A Father/Son Story

Happy Father's Day...

A Father/Son Story on this Father's Day

For those of us who had complicated relationships with our deceased Dads, Father's Day can be bittersweet. There are no more moments to share, no more significant dates to celebrate. All that remains are the ever-fading memories of how it once was.

With each passing year, I feel our relationship differently, the half-life of the more painful moments ever receding, I think little of the angst I once did. Perhaps it's maturity, perhaps just a matter of grace. Who knows. What I do know is there's a void in my life, that something once important and defining is missing and no longer. And though our relationship had more than its share of challenges, even in the most dysfunctional of father-son dynamics, sometimes you just wish they were still around.

Like most fathers and sons of our era, our early bond was cemented around sports. Growing up in New England, our first passion was ice hockey. I played it, he coached it, we watched it. Bobby Orr and the Big Bad Bruins of the 1970s. We were in the right place at the right time and mined it for all its worth.

And though hockey became my Father's driving passion, Tennis was always his true love, always in the back of his mind, in case he were ever to have an athletic son, tennis would be his sport of choice for our household.

Recently I relocated to the South. Living in suburbia again has triggered a myriad of memories from my youth. Large lush lawns in need of mowing, afternoon thunderstorms that appear from nowhere, and indoor tennis courts for when the Earth's seasons change, with many of these courts housed in rather unsightly inflatable bubbles. And it was in one of those unsightly bubbles my Father would take me to hit my first ever tennis balls.

My Dad loved tennis. He picked the game up too late to ever be any good, but once the sport got its hooks in him, it became his life's passion, with him determined to make it my passion too. In the joyous days of a Northeast summer, finding time to play was little trouble. But in the endless frigid New England winters, finding available court time could be quite the adventure.

Dad figured the only way for us to get in any court time would be very early in the morning, before work, before school, hell, even before the first light of the new day. So he devised a plan.

Three times a week, at 4:59 A.M., (for 5:00 A.M. was sleeping in to my Dad) he would quietly enter my room to wake me, from which our morning scramble would begin. Before leaving the house, we both had jobs to do. He would head down to the garage to warm up the car. I would get dressed and head out to the driveway to fetch the paper and see if any snow required shoveling. With all systems go, we would roll out of our driveway onto the dark, icy roads of a New England winter's morning to the Reading Indoor Tennis Bubble to hit some balls.

I was pretty young then, no more than 7 or 8, and a complete beginner. If you think tennis is hard to learn now, back then it was brutal. There were no junior rackets, no short courts with green and orange dotted balls, no groups to join, no Academies to enter. Young kids learned tennis from their parents, and all that entailed. Let's just say a calm patient bedside manner was not in my Dad's teaching DNA.

Often, we would arrive at the bubble a bit before it opened. Which meant there was nobody inside yet to turn the heat on. But like clockwork, there we would be, at 5:45 a.m. slowly warming ourselves up as the frigid bubble came to life. My Father loved to be different. He took pride in our being the first ones to the courts those mornings. He used to love to tell me."You're not very good...but I'll tell you this, you're a helluva lot better than all the kids still sleeping in their beds right now."

I like reflecting back on all those mornings of tennis we played. It was tender, it was tense. He didn't want just to teach me tennis. He wanted me to get good. So I could play with him. This had to happen. In his time, in his way. He was going to will it if he had to, in his temperamental demanding ways. Little did I know then that I was playing for him, and that he was playing vicariously through me, and try as he may over the years to detach from my tennis, that's how it was always going to be with us.

There was nothing high-performance about those early morning hits. It was just Dad, me, a couple big old wooden rackets, and a can of used balls. Just one can. Three balls. That was it. That was how he liked to play, that was how I was going to learn.

What that meant was there were consequences for making errors, and with me being a beginner, I made a lot. When I would miss, I would run my ass up to the net as fast as I could to retrieve my errant shots, often catching a harsh earful of old-school Father-son motivation in the process.

But as I reflect back on those mornings, I feel I learned a few things: that tennis is hard, and parenting is harder. Put the two together, tennis parenting is darn near impossible. Getting yelled at for missing all those shots back then would have turned most kids off to tennis. For me, it had a somewhat different effect. It turned me off to missing. The logic seemed pretty simple. Don't miss, don't get yelled at. It taught me how to focus and try my absolute best, or else. The quintessential negative incentive, the kind of stuff highly frowned upon in today's parenting climate.

I look back at those early mornings as the winters of groundstrokes and conditional love, that somehow my relationship with my father hinged precariously on how I played. Or so it sure seemed then to my young evolving self.

In retrospect, there was nothing conditional about his love at all. My Father was from a bygone era, where it was all love, fierce love, yet a messy kinda father-son love from a far different time.

Obviously, those were not the most nurturing of conditions to learn tennis in, let alone grow up. In my later years, our dynamic got quite unhealthy, leaving some marks I still carry with me today.

But his pushing me so hard taught me probably life's most important lesson...to push myself, to expect a lot from myself, which in retrospect is the most important lesson a father can teach a child. And as dysfunctional as our relationship would become in our adult years, I wouldn't trade those early mornings of tennis with my Dad for anything, for my Dad...He just parented differently.

For the longest time I never quite understood what my Father got out of those early mornings. He knew little about tennis, I was never going to be a world-beater. I would frequently leave the court in tears, only to come back the next morning, trying even harder than the time before.

Now I realize those mornings had little to do with tennis. It was more about parenting, a Father and his son, spending time together playing the game he dearly loved.

And in the end, that's all my Dad wanted: to give me a chance to be great at something. A chance he never had as a kid. And for us, that something would be tennis, him willing to drive all those cold, dark winter miles, year after year, despite how bad I was, to help see my chance through.

Perspectives change over time. My dad and I struggled a lot. Fathers and their Sons, as old as time.

I compare the Father/Son dynamic to a painting. If you stand too close, all you see are smudges and imperfections. Stand too far away, you miss much of the finer detail. Too close, too far, you miss the bigger picture. The painter always has the viewer in mind. Maybe God did too when it came to Fathers and their Sons

Either way, if my Dad were still alive today, I'd just want to thank him for giving me all those chances to be good at something.

Happy Father's Day to all you Dads out there who go the extra miles for your children, giving your kids all the best chances they can. Cause I'm able to see now that's really what being a father is all about.

Peace