Bridging the gap may mean leaning on sport

My relationship with my father is good. Not great, but good. It’d be better if each of us were willing to reveal a bit more of ourselves – if only we knew how.

Trouble is, it’s easier not to. It’s easier to talk about the stock market or the five-day forecast than about the heart and the past.

I spent the last week on vacation in Oregon – visiting my father. I went intent not only on seeing him get married – which he did in a beautiful, if non-traditional, wedding – but getting to know him a bit better.

I’m sad to report that I made less headway than I would’ve liked toward the second goal.

With just six days, and all the wedding and honeymoon roadblocks, time pulled the rug out from under me. I was, however, able to clear some dirt from the tunnel to the past on my last day in town. And for that I must thank sport.

I asked him what he wanted to be when he was seven years old. The answer came without hesitation.

“A baseball player,” my father said. “We all wanted to be baseball players – every kid I knew at the time.

“After school, it was off to the lots with whatever guys we could find. We’d use sticks for bats if we had to, and we play long into the night. On the weekends we’d play all day.”

My father was as focused as I’d seen him in a long time, like he was running through some make-shift base-stealing signs he and his friends had concocted.

It’s funny, but I knew when I asked the question that he was going to say he’d dreamed of a career on the diamond. The mid- to late-1950’s have always struck me as a time when baseball’s traditions had a much firmer hold than they do now.

I knew that’s what every kid wanted.

“I remember,” my father continued, “that there was a real competition about who was going to get to be certain players. We all wanted to be Babe Ruth and . . .”

His voice trailed. He couldn’t recall the names of other greats of the era. And it didn’t matter. The life of baseball was short lived for my father, and far removed from his true athletic calling.

He became an outstanding swimmer and even better water polo player.

“I remember one day this kid and I called Babe Ruth about the same time,” my father said. “He wasn’t letting go of it, so we got into a little shoving match, and I may have even hit him.

“Nah, I didn’t hit him.”

My father and I don’t truly bond very often. Right then, I saw an opportunity.

“I did,” I said.

“You did what?”

“I hit the kid.”

When I was nine, basketball was to me what baseball was to my father. Even in sleepy little Eugene, Ore., everybody wanted to be Michael Jordan.

Everybody.

It was 1985, and he was just getting into his second season with the Chicago Bulls.

“One day I got into a shoving match with this kid who said he was gonna be Michael,” I said to my dad. “He told me I didn’t have enough skill to hold the name.

“So, I hit him in the stomach. He was a friend or I’d have hit him in the face.”

My father looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He was wearing a proud smirk.

“The kid pushed me back, and then some of our friends broke it up. He said he’d just be Magic Johnson then.”

“You hit a kid over that?” my father asked.

“Yeah, he was knocking my skill and taking my guy.”

My father’s exasperation grew out of my unwillingness to engage in combat. I was, and always have been, a lover rather than a fighter – aggressive, to a point. Despite his rough edges, my father is, and always has been, the same way.

And that’s where the conversation died. My father and I laughed for a few more moments, and I smacked him on the shoulder.

Then there was silence.

Maybe we’d gotten too close to more revelation and bonding, too close to watching the walls of our masculine exterior crumble a bit. It’s too bad more truths about my father couldn’t be derived through sporting conversations.

I went to Oregon seeking more than I got, but left with another revelation about sport: it is a true generational link – sometimes the only.