This year, I turned 40, The Basketball Show turned four, and my sons have started playing competitive basketball. I’m becoming far-sighted, and will hopefully be so more than just physically. A few more aches and pains in places I never noticed have started to surface, and keeping my weight down is definitely challenging me again.
Once you become a parent, your world definitely changes. Everything is sharper, more intense, more colorful, like playing in your first game, every single time. A whole new world of firsts opens up for you, and a certain paranoia sets in. What will my child look like? Will he (or she) be normal, have ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes and one nose? Heavan forbid it’s the other way around!
I’ve been a sport lover all my life, and it has loved me back. But then, I started to worry about my own genetics, the source material for the building blocks of my own kids. I took up athletic activity to escape asthma, scoliosis, migraines and flat feet? Would my kids inherit any of those challenges?
Then you wonder if they’ll like the things you do, and if they’ll through some mystical osmosis absorb all your bad habits. You just have to be a better person around them, and pray your inadequacies and bad habits aren’t too discouraging.
I remember some of the lessons I had from the difficult relationship I had with my stepfather, my loving, generous, jolly but sometimes detached grandfather who was always there for me, and the biological father I met when I was 23, and whom I haven’t seen in 16 years. What would my relationship with my kids be like?
I wish I could be there with them 24 hours a day. (At least during the times when I can stand their own idiosyncrasies and eating too much and using the telephone and my clothes and other stuff and... but I digress.) I wish I could protect them from everything. When they would cry, doctors would tell me it helped develop their lungs, and I’d cast a cynical eye. The times they got sick, I held them, hoping somehow that I could absorb the illness for them. Each time they fell, I wanted to pad them all over, but realized that was the way I walked, so I could pick myself up again. (Now I’m quoting Batman Begins, which proves that indeed, the child is the father to the man.) Each time they get hurt, I prayed it could have been avoided, or that it would happen to me. I can’t begin to imagine what God must feel like, watching all of us. It would have driven me insane.
We pushed them into sports: swimming, wall-climbing, running, soccer, and others. They soon settled on basketball. Gee, I wonder why. Gradually, with their independence starting to pick up, they detached themselves more and more from the house, and their parents. I can’t begin to describe the strange void I still feel when they’d rather be out. ("Why do you spend so much time with your friends? Don’t you LIKE being at home?") Serves me right for not having a television and computers in the house. After all, you can only read so much.
And I suppose I could only keep the real world out of their lives for so long. I distinctly remember the UAAP-NCAA All-Star Game two years ago. I brought my sons Vincent and Daniel with me, so they could experience being at a live all-stars. As soon as we exited the tunnel to head to the court, dozens of young ladies’ heads turned, almost in unison. And they weren’t looking at me. I was so stunned that I actually stepped back in surprise. Then I took a more objective look at my boys. Being male, and often surrounded by male athletes, their looks are often farthest from my mind. But, damn, these kids of mine are good-looking. I must have done something right. (But then again, I’m sure every father say that.)
Then I realized some of the things I said about basketball players were becoming true about my sons. When asked about why ballers are seemingly attractive to women (even the ones I personally find appealing — or downright ugly) I would often say that girls like watching tall, athletic, well-built men running around practically in their underwear. Now, I realize that they’re starting to look at my kids — MY kids! — that way. Of course, with the accompanying jokes about how much better-looking they are than their father, it presents a whole new set of problems. Now, I’d like to hire a private investigator to make sure they’re at basketball practice, or within the neighborhood. Then I thought back to what I did when I was their age. Suddenly, I got even more scared.
The good thing about it is now, when I watch sporting events as part of my work, I have a deepened appreciation for the athletes, and what their families go through. All the sacrifices supportive parents experience in trying to support their children’s passion resonates with me. Each time they succeed or fail, I feel it. And, as a result, I feel more compassion for each athlete that I meet, like they’re all my children, too.
You can teach an old dog new tricks.