01-30-2021, 12:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-30-2021, 12:31 PM by Blue Hawk (Mizzou) Card.)
[Warning: Completely OT, with stuff I have burdened some of you with before.]
What is it about sports for those of us who love them so much? Lots of things, of course, but a scene in City Slickers captured one of the most important aspects.
When a woman asks the three male buddies why they obsess over baseball, the Daniel Stern character replies, “When I was about eighteen and my dad and I couldn’t communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball. That was real.”
It wasn’t when I was eighteen, but there was a time in my life when I was really mad at my Dad. I mean really really really mad. After watching this for about a year and a half, a wise friend took me aside for a little pep talk. “It’s time to decide,” she said. When I asked what I needed to decide, she said I needed to decide whether I was going to let the thing I was so mad at my Dad about foster forever, or whether I was going to put it aside and rebuild something with him before it was too late.
When I, rather begrudgingly, chose the latter option, I made a concerted decision to use sports as a way to communicate with my Dad. At first, our conversations were almost exclusively about sports. But gradually more consequential subjects reemerged. Eventually, we were pretty darn close again. I am not sure we would have gotten there without having sports as something to communicate about.
A year ago today, we lost him. Let me clear: My sisters and I have nothing to complain about, as we have had a very charmed existence. Dad was 85 when he passed. Mom is still going strong. No sympathy is necessary or even warranted.
But I miss him. And today I am thinking about him a lot. So, if you are foolish enough to keep reading, I wanted to write a sports-centric tribute to him.
Part of my sports bond with my Dad came from our shared experiences as sports fans. When I was young, Dad was a Johnny Unitas and Floyd Patterson fan, so I became a brobdingnagian fan of both. We went to a lot of games together, from a swimming meet at Rock Springs High School that burned its way into my memory bank for some reason from my toddler days to the University of Wyoming football game that we somehow got Dad to in the fall of 2019 as he was deteriorating rapidly. In between, when his son went west for law school, Dad became a Stanford fan with special affection for Sam Fuld, who we saw (with Dad’s grandson) setting hitting records in Omaha. To this day, and probably forever, my heart flutters a bit, or more, when I am heading to “the game,” especially if it is with one of my boys. Many of those times, I do and will think of my Dad, because he brought that passion into my life.
Though my Dad and I shared a passion for sports that has been inherited by his grandsons, there is a major difference between our two experiences. Much as I wanted to be, I was a horrible athlete. Dad was a pretty good athlete, at the local level.
Actually, he wasn’t so much a good athlete as a relentless competitor. He had only limited athletic ability. He loved to tell the story of his brief tryout with the Cincinnati Reds (who used to try out pretty every high school kid in the Midwest). After he went through the drills, the scout sat down to give his assessment: “You’re little. No power at the plate. You aren’t very fast. Your glove is okay, but your arm is weak.”
But Dad loved to compete. At our joint alma mater, Dickinson State of North Dakota, which more recently become my son’s alma mater, Dad lettered in football and basketball, of course. But also track. And golf. And, believe it or not, bowling. He also won a spot on the tennis team, but he relinquished it to a friend who was not good enough to play any sport, so he’d have a chance to play.
Dad’s competitiveness lasted his whole life. Everybody knows about Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King in the 1973 Battle of the Sexes. Only a few from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, remember Dad’s “single v. doubles” tennis match against two of the town’s better women’s players that Dad jokingly suggested to avenge the reputation of his half of the species. This event drew a rather surprising crowd. My buddies and I carried Dad onto the court in a chaise lounge, as he popped “pills” (actually, M&Ms) from a large jar and sucked on a giant Sugar Daddy, in mock homage to the original event in the Astrodome. [Dad also had a world class sense of humor.]
