Bonds always strengthened by following rims of the fathers
Alfred Hajos, the first Olympic swimming champion in 1896, took up the sport when at age 13, he saw his father drown in the Danube River in his native Hungary. Pete Maravich, one of basketball’s most electric players of the 1970s, was the product of exhaustive engineering by his father and LSU head coach, Press, in an attempt to fulfill the career goals that Press, a World War II veteran forged from the fire of Western Pennsylvania’s steel foundries, never got to pursue.
The connection between fathers and sons is often inextricable from larger narratives in sports. Next week’s NBA Draft, for instance, will be studded with bywords for familial connections. Players will describe an AAU or college coach as their father figure. Picks will opine on the attributes of their new boss, a man they’ve met maybe only a few times, with descriptions hewing to traditionally paternal characteristics, as a taskmaster or a mentor or a nurturer. Every time a clubhouse or locker room is described as housing a family, every time the issue of developing athletes as adults or as men is broached, the family dynamic is the subtext. And we haven’t even talked about the last scene in “Field of Dreams” yet.
Some of the most rewarding stories I’ve covered while chronicling Delaware County sports have explored players’ and coaches’ family roots. Sharing a name is a bit of trivia; carrying on a legacy or blazing a new trail has real-life implications that add texture and richness to our experience. I was fascinated watching two pairs of same-named fathers and sons — the Kevin McCormicks at Springfield, the Mike Doyles at Penncrest — interact on and off the court. And seeing Mahir Johnson follow in the footsteps of his late father, Mike, as a Chester basketball star helped bridge 30 years of the past that the two could never share.
It’s a narrative I know well. Sports was always a mode of connection between my father, Rick, and I, a neutral ground to communicate. So many other things in life — mainly his constantly tenuous health — were more tiresome to talk about.
Sports had always appealed to him. His gravest concern as an eighthgrader, when his parents were told he would need spinal fusion surgery, wasn’t about the risks of a then-cutting edge procedure but rather how long this sentence in a back brace would keep him off the basketball court. His letterman’s jacket, from the Epiphany Middle School Comets, remains in a closet at home, the black and gold jacket withstanding the ravages of time better than a felt-and-leather construction of the 1970s should.
Forget the fact that my father was 5-foot-4; he approached life — and I’d assume, basketball — with a tenacity that compensated for what he lacked elsewhere. Into his 40s, he would find hours of repose hoisting jump shots in our backyard, which had featured a backboard since before it became a driveway staple. His attention to detail was such that made baskets off the rim barely counted. In his mind, he would only count the kind of makes where your shot’s backspin through the net rebounds the ball right back to you.
After college, my father the English major tried his hand at sportswriting for a few years. He worked for a daily newspaper outside of Syracuse, N.Y., part-time (technically speaking, Gloversville is outside of everything; Syracuse, two hours away, was its defining market). He spoke more fondly of his parttime bartending gigs then than his reporting exploits.
One story: He once spelled the name of a young head coach at Syracuse, Jim Boeheim, incorrectly in print. I’m reminded of that every time the Union sign a player whose name I think I have down pat.
My father inherited his fandom from his father, but put a rebel’s twist on it. My grandfather was raised in New York in the 1920s and, contrarian that he was, sought a team outside of New York’s big three to support. The romance of Rogers Hornsby led him to the St. Louis Cardinals, and my father’s childhood vacations were structured around train trips for extended homestands in the Midwest summer heat.
My dad’s priorities of family over sports were never as skewed as my grandfather’s, but trips to ballparks and stadiums around the country provided constant high moments of my childhood. He always prioritized my sporting pursuits, as a baseball coach into my teens as I played for passion of the game instead of the prospect of any material gain, like so many of my peers. The nostalgia of watching batting practice in a big-league park or (my favorite as a child) a Zamboni smoothing the ice between periods at a hockey game still strikes me now, even as the novelty that once accompanied it has worn off. So much of the way I approach story-telling and my analytical view of sports stems from those games as a kid and the hours of conversations in car rides, spent pouring through media guides and stat books to fill the pre-Internet hours.
Sunday will mark my 11th Father’s Day without my dad. How his journey into this business compared to mine was something we never got to discuss, mine beginning after he was gone. But as long as I see the way fathers and sons interact around the field or the court, as long as I see that echo in a kid tagging along to the sidelines to watch his dad coach, or a kid who speeds over to his dad after a game-winning shot to celebrate, his presence will always resonate.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.