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OT -- Happy Father's Day!
You dads out there need to read this -- I never had this experience
with my dad, but my son and I come close: ==== Cheering Section: Father-Son Connections Are in the Cards http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/sports/baseball/15cheer.html Published: June 15, 2008 By ADAM BUCKLEY COHEN It all started with cards. When my mother arrived last summer with 5,000 of my old baseball, football, basketball and hockey trading cards packed into Mother Goose shoeboxes, my sons opened each flimsy container as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. Will and Theo, then 8 and 6, searched out the few superstars they knew from the 1970s — Terry Bradshaw, Hank Aaron — while I gazed at the largely forgotten images that drew me back to grade school: Oscar Gamble and his Afro, a toothless Bobby Clarke. The boxes still smelled like bubble gum. The boys’ fascination sprung from wanting to learn what these athletes had done to merit enshrinement as cardboard demigods. But it also seemed to come from another place, closer to home; if they inspected these relics of my childhood hard enough, maybe they would catch a glimpse of me. Not as their father, but as a boy who was once their age and might have been their friend. “Who was your favorite player?” “Why did you sort them by team instead of by number?” “Did all your friends collect cards, too?” For the next year, the boys peppered me with questions and kept my floors carpeted in Topps. It was a small price to pay for the joy those cards brought. And when my marriage to their mother crumbled, those cards brought far more. The boys’ bodies heaved with sobs the day we told them I was moving out. Yet bit by bit, Will and Theo felt their way into a new dual life: two sets of clothes, two (identical) videogame consoles, two homes. But those Mike Schmidts and Tony Dorsetts and the stories they spawned were something a father alone could share with his sons. One day, as we flipped through cards while sitting cross-legged on the floor, I mentioned how some football player or another was in the Hall of Fame. “Is there really a football Hall of Fame we can go and see?” Will said. “Sure,” I said. “It’s in Canton, Ohio.” “What about hockey?” Theo chimed in. “Can we go to the Hockey Hall of Fame, too?” Within moments, I had promised a trip to the Big Four halls (as defined by my card collections of three decades ago). It would be a chance for me to build new, happy memories with my sons. To take them to a place where the rough edges of the world had been filed off. To a place where parents did not divorce. So on Memorial Day weekend, we embarked on our journey. At the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the boys grew silent upon entering the chamber housing the bronze busts of the inductees. Then they began dancing from one great to the next, their voices rising as they shouted: “Look, Troy Aikman! And here’s Michael Irvin!” I knew they would be awed by immortals like Thorpe and Unitas, but I would not have predicted the intoxicating power of Norm Van Brocklin and Steve Van Buren. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., was packed with interactive exhibits. The boys shot at a model of the peach baskets Dr. James Naismith once nailed to a gymnasium balcony, and tried to better Jason Kidd in a one-on-one contest. “There was a game where you jump and try to pull on a basketball,” Will wrote in his journal about an exhibit that tested rebounding ability. “It was my favorite game.” In Toronto, we watched Game 3 of this year’s Stanley Cup finals while eating dinner in a pub, all of us rooting hard for Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins, beloved by Theo ever since Santa left him a Mario Lemieux card under the tree. The next day, at the Hockey Hall of Fame, Theo took great pleasure in shooting a puck past the virtual Toronto goaltender. “I hate the Maple Leafs,” he said. It was Cooperstown that cast the strongest spell. In the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which I had first visited 31 years ago, I could see all that sports had signified for me. Back then, the statistics, the stories, the relics — Lou Gehrig’s jersey, a Honus Wagner T-206 card — had helped me forget that my parents’ marriage was falling apart. Now, I felt that maybe I had given that same overdue gift to my boys, an escape from the pain and sadness divorce had caused them. As we drove from the airport to my home, I asked Will and Theo what makes sports so special. The history? The numbers? Watching your favorite team? Will paused a moment. “I guess I just like doing them.” At that moment, I realized our trip was not complete. So before I delivered them back to real life, we headed to a park to throw a ball around. And for one more hour, we were just three boys together, playing. |
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