It used to really bug me when my dad would come home from work, plop down in his chair, and watch sports for the rest of the night. It seemed to my young eyes that the rest of us were running around the house all evening doing dishes, working on homework, getting yelled at by our exhausted mother for leaving our junk everywhere.
And my dad watched sports. I don’t want to make it sound like my father was lazy, because that’s jut false. He broke his back at work, and he worked hard taking care of our yard and our cars at home. But the fascination with sports kind of torqued me.
Until my dad met the man who would become my husband. You never quite know what to say when you are meeting your daughter’s boyfriend for the first time. And in my long history of catch and release, my poor father met many boyfriends for the first time. So you default to the universal questions: What do you do? Where are you from? Where did you go to school? What do you think about the (fill in the blank with any local sports team)? And while the “what do you do” and “where are you from” questions may have generated some idle conversation, the sports question was always the kicker.
With the catch who I finally kept, I watched my dad take him to sports in the first 30 seconds of meeting him, and there they have stayed—and there they have bonded. Today not a conversation goes by that they don’t debate the finer points of this team or that. Dad has come to our house on several occasions to watch “the big game,” and if they watched it separately they are sure to compare notes later. If there’s nothing else to talk about under the sun, they always have sports.
I also observed this with my husband and his own father. When my husband and I met, his father was in the middle of fight with cancer. Discussions of doctors and medications and logistics of care-giving dominated family conversations. But when it was one-on-one with Dad T., inevitably a game was on the television and the conversation revolved around sports. I often observed my husband and his brothers sitting down next to their dad and asking what the score was. They would talk about this quarterback or that running back or who had to win what to advance in the standings. They didn’t dwell on medication or doctors, they dwelt on March Madness and bowl games.
And because of that, they always had something to say. Right up to the end when the battle was almost lost, there was still a golf tournament or a tennis match or a baseball game to analyze and get animated over. The conversation didn’t have to be about another surgery or the possibility of hospice care. It could be about basketball.
I’ve always been on the outside of these conversations. I don’t know much about golf or tennis. But I’ve learned to love what sports has done for my husband’s relationship with my dad and what it did for his relationship with his dad. And I look forward to what it will do with my husband’s relationship with our children. I probably won’t condone watching sports all evening after work every day, but I will better understand what that passion can do for our family.
