Everyone who plays and follows sports had to get their start, their spark of interest, somewhere. For many of us, it came from Dad.
I may credit some friends and other outside influences for making me the sports fanatic I am today, but without my father the foundation wouldn’t be there. We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye on everything, but he always supported whatever I wanted to do athletically and always tried to help me up my game.
As far as I can remember, it started with baseball. Seriously, one of the first toys I can remember having around preschool is a baseball glove. It was a blue-and-red outfielder’s glove marked with the Toronto Blue Jays’ logo. (We lived close to the Canadian border, and this was well before I started rooting for Orioles.)
My dad taught me how to play catch when I had that glove, and when I got older he passed his gloves on to me. One was properly broken in and cared for to the point where the leather was buttery soft and perfect for my hand. The other one felt like a deathtrap, and I can’t recall a time when I ever saw him use it, but I still have it.
My dad was the one who signed our whole family up for tennis lessons, on at least two occasions. I enjoyed it, and still do but just never really got around to playing much. It’s one thing I do regret not exploring further, now that I look back on it.
When I wanted to try my hand at wrestling, thinking I’d maybe make it in WWE one day (I was in fourth grade, don’t judge me), he immediately volunteered to be an assistant coach and helped me work on my techniques. And at my first-ever scrimmage, when I was football tackled by an older kid who led with his head and knocked the wind out of me to start my first match, he talked me up and made me feel good enough to brush it off and start fresh on the mat.
I didn’t play football like he did. I had always heard stories about how good he was for his high school despite being undersized. The most common comparison I heard for him was to former New England Patriots linebacker Mike Vrabel, and I always thought that was cool. He gave me a replica of his old jersey when I was in high school, which I hung in every dorm room I lived in throughout college and have since hung in my house.
I ended up being better writing about sports than playing them, but it doesn’t matter: My dad still laid the groundwork for this, even if he didn’t know that I was destined to write back when I was catching underhand tosses with my little Blue Jays glove.
Some of my friends have kids and seeing them teach their young ones how to play sports over the years has been awesome. One of my best friends has a 4-year-old son who, for some reason, likes to ask me to pull out my iPhone and time him with the stopwatch while he runs from A to B. I think he must have seen the NFL Combine and watched his dad freak out about UCF speedster Breshad Perriman, but it’s so cool that he’s already picked up on that. I’ve already called dibs on helping to teach him basketball when he’s a little older.
So Father’s Day is this Sunday, and hopefully you’ve got some family plans or a nice gift already in mind. Whatever you do, whether it’s a round of golf, catching a sports game in person or even tossing the ball around in the yard, make it count. And if you have a kid, take some extra time to teach them sports in the yard. You never know where that will take them one day.