The Sporting Life

My father is, among many, many other things, a lifelong connoisseur of American sports. "Fan" is not the right word in his case, because that's not what he is. He doesn't participate passively and root feverishly, he immerses himself into the sports that he loves and studies their rhythms and properties, lets them seep into the fabric of his life, participates in them in any way he can. He was a great athlete in his youth, a Triple A pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts, the farm team for the Detroit Tigers, and a professional middleweight boxer for 12 fights. He coached baseball, football and basketball for years at the high school level, and when he retired from teaching and coaching he spent many years as a freelance sportswriter for local papers, attending every sporting event he could, whether it was professional baseball, college football, track and field or even junior college basketball.

He's 85 now and doesn't get around much anymore, but the first thing he does every morning is scour the sports page at the dining room table and plot out his television viewing for the rest of the day. I spend a portion of most Saturdays at my parent's house, visiting my mom and dad while the kids run around wreaking havoc, and now as ever the constant background noise of whatever college football game or baseball game happens to be on offers a kind of nostalgic and peaceful reassurance that I can't even describe. It is the sound of my father in his element, and I find it joyful.

I grew up immersed in this world and took to it with my own kind of enthusiasm. I was not an athlete, as anyone who's met me can attest, and though my natural interests from an early age tended more toward books and movies and fantasy worlds than baseball and football, I did inherit my father's ability to see the beauty and intricacy of sports. More than anything, though, sports offered a way for me to *experience* my father, I realize now, to participate in his life and his worldview in a way that is enormously important for children and their parents. He gave me the gift of the thing he loved, without ever forcing me to love it too. He just tried to show me why he loved it, I think, in so doing modeled for me how one can love something and take joy and comfort from it, how one can use the things they love to help them get through the day and better understand and participate in the universe around them. He did what all great fathers do, I think--he tried to teach me how to live not by dispensing wisdom or making rules, but by showing me what he believes the world has to offer.

I'm thinking about this stuff today for a lot of reasons, I guess. My father is getting older, my children are getting older, I find it harder to make room for abiding pleasures in my own hectic life. I don't really give much of my attention to sports anymore, not in a substantive way. I haven't been to a baseball game in a few years, I try to watch football here and there on a weekend but invariably find myself unable to really concentrate after a few minutes, I don't take the time to read the sports section of the newspaper very often. But it is always there for me, and I can return to the pleasure it offers at any time, for however long I like. And I do return to it, without even realizing it sometimes. I find myself stopping on the sports station while scanning the radio on my long drive every now and then, and I linger there, reassured and soothed by the banter. I am in those moments 11 years old again, drifting in and out of sleep in the passenger seat of my dad's old Chevy truck on the way home from another Padre game, my head on his shoulder as he drives, Jerry Coleman's voice on the post game show, a warm and tender feeling in my stomach, the lingering taste of salted peanuts still on my lips. I know I could leave the office tonight and drive to Dodger stadium (are the Dodger's in town tonight?) and buy a ticket and get a hot dog and have the time of my life, all by myself, if I chose to. That is a gift my father has given me, one of many. A way to be at home in the universe, wherever you are.