Notes from an Unathletic Dad : Lost in Sports : Can a Non-Fan Father Bond on His Son’s Field of Dreams?

I began to realize I was in trouble when my son, Farrell, rattled off the roster of the Seattle Mariners. He was 5 years old at the time and though he spoke with great conviction and authority, he was making up the names as he went along. Omar Francisco played shortstop. Danny Jessie Anderson was the clean-cut third baseman. The pitcher was none other than Tommy Murphy, a southpaw I suspect. And then there were those two baseball greats with similar names. Ken Groofy and Ken Groofyjunior. It took me a while to sort that one out. “That’s Ken Griffey, Farrell. And his son’s name is Ken Griffey Jr.” I thought I had the right timbre in my voice, the tone that signals a certain inside knowledge. “No, Dad,” Farrell politely corrected. “It’s Ken Groofy and Ken Groofyjunior. They are ball whackers.”

Farrell is happy to permit me access to his active sports imagination, a world in which, during one phase, sumo wrestlers donned baseball togs for incredible power plays. And did you know that Michael Jordan, Ken Griffey Jr. and Shawn Kemp are all related? Not only that, they grew up together and they are all such splendid jumpers because they had a trampoline in the back yard when they were young. It was news to me.

These days, Farrell’s sports-mindedness comes so blindingly fast, the names sounding so incredibly authentic, that I have no idea any longer if what he’s telling me is sports gospel or an act of vivid imagination. “The real tall guy on the 76ers? He’s the one they call on to get the ball down when it gets stuck between the hoop and the backboard,” Farrell says. I tend to nod my head at such things and grunt noncommittally, “no kidding.”

Divorce has divided Farrell’s world into two homes. During that half of the week he stays with me, I struggle to maintain the appearance of an abiding interest in sports. I have started reading the sports page, of all things, all that purple prose and hyperbole about the most astonishingly meaningless issues. Farrell is generous enough to share with me his monthly copy of the kids’ version of Sports Illustrated. My vocabulary slowly expands. Phrases such as “clean-up batter” and “fielder’s choice” trip off my tongue as though I might even know what they mean.

The day he asked me to name my favorite basketball team reminded me of how his mother must have felt when he asked her if Santa Claus was for real. I thought I might lie and be done with it--say something such as the Seattle SuperSonics or the Phoenix Suns and skate on by. Instead, I told him the truth. “I really don’t have a favorite team, Farrell. I’ve never really thought about it, you know?”

His look wasn’t exactly pitying. He simply stared at me in brown-eyed wonder as though seeing me for the first time. Then, dismissing the preceding absurdity, he asked me who my favorite basketball player was. I answered Dana Barros, of the Philadelphia 76ers, which had a ring of truth to it. I said I admired a guy shorter than I am who can jump higher than I am tall and who can hit three-point shots better than anyone else in the sport. “It just shows you what a lot of work can do, Farrell. Ol’ Dana runs circles around guys much taller than he is. He doesn’t know a thing about limitations. I bet he must practice all the time.” I had been reading up, but I didn’t let on.

Farrell is now 8 years old, still young enough to think that his interests are universal. He is fascinated by sports, baseball and basketball most particularly. Therefore, I too must live and breathe in a world the center of which is occupied by athletes. My true nature, I fear, is just the opposite. I am neither a font of detailed sports information, nor a fusion reactor of sports enthusiasm. I just don’t have the gene. Box scores could just as easily be boxcars for all I know. I’m not even sure what my lanky body feels like at a full run. I suppose I could turn that side of Farrell over to coaches and teachers. But I know that if I cut myself off from sports in my son’s life, I cut myself off from him. I’d rather stop breathing.

Participatory sports were never part of my father’s life. He didn’t have an old mitt kicking around. On crisp fall days he never picked up a football to toss in the yard. Unlike me, however, my father has always been something of a fan, which helps when I find myself fielding Farrell’s jackhammer questions about teams and players.

I would go to University of Washington football games with my father and my maternal grandfather, Neal, when extra seats were available and a wiggly kid was welcome. My father was a faculty member and had season tickets. We would park on campus and hike over to the stadium, the crowd filling in around us, swallowing us in its sports fans’ embrace. My family moved from Seattle to Los Angeles about the time I started high school. When Neal visited I would go to Dodger games with him. Neal knew a bad call when he saw one and never hesitated to rise to his feet with vocal indignation. This meant a string of astonishing expletives tightly structured around racial epithets, venereal disease and dubious parentage. Inevitably, he would stand there shoulder to shoulder with some other equally outraged fan who was yelling in Spanish. Then it would all die down and the two men, so vocally bonded, would laugh at each other, sit, and return to their own worlds. I would look on pleased to have witnessed the ritual, yet feeling somewhat forlorn for having been denied the deeper, inner, secret fan meaning of the passionate moment. I could see the boundary rising between my world and theirs.

