Fathers & Sons & Sports (5 page)

We catch a number of waves, miss a number more, and spend a lot of time in each other’s way. At one point I fall, pop my head through the sea foam and see Luke and Zuckerman knifing straight for me. I escape beheading and even get vertical twice, while my son, for all his pique at being shrink-wrapped in rubber, stays in the water for an hour. By the end he and Elliot are a well-oiled unit, going out and coming back in high rotation, wearing loopy grins as they get up. On the drive home to Brooklyn, Luke is silent, staring out of the window in blank exhaustion. So too through dinner of Chinese takeaway, a meal he usually gobbles two-fisted. But in the bathtub he rallies, “reading”
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
, a book he’s known by memory since babyhood.

I towel my child dry, that great, painstaking pleasure, pausing to drink his little-boy scent and kiss the down on his neck. He wheels and surprises me with a hug, an act he confirms by yelling, “Hug!” I hold him so tight it makes my own head reel. Soundlessly we turn an arabesque, a father and young son dancing stag. Carrying him off to bed then, a thought occurs, and I lower him in my arms till he’s horizontal. “Lukey’s surfing” I sing as we sluice the room. “My brave little boy is surfing.”

He puts his arms out to skim the waves and says, “Whee, whee, whee,” all the way in.
Paul Solotaroff has been a journalist for eighteen years, having written for
Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Vogue,
and
The New York Times Magazine,
among many others. He’s currently a contributing editor at
Rolling Stone
and
Men’s Journal
magazines, and will publish his third book, a memoir called
The Body Shop,
in 2008. He has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Magazine Award and his work has been anthologized in
The Best American Sportswriting of the Century.

t begins early. At Little League games, some fathers have admitted—or mothers have happily testified as hostile witnesses against them—that among the first thoughts they had after learning they were fathers-to-be was a vision of playing catch with their sons in the backyard. And, yes, all right, if need be, with their daughters.

“Honey, did that sonogram indicate if the kid is a lefty or a righty? I was in the sporting goods store today …”

The mother of a particularly talented Little League short-stop—a boy I grew to despise as he robotically and errorlessly vacuumed up my son’s ground balls and threw him out at first—told me that her husband used to put a portable radio tuned to Mets games up to her stomach when she was pregnant to imprint an interest in baseball on the yet unborn. It seemed a calculated risk. I mean, the kid could be walking around saying “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” the rest of his life, too.

“He was kidding,” she said, “I think. He did it a lot.”

I told her that was really silly, that I’d waited until the moment of birth, bringing a Rawlings catcher’s mitt to the delivery room for use by the obstetrician. Curiously, however, the baby turned out to be a first baseman. Go figure.

Of one thing most expectant fathers are certain: their kid is going to get a much earlier start on the game than they did, a leg up, a competitive advantage. We fathers were never as good at the game as we wanted to be—let alone as good as we told our children we were.

Expectant fathers worry that their offspring will inherit their mediocre hand-eye coordination, their short legs, their clumsy feet. What if my son hates baseball and joins the Audio-Visual Club? What if: My son is a girl? It can happen. It happened to me once.

The first indication of athletic prowess seized upon by fathers is the newborn’s APGAR score, a score from one to ten given immediately after the birth to indicate the child’s overall
health. If the score is a nine or a ten, fathers immediately start thinking: professional triple-A ball or higher; something in the six or seven range might mean the best kid can do is make the high school team. Any score lower than that, and fathers’ thoughts naturally turn to adoption.

If the father protests the APGAR score, suing the hospital to upgrade it, he has the makings of a Little League coach!

I bought Willie one of those little baseball uniforms for newborns, the pinstriped ones with the little caps. He looked just like a little Yankee or perhaps a Cub, except for the large patch of drool on his chest.

“Did you see that?!” my wife would shriek, indicating I should punish my son for hitting his grandmother with a stick.

“Yes, I did,” I’d answer. “He showed good hand-eye coordination that time, but I truly believe he’d develop more power through the hitting zone if he’d step toward her and extend those arms.”

And when she called the office to tell me the baby had just chucked a piece of Waterford across the dining room,

I’d say: “All the way across? Was it on an arc or more of a clothesline throw? How about the accuracy?” She’d hang up.

When he could sit up a little bit, at least when propped, we played a little “catch.” It was sort of like one of those carnival midway games: I’d toss a tiny little ball and see if it would come to rest on a roll of fat or a protrusion of some kind, somewhere on his person. When it did, I’d haul out the camcorder.

