Happy Father’s Day

By: Sean | June 20th, 2009

Tomorrow is Father’s Day. I know this to be true because Hallmark Greetings has inundated my local department store with ~~hundreds~~ thousands of cards saying as much. Sunday will dawn around the neighborhood with many new ties, many fine breakfasts in bed, and sanctioned respite from chores around the house. This being a recreational soccer blog, however, the occasion also merits some reflections on the biggest influence on my non-professional footballing “career” (such as the last thirty-ish years of kicking the ball around could be called)…my dad.

We’ll call him “Jim”. Jim never played the game growing up, never once laced up the footy boots. He was an American rules football player and a damn good collegiate diver–I think at one point in the 1960s he was nationally ranked in the top five for springboard and platform diving. I mention this just to illustrate the simple point that soccer wasn’t a birthright for our family. We didn’t grow up with it. Like so many Americans in the 1970s, he became immersed in the soccer culture when his kid finally stopped watching cartoons and signed up to play. Also like many American moms and dads from that time, it was a quick transition from parent-signing-up-kid to volunteering-to-help-out-with-a-sport-they-knew-very-little-about. But my dad became so very much more than that.

My dad was a coach. Not a Class “C” license holder or a master of the offsides trap, but he stepped up and made sure a bunch of third graders had another adult on the field to help them dribble through cones and remind us not to eat grass. There is an entire generation of citizen-coaches (described in Jim Haner’s book Soccerhead far more eloquently than I can) who answered the call/plea from soccer organizers to make sure that kid’s sports would get played. He left the official head coaching duties to those in charge, but he never said no to filling in when the coach was late or had to work and he made sure all of us kids were safe and doing something soccerish. It takes a lot of courage to work with kids of any age…more so when the kids may know more about the activity than you do. Dad did it with ease and there was never any doubt who was in charge.

My dad was a physio. He could tape bum ankles with the best and understood first hand what shin splints so bad you couldn’t walk up stairs felt like. There were many nights in high school when he helped me dump ice cubes into the bath tub to numb both legs after the aspirin wore off, always reminding me that I needed to stay in the freezing water for at least twenty minutes or it didn’t do any good. He was also with me when I had to buy my first cup, which for guys, is a moderate big deal. I can’t remember if he actually said this or if I’m making it up and just believe it happened, but I distinctly recall the words “buy the one that fits and not just the one that is size large” regarding this all-important right-of-passage purchase.

My dad was a trainer. I came down with mononucleosis, a really bad case, one week after my junior year of high school. It lasted all summer and I didn’t get a doctor’s approval to start doing any exercise until two weeks before daily doubles started, so for about nine weeks I literally laid on the living room couch, spleen engorged, watching “Aliens” on HBO about twenty-six times. [Little aside: To this day, I can't look at Bill Paxton without hearing the words "Hey, maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!" in the back of my head.] I asked my dad if he could get me ready for doubles in two weeks. He nodded and had me walk around our short little cul-de-sac. I came back exhausted. He told me to rest and do it again in a few hours, which I did, still exhausted. Repeat. After two days I moved up to the slowest jog possible that isn’t technically walking. Repeat later in the day. Long story short, I was jogging after a week and doing ball work the next, along with sprints. So many sprints…but come the first practice, it was like I hadn’t missed a beat.

My dad was a cheerleader. You know how when you play, all of the cheers and shouts kind of blur together? You hear it, but you don’t? I could always hear my mom and dad. Clear and distinct, shouting encouragement, telling me to watch out for the incoming tackle, even “motivating” me when I was not playing at the level I should. Dad wasn’t afraid to tell me if I was having an off-game, but he always backed it up with advice and observations to improve. “You’re too tentative, Sean! Get in there and take that ball from the defender when he holds it up, don’t wait for it. You need to eat red meat!” “Red meat” became slang for getting more aggressive and turning up the intensity. It always sounded more urgent when I heard Dad yelling it than from my coach.

My dad was a chauffeur. This may seem like a trivial point, but as a working adult with a child player of my own, I now get how tricky it can be to juggle schedules and get out of work (gracefully) and get kids to practice on time. Between my two parents, I never had to miss a practice or a match from the third grade until after I left for college and what is more, I think one of them was at every game to cheer and pass out orange slices. Oh, and my little brother also played on different teams and my sister did gymnastics, so you’ll appreciate the logistics involved in making all of that happen.

My dad was a volunteer/fundraiser/chairman of the board, etc. No offense to anybody, but I think fundraising sucks. I struggle to get into selling chocolate bars or magazines no matter the cause, but Dad would take on the board positions nobody else wanted, would help us sell pumpkins for the team fundraiser (despite the regular jeers from passing cars that went something like “soccer is for p*****s!”) and do whatever thankless administrative task required to keep the teams fully equipped, loaded with Gatorade, etc. I know there were about a dozen other things he would prefer to do, but his attitude of “if it needs to be done, it might as well be done right, so I should do it” comes back to me with ever-growing frequency.

My dad was the quiet voice of reason whenever I needed it. The hazing ritual at North Salem High School–pretty tame by the YouTube standards of today, mind you–was for the freshmen to be tackled and dragged through the mud of Barrick Field, our home pitch. Come late October, Barrick Field had the smell and drainage properties of a latrine. When I made varsity as a ninth grader, the entire frosh class on my team consisted of…me. Which meant when the upper classmen came to drag me through the cesspool of our goal box, I had no support. Sadly, this occurred at the end of practice when my dad arrived to pick me up. Not wanting to be humiliated in front of my father, I put up a hell of a fight. I swept our keeper’s legs with my shoulders and dumped him on his ass. I kicked another guy in the crotch and may have bit somebody’s hand. When I started to tire, I clenched around somebody’s neck and tried to choke him into submission. It took seven guys, but eventually I got dumped into the slime. That was it. Very tame, but it really upset me. I dragged myself over to my dad’s rig, smelling like a colonoscopy, and tried not to break down. Dad just smirked and looked at his watch. “It took seven guys twelve minutes to get you into the mud. Not bad at all.”

My dad was all of those things and so very much more. To this day he still asks about how my men’s team is doing and reminisces about this match or that. It wasn’t the sport he grew up with, and I’m not sure to this day he knows about the offsides trap, but his support and enthusiasm allowed me to develop my own interests and experiences and now pass them onto my own daughter. My dad is a great man and on a good day, I’m maybe half the man he is, but it is that overwhelming sense of involvement and support that I got from him that carries me forward to try and be the other half. I know not everybody is that fortunate to have a positive father figure in their life. I wish everybody did.

Happy Father’s Day, Pop.

Image courtesy of Corbis.