Of course, he stood no chance in the actual match. But that never deterred Dad. On the tennis (and racquetball) court, he was the master of the dink shot that barely cleared the net (or, in racquetball, hit the front wall just above the floor). Ironically for the Challenge of the Sexes, it was stunningly “unmanly,” but Dad never cared about style points when there was a game to be won or lost. As the match went on, his opponents’ cries of “hit the ball!” got louder (and more colorful, as adjectives were added between “the” and “ball”). Dad won a tight first set, then dominated the second. It was classic Dad: All in good fun, to be sure, but he definitely played to win.
He won many a sand greens and other small-town golf tournament in Nebraska, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Facing almost certain defeat when down two holes with only two holes to go in the City Golf Championship match in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, he turned to his caddy, my sister Julie (as his regular caddy was in California at law school), said “We’ve got him right where we want him,” then proceeded to win the next two holes to tie the match, then the first extra hole to win it.
[continued below]
[continued from above]
Dad even had a few touches with sports greatness. His high school days in Bismarck, North Dakota, overlapped with a Fargo multi-sport athlete named Roger Maris, so they played as opponents throughout high school. Later in life, Dad noted that when his friends from that era would get together, they would say things like “Roger was not that much better than us.” Dad prided himself on firmly correcting them, saying “He was so much better than us that we were lucky to walk away alive.” But Dad’s Bismarck American Legion team did beat Maris’s Fargo team in the state semifinals (only to lose to Wahpeton’s incredibly aggravating knuckleball pitcher, Steve Myhra, in the finals—you get bonus points if you recognize that name).
One separate occasions many years apart, Dad played and beat two different Olympic gold medalists in golf matches. Okay, they were Winter Olympians (Neil Broten of the Miracle on Ice and Bode Miller), but still . . . .
There are so many great sports stories involving Dad, but I will limit myself to one more. Shortly after college, Dad was playing on a Bismarck amateur baseball team. When the Harlem Globetrotters baseball team came to town, a local all-star team was organized to play them.
You need to know some Bismarck background to fully appreciate this story. In 1935, when Satchel Paige was in a contract dispute with Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee, he spent the summer pitching on an integrated baseball team in Bismarck. [It’s a fascinating story, but that is for another time.] Since then, Bismarck has had special affection for Satchel.
Satchel Paige was pitching for the Harlem Globetrotters team. His return to Bismarck was touted widely, to increase ticket sales for the game against the local all-star team. So Dad had the chance to hit against Satchel Paige!
Except he didn’t. In those days, Satchel would pitch a few innings at the start of these barnstorming games, then give way to another pitcher who mopped up the middle and later innings. Dad was one of the younger guys on the all-star team. As he ruefully remembered it, the older guys started the game, so they could hit against Satchel. Dad’s “almost,” but nonexistent, at bat against Satchel, gnawed at him, at least a little, for quite a while.
By the time Dad got into the game, some other guy was pitching. Dad scratched out two singles against the other guy, though, so it was still something to be proud of.
Many years later, Dad ran into one of his college buddies. The buddy said, “Do you remember that all-star game in Bismarck?” Dad, of course, did. His buddy said he had a box score from the game. He asked Dad if he knew who “that other guy” was. Dad said he had had no idea.
Bob Gibson.
At least according to his buddy. Though Dad was not a braggart, so I am fairly confident of the legitimacy of this story, I have not been able to fully verify it. I have confirmed a few facts. There was, for a short time, a Harlem Globetrotters baseball team, run by Abe Saperstein. And Bob Gibson played for the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, so it is quite plausible that he played baseball for them, too, though he was mostly a shortstop at Creighton. And Satchel Paige definitely pitched for Bismarck in the 1930s, and came back several times after that. That’s all I can confirm. I am no longer trying to confirm anything else, as I don’t want to risk it. I ask you good folks who have read this far for only one favor: If you somehow determine that this did not actually happen, please don’t tell me, because . . . .
It puts a smile on my face to think of my Dad, probably with dirt all over his uniform, somehow figuring out a way to go two for two against one of the greatest pitchers of all time. That’s the way—or one of the ways—I want to remember him as an athlete.
