of a lifetime? Could some of this time be better spent practicing on a musical instrument, chiseling away at a craft, volunteering at a community-service project? Those are skills that you don’t hear much about. Unless you are a parent to young children.
Pondering this, I can’t help wondering what latent traits I never tested, never discovered. Who knows, but I might have mastered something gritty and basic and useful, like my boyhood chum Billy, who learned the intricate internal logic of a V-6 engine by actually reassembling one. A fair athlete, Billy had absolutely no interest in ever watching sports. Now he’s probably helpless as a chimpanzee when the hood’s raised on a modern computerized auto, while I can still banter authoritatively about who played infield on the ‘75 Redlegs.
On the other hand, knowing so darn much about the ‘75 Redlegs has not exactly been a major asset. The larger lessons my dad hoped I’d learn from Ted Williams (and himself) cannot derive from so passive an act as plopping down to watch a telecast.
All this comes to mind as we approach Super Bowl Sunday. I’m thinking that this might be the place to make my stand. Like always, I’ll be itching to switch on the tube and call for my son to come join me. As my father did unto me. I loved that feeling of sitting beside Dad and rooting. I loved it all.
But that’s what addicts always say. Kicking the habit won’t be easy. But I’m doing it for my boy. I’m determined to save him. Being a sports fan is fine, but I cannot allow it to consume him. There are any number of options. We might visit friends, if any can be found not hunkered down by the tube. We could go bowling if Lanes & Games is open on this national holiday. There’s Monopoly, chess, hiking. I’ll think of something. I have to. Because the stakes are high.
Big game’s fast approaching. Now I’m getting psyched. Pressure’s mounting. Clock’s ticking down. Crunch time for Dad!
