(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, with the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’re doing something different. For previous Tantrums, click here.)
Despite his feigned attempts at cynicism, you can tell that my steamed colleague Theodore has a Tuesdays with Morrie vision of sports and families. “The next Jewish point guard for the Knicks!” they say each time a Ross child is pushed out into this Earth: a sports tradition handed from father to son with the sort of warm chuckling that reminds you of dens and cardigans.
I don’t think that sports is less important in my family. It’s just that for us I think of sports as a bit more like a genetic disease, more Tay Sachs than Red Auerbach.
And I’m not talking about my father’s ambitions for his sons as professional athletes. That is a story about how pluck and will can be massacred by the realities of genetics. It should be saved for another post, or, if I ever make any money, for therapy.
No, rather, I think that in my family, the way we follow sports transmits a host of characteristics that aren’t generally regarded as favorable. I sense this is the case with a lot of families, at least from my time living in Somerville, Mass., when a trip to Fenway Park meant seeing fathers lead sons in chants of “Jeter is a homo,” even when they were playing the Blue Jays.
In our family, it’s not homophobia or racism or other Boston delights that get passed down. Rather, it’s the strange combination of obsession and fickleness. My father taught me to be a horribly fairweather fan. Take baseball, which happens to be in season. My team is San Francisco, because, well, I lived there some and I am not one to lecture Barry Bonds on drug use. So, they are doing pretty well this year (welcome back, Zito). Which means that neither I, nor, I suspect, my dad, can stop watching them. He has TIVO, I have the MLB 2010 on my iPhone (which streams Jon Miller’s sublime radio broadcasts to me wherever I am in the world). So we both have our ways of catching up on day games, night games, whatever. But I am also ready, if they ever start to lose, to stop listening to the Giants, to write them off as a lost cause and exile them from my life for the rest of the season. My dad is just as twitchy. Literally, if they lose four games in a row, if they fall too far behind the Padres, then I will just start getting psyched for football season, in which the 49ers will likewise be on a very, very short leash.
This could be because my father and I are spoiled. His divorce landed us in San Francisco in the 1980s, when Eddie DeBartolo was using all that money he shook down from used-car dealers or whatever the fuck he was doing in Youngstown, Ohio, to buy a decade of utterly unfair football domination. We used get mad if the 49ers didn’t win by three touchdowns. Even before I moved away from Key West, I won $50 in bets on the playground against the lumpen Miami Dolphin fans, who were so slathered in baby oil and hair gel that they didn’t even realize that the 49ers didn’t even lose preseason scrimmages, much less Super Bowls.
But, not to get as saptastic as Theodore about it, there is an alternate explanation: maybe I just care too much. Losing a big game can tear a little chunk out of me for the rest of the day. A win—someone else doing their job well—can make my current failures a little easier to swallow. Those reactions are strange and fantastical. Cutting a team off for the season—an act of apparent faithlessness that would anger your average Masshole as much as, say, being a called racist and homophobe—might actually just be a protective mechanism, exactly the sort of coping skill that any father would be proud to hand down to his son.
[Tomorrow, Will Leitch himself weighs in.]