None of us get to choose our parents, as fate does that for us. But I won that lottery.
We miss you, Dad. Keep swinging.
What is it about sports for those of us who love them so much? Lots of things, of course, but a scene in City Slickers captured one of the most important aspects.
When a woman asks the three male buddies why they obsess over baseball, the Daniel Stern character replies, “When I was about eighteen and my dad and I couldn’t communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball. That was real.”
It wasn’t when I was eighteen, but there was a time in my life when I was really mad at my Dad. I mean really really really mad. After watching this for about a year and a half, a wise friend took me aside for a little pep talk. “It’s time to decide,” she said. When I asked what I needed to decide, she said I needed to decide whether I was going to let the thing I was so mad at my Dad about foster forever, or whether I was going to put it aside and rebuild something with him before it was too late.
When I, rather begrudgingly, chose the latter option, I made a concerted decision to use sports as a way to communicate with my Dad. At first, our conversations were almost exclusively about sports. But gradually more consequential subjects reemerged. Eventually, we were pretty darn close again. I am not sure we would have gotten there without having sports as something to communicate about.
A year ago today, we lost him. Let me clear: My sisters and I have nothing to complain about, as we have had a very charmed existence. Dad was 85 when he passed. Mom is still going strong. No sympathy is necessary or even warranted.
But I miss him. And today I am thinking about him a lot. So, if you are foolish enough to keep reading, I wanted to write a sports-centric tribute to him.
Part of my sports bond with my Dad came from our shared experiences as sports fans. When I was young, Dad was a Johnny Unitas and Floyd Patterson fan, so I became a brobdingnagian fan of both. We went to a lot of games together, from a swimming meet at Rock Springs High School that burned its way into my memory bank for some reason from my toddler days to the University of Wyoming football game that we somehow got Dad to in the fall of 2019 as he was deteriorating rapidly. In between, when his son went west for law school, Dad became a Stanford fan with special affection for Sam Fuld, who we saw (with Dad’s grandson) setting hitting records in Omaha. To this day, and probably forever, my heart flutters a bit, or more, when I am heading to “the game,” especially if it is with one of my boys. Many of those times, I do and will think of my Dad, because he brought that passion into my life.
Though my Dad and I shared a passion for sports that has been inherited by his grandsons, there is a major difference between our two experiences. Much as I wanted to be, I was a horrible athlete. Dad was a pretty good athlete, at the local level.
Actually, he wasn’t so much a good athlete as a relentless competitor. He had only limited athletic ability. He loved to tell the story of his brief tryout with the Cincinnati Reds (who used to try out pretty every high school kid in the Midwest). After he went through the drills, the scout sat down to give his assessment: “You’re little. No power at the plate. You aren’t very fast. Your glove is okay, but your arm is weak.”
But Dad loved to compete. At our joint alma mater, Dickinson State of North Dakota, which more recently become my son’s alma mater, Dad lettered in football and basketball, of course. But also track. And golf. And, believe it or not, bowling. He also won a spot on the tennis team, but he relinquished it to a friend who was not good enough to play any sport, so he’d have a chance to play.
Dad’s competitiveness lasted his whole life. Everybody knows about Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King in the 1973 Battle of the Sexes. Only a few from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, remember Dad’s “single v. doubles” tennis match against two of the town’s better women’s players that Dad jokingly suggested to avenge the reputation of his half of the species. This event drew a rather surprising crowd. My buddies and I carried Dad onto the court in a chaise lounge, as he popped “pills” (actually, M&Ms) from a large jar and sucked on a giant Sugar Daddy, in mock homage to the original event in the Astrodome. [Dad also had a world class sense of humor.]
Of course, he stood no chance in the actual match. But that never deterred Dad. On the tennis (and racquetball) court, he was the master of the dink shot that barely cleared the net (or, in racquetball, hit the front wall just above the floor). Ironically for the Challenge of the Sexes, it was stunningly “unmanly,” but Dad never cared about style points when there was a game to be won or lost. As the match went on, his opponents’ cries of “hit the ball!” got louder (and more colorful, as adjectives were added between “the” and “ball”). Dad won a tight first set, then dominated the second. It was classic Dad: All in good fun, to be sure, but he definitely played to win.