Among the great moments of Ingle family folklore is the time I pointed out to my father that he never threw a ball back and forth with me. I don’t remember the actual event, though I suspect it happened during a flash-fire of adolescent rage. While it has become something of a family joke over the years, I have never felt inclined to chuckle right along. My father answered that he never threw a ball with me because if he had happened to catch the damn thing wrong and break a finger he’d be out of business as a dentist and then where’d we be? But he missed my point.

I played Little League baseball one season. I remember the reassurance of my father taking me to the big meeting, the one where we were all divided into teams and given hats and T-shirts and schedules. And then that was the end of it. He was too busy to participate any further, which is the truth. Our coach, a building contractor, was also too busy to show up for practice. A well-meaning high school kid filled in for him. The games were terrible. No one had any idea what to do. We lost every time. It was humiliating. And no one was there to help make sense of it all. I never went back.

This isn’t to say that as a child I was never exposed to playing sports. Our neighborhood bordered a golf course and in the summer twilight that in Seattle lasts well after 9 o’clock, children from one end of the block to the other would converge and we would play baseball and touch football on the fairway, running pass patterns between groups of passing golfers. We’d shoot baskets together, the kids on the block, long games of H-O-R-S-E and around the world. But the neighborhood experience never extended into organized, school-based sports for me. It just never clicked.

The sports path I did choose was a curious one, and since there was no family connection to it, other than my own interest, I can’t begin to explain how it occurred. The first magazine I ever subscribed to was Sports Afield. I was probably 9 years old and I engineered the subscription all on my own. If I had a sports hero as a kid, he was Jack O’Connor, mightiest of the American big game hunters. I saved up my allowance until I could secretly send away for a Sears Roebuck BB gun, and I caught hell from my mother when it arrived. Had my father not started to write a dental textbook (he continues to revise and upgrade it to this very day) and bought a piece of forest land and built a cabin for his reclusive scribblings, I probably would never have been allowed to own a .22 rifle or a shotgun.

We would spend long stretches of summer holidays out there, my father and I, he sitting in a chair on the deck writing in pencil on yellow legal pads, and me wandering the woods and shooting up trees, or exploring the creeks and coaxing trout to take first my worms, then my tied flies. It was as close as I could come as a kid to creating an outdoorsman’s life, and I did it alone, for the most part. There were several occasions when we rose before dawn and drove over to the country dump with the 12-gauge to shoot at rats scuttling through cans and junked refrigerators. He remembers this as well as I do, which makes me think he appreciated his immersion into my world, short-lived though it may have been.

I know now that I could no more have converted him to my passions, to my path, than Farrell can transform me into the quintessential sports dad. I have come to believe that it doesn’t matter what we do so much as that we do it together. I suspect that if my father were to appear on my doorstep with a couple of tickets, I wouldn’t hesitate to go to the game, no matter what the game might be, and I would love every moment.

This is Farrell and I’d just like to say I must have a thousand Giants baseball cards and what I can’t figure out is where they are from because--you know, on the back?--it doesn’t say where the team is from. If you know, give me a call.”

That last bit--”if you know”--that’s a new wrinkle. A signal. He’s catching on. He’s getting wise to his faux sports dad. I called him at his mom’s house, took a long shot, and told him that the Giants were from San Francisco.

At this level of psychic exchange, I can do my homework and keep pace, balancing nimbly between condescending phoniness and my sincere desire to please my son. But the second side of the dilemma, the physical side, remains thorny. Our task with each other is to find points of entry into each other’s world. And I think Farrell senses this.

Farrell gave me an oversized gray T-shirt for Christmas. On the back, in yellow and purple textile ink, he had drawn “U of” and on the front, a big “H” with a small “w” over the breast pocket, meaning University of Washington Huskies. Into the breast pocket he had stuffed a carefully folded dollar bill, largess from his paper route. For my part, I gave Farrell a Fiberglas bow with a 20-pound pull, a dozen target arrows, target, finger and wrist pads, and a quiver. In years to come, I’ll consider giving him a .22.