I figured when the kid could stand, he was ready for batting practice. I bought the Biiiiig fat, red plastic bat at K-Mart and the really Biiiiig white plastic ball, to get Willie in the swing of things. The technique I recommend is getting on your knees about three feet away (just far enough to not get hit by the Biiiiig bat), yell “Swing!” then toss the ball where the bat might be. (You determine this by having the child take several practice swings.) If the child hits the ball or even swings the bat, you cheer wildly. But don’t worry, you will, you will. However, there are other fathers who eschew positive reinforcement, preferring to touch the kid lightly with a cattle prod when he misses. Your call.

Another daydream I had when my wife was pregnant was taking my son to a major league game. Here, fathers also tend to jump the gun a bit. Last year a Bostonian in the stands at the Red Sox spring training camp in Florida held his—snoozing—six-month-old son and said to me: “I just had to bring him down so he could see this.”

In my daydream, my unborn son would be sitting there in a blue baseball cap slightly askew or pulled down too far on his head, his little legs dangling, not long enough to reach the ground. He is wearing his little baseball glove on one hand and eating a hot dog with the other, chewing on the ends of both glove and dog. The weather is perfect, of course, sunny and mild, about seventy-six degrees. Our seats are very good. The home team is winning. My son adores me. My tie is loosened, my sleeves are rolled up, and I am (somehow) handsome.

Unfortunately, we lived on the North Side of Chicago when my son was a toddler, so the first game he saw was a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. I know of no finer place to watch a baseball game, although many of us have come to realize that raising a child to be a Cubs fan is a particularly heinous form of child abuse—with lifelong consequences.

Back in Illinois in 1955, my grandfather told me that, well, sure, it had been ten long years since the Cubs had won a pennant but that—doggone it!—I should show some loyalty and stick with ’em! (We lived equidistant between Chicago and St. Louis and I was entertaining the idea of a switch to the Cardinals.) My grandfather was lucky. He died that year. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still waiting for the Cubs to do something.

The reality of taking my son to a ballgame was somewhat less idyllic than the daydream. The home team, as is its custom, was not winning.

And this being Chicago, and the month May, the weather was not quite perfect. It wasn’t bad for Chicago, I mean the airport wasn’t closed, yet, but it was drizzling a bit, the temperature just warm enough to keep the rain from solidifying. Hell, this was a nice day, springtime in Chicago—time to haul out the lawn furniture.

Willie loved the food. He consumed one hot dog, one bag of peanuts, one box of popcorn, one coke and one ice cream bar in the first five innings. It was not the last we’d see of it.

He asked for, and received, a Cubs cap, pennant and T-shirt. Counting my three beers and hot dog, the afternoon cost just under the Blue Book value of our Datsun wagon.

Midway through the game, the light drizzle turned to rain. But! The Cubs were playing the Padres, and the San Diego chicken saved the day for Willie by running and sliding headfirst across the tarpaulin. By the time the rain delay was over, Willie was asleep. He awakened after the last pitch of the game, and asked: “Did the Cubs win, Dad?”

“Uh, why, yes, son. Yes they did,” I answered. Falsely.

Some fathers want to take their kids to ballgames because it reminds them so much of what they did with their own fathers. Not me. I don’t think I ever went to a baseball game with my father. We lived in a small town; to go to a baseball game you had to go all the way to Chicago, and no one in his right mind went to Chicago, a city filled with unspeakable traffic and hoodlums—not to mention Democrats! I don’t want to say we were provincial, but our high school foreign exchange student was from … America. Hawaii.

I have fond memories of lying on the top bunk of the bed I shared with my brother, David, listening to Cardinals baseball games (and Cubs away games) on the radio in the dark while he gently bounced me off the ceiling. Harry Carey, Joe Garagiola and Jack Buck did the Cardinals’ broadcasts. There is something wonderful about listening to a baseball game on the radio in the dark.

My brothers-in-law have similar memories of listening to ballgames on summer evenings on the porch in Indianapolis with their grandfather, who was always smoking a cigar. For the moment to be absolutely perfect, the game had to be an obscure one: maybe the Indians and the Orioles.

I met a man in Chicago who loved listening to night games on the radio. He was a lifelong Tigers fan, who had been (tragically) transferred to Chicago at about age fifty. He’d put on his pajamas and drive to the western shore of Lake Michigan, where if he got his car lined up at just the right angle he could pick up Ernie Harwell’s broadcasts from Tiger Stadium.

I tried doing that with Willie some, on our screened-in porch in Chicago, and he liked it all right, I guess, but after a while he would always say: “The game’s on TV, Daddy.”

I know, son, I know.