He won many a sand greens and other small-town golf tournament in Nebraska, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Facing almost certain defeat when down two holes with only two holes to go in the City Golf Championship match in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, he turned to his caddy, my sister Julie (as his regular caddy was in California at law school), said “We’ve got him right where we want him,” then proceeded to win the next two holes to tie the match, then the first extra hole to win it.
[continued below]
[continued from above]
Dad even had a few touches with sports greatness. His high school days in Bismarck, North Dakota, overlapped with a Fargo multi-sport athlete named Roger Maris, so they played as opponents throughout high school. Later in life, Dad noted that when his friends from that era would get together, they would say things like “Roger was not that much better than us.” Dad prided himself on firmly correcting them, saying “He was so much better than us that we were lucky to walk away alive.” But Dad’s Bismarck American Legion team did beat Maris’s Fargo team in the state semifinals (only to lose to Wahpeton’s incredibly aggravating knuckleball pitcher, Steve Myhra, in the finals—you get bonus points if you recognize that name).
One separate occasions many years apart, Dad played and beat two different Olympic gold medalists in golf matches. Okay, they were Winter Olympians (Neil Broten of the Miracle on Ice and Bode Miller), but still . . . .
There are so many great sports stories involving Dad, but I will limit myself to one more. Shortly after college, Dad was playing on a Bismarck amateur baseball team. When the Harlem Globetrotters baseball team came to town, a local all-star team was organized to play them.
You need to know some Bismarck background to fully appreciate this story. In 1935, when Satchel Paige was in a contract dispute with Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee, he spent the summer pitching on an integrated baseball team in Bismarck. [It’s a fascinating story, but that is for another time.] Since then, Bismarck has had special affection for Satchel.
Satchel Paige was pitching for the Harlem Globetrotters team. His return to Bismarck was touted widely, to increase ticket sales for the game against the local all-star team. So Dad had the chance to hit against Satchel Paige!
Except he didn’t. In those days, Satchel would pitch a few innings at the start of these barnstorming games, then give way to another pitcher who mopped up the middle and later innings. Dad was one of the younger guys on the all-star team. As he ruefully remembered it, the older guys started the game, so they could hit against Satchel. Dad’s “almost,” but nonexistent, at bat against Satchel, gnawed at him, at least a little, for quite a while.
By the time Dad got into the game, some other guy was pitching. Dad scratched out two singles against the other guy, though, so it was still something to be proud of.
Many years later, Dad ran into one of his college buddies. The buddy said, “Do you remember that all-star game in Bismarck?” Dad, of course, did. His buddy said he had a box score from the game. He asked Dad if he knew who “that other guy” was. Dad said he had had no idea.
Bob Gibson.
At least according to his buddy. Though Dad was not a braggart, so I am fairly confident of the legitimacy of this story, I have not been able to fully verify it. I have confirmed a few facts. There was, for a short time, a Harlem Globetrotters baseball team, run by Abe Saperstein. And Bob Gibson played for the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, so it is quite plausible that he played baseball for them, too, though he was mostly a shortstop at Creighton. And Satchel Paige definitely pitched for Bismarck in the 1930s, and came back several times after that. That’s all I can confirm. I am no longer trying to confirm anything else, as I don’t want to risk it. I ask you good folks who have read this far for only one favor: If you somehow determine that this did not actually happen, please don’t tell me, because . . . .
It puts a smile on my face to think of my Dad, probably with dirt all over his uniform, somehow figuring out a way to go two for two against one of the greatest pitchers of all time. That’s the way—or one of the ways—I want to remember him as an athlete.
None of us get to choose our parents, as fate does that for us. But I won that lottery.
We miss you, Dad. Keep swinging.