Hunting is a possibility. But he may find the whole thing revolting. Or boring. And then hunting isn’t exactly something you do from fall to spring. It takes up a bunch of weekends, and then it’s over for another year, to be replaced by fishing. Or skiing. I grew up skiing and probably skied as much as I did because my father enjoyed the outings. We did it together. But only for a time, only until my taste for speed left him far behind.

I see Farrell picking up speed every day. He lives in a world where he knows no limitations. Until he discovers otherwise, there’s no reason he shouldn’t believe in a possible career in professional basketball. Or maybe even that other sport he has explained to me in studied detail, the one played on ice that combines the best of hockey and basketball. I forget what it’s called.

Farrell’s real sports career started with T-ball, back in the days when he referred to the process of connecting bat with ball as “ball whacking.” He has since progressed to considerations of the power swing, owns his own metal bat and has very definite ideas about what is and is not a proper batting glove. And the hell of it is, the kid has a great, natural swing, the power rising up his spine out of his hips, through his shoulders, down his arms and right into his quickly snapping wrists. Those times I can actually throw a pitch across the plate, he nails the sucker, and off I lope to retrieve the ball. In his first season of Little League, his coach told him he had an arm most kids would die for. Which is true. Both powerful and, at times, startlingly accurate. He must get it from his mother.

I have watched Farrell’s body change over the past few years, and with those changes have come natural increases in his ability to throw from third to first base, or to loop a basketball over the rim and into the net. I have watched sports dads live their sports lives over again through their sons. I don’t have this problem. My thrills are more vicarious, simply watching my child learn to accomplish something that demands both concentration and physical coordination. Which is to say, I have been watching Farrell grow up and choose his own path.

Watching him grow also means letting go, and as I do, I can’t help but wonder what will become of me when he realizes that I don’t miss the greater majority of baskets out of politeness, that when he beats me at H-O-R-S-E, it isn’t because I am throwing the game in his behalf. With luck, Farrell will admire me for doing the best I can. But the day will come when shooting hoops with a challenging group of like-minded kids will leave me in the lurch. I plan to be there leaning against the fence.

A cycle of emotional distancing exists among the generations of men in my family. It was true of my father and his father, becoming a model for how he would be a father to me. Who knows how many generations back it stretches, and even why? But part of becoming a father, I discovered over time, meant letting go of being a son.

Since I work at home and had the opportunity to raise my son through his first few years of life before he started punching that preschool time clock, I didn’t feel inclined or persuaded to fall back on the model of fatherhood bestowed upon me. I have come to hope in these past eight years of Farrell’s life that I can banish emotional distancing and reserve, to break the cycle, and let the boundaries of my life and my son’s life wash over one another like great standing waves passing through a stadium audience.

When I was Farrell’s age I connected with one pitch in practice. I remember smacking the ball out over the shortstop and making it to third base. I remember what that hit sounded like and felt like, both in my hands and in my heart. I remember that my father was not there.

Had I failed to join Farrell on the playing field, I don’t think I would know how he has the strength within his young heart to keep working and working and working, whether that means trying to catch the pop-ups I have learned to throw without doing damage to my lower back, or hit the hoop from the foul line, grunting with every effort and launch of the basketball. He simply doesn’t stop until he’s about to drop. And usually by that time I have long since thrown in my towel.

We first made serious visits to the playfield when Farrell started T-ball. His mitt was small and the ball was soft. I was 43 the first year he played in Little League. The coach said he need a new glove, something bigger, more substantial. And I discovered that I needed a new glove, too. With hardball descended upon us, there could be no more bare-handed catching for me.

Farrell picked out a Ken Griffey Jr. autographed model Little League-size mitt in black leather. I limited my choice to a Jose Canseco fielder’s mitt and a Wade Boggs autographed model. Some dads no doubt check out the leather and the stitching and the size of the pocket or the length of the mitt. I settled on the Boggs because Boggs seems to be able to freely mix his sex life with his sense of humor while Canseco comes off as an overpaid blowhard.

Farrell and I went straight from the sporting goods store to the park with our new mitts and a baseball. By late that afternoon, I discovered that both my right shoulder and my right elbow needed oiling. I also discovered that young boys break into tears when they miss a catch and get bonked in the face with a hardball. We sat on the grass together, Farrell in my lap, his arms around my neck, sobbing away the pain that was mostly frustration. I told him that it was probably as much my lousy throw at fault as it was his failure to hold his glove out with the fingers upright.

I suggested that if we kept working at it, we’d no doubt both get the hang of it.