“Does it hurt on the inside or the outside?”
I don’t recall asking my son the question. It was, he explains, my reaction to a knee injury he suffered in soccer practice when he was 11.
“Outside,” he answered.
“You’re not hurt,” I told him, ignoring an abrasion. “Get back in there.”
For 17 years he has carried that memory, along with the rest of the emotional and physical baggage heaped on him by his sports-crazed father.
Paybacks are hell. As Father’s Day approached, my son invited me to see the movie “Kicking and Screaming.” It’s a Will Ferrell comedy about a 30-something guy locked in a hilarious struggle to outcoach his supercompetitive father in a youth soccer league.
The old man is so competitive that he refuses to keep his own grandson on his rec-league roster because the boy just isn’t good enough.
To outdo his dad, Ferrell takes a job coaching his son’s new team, the worst in the league, and hires former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka as an assistant. But Ferrell even manages to drive Iron Mike away with his win-at-any-cost attitude.
We howl, my son and I, as Ferrell and his father completely lose perspective about a kids game and make jerks of themselves.
The chuckles carry with them an uncomfortable catharsis. Long-suppressed anger laces my son’s laughter. Acceptance of a humiliating history accompanies mine.
Like many fathers, I meant to teach my children the teamwork, determination, discipline and confidence sports instill. Somewhere amid the drills and instructions, I forgot about the fun.
“Mom and I talked about this,” my 28-year-old confided after the movie. “We decided that you probably shouldn’t have done that from the beginning. It was like an ugly habit.”
Think heroin.
When I told my 24-year-old that I intended to write a column about this, he told me I had to include the famous finger fiasco.
“Which one?” I had to ask.
All you budding youth-league Bob Knights, listen up: If you publicly offer the single-digit salute to a 14-year-old soccer opponent and a junior-varsity basketball referee, you need a 12-step recovery program, not a better game plan.
In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy’s “redneck” jokes, here are a few more tests provided by my sons to determine whether you might be a “fan-addict.”
If you’ve ever been thrown off the sidelines for harassing the referee, stomp to the parking lot and scream sarcastically, “Is this far enough?”, you might be a “fan-addict.”
If you start the season sitting and cheering with other parents but find yourself migrating to empty bleachers so you can shout critical coaching tips without attracting strange looks, you might be a “fan-addict.”
If you’re telling a bunch of 10- to 12-year-old soccer and basketball players to have “confidence, concentration and relax” and spittle forms at the corners of your mouth, while your eyes double in size, you might be a “fan-addict.”
And if your only answer to a child’s problems is to tell him to play through pain, you might one day find yourself sitting at the movies wondering how you became the guy being lampooned on the screen.
Turns out my oldest son has a rare genetic form of soft-tissue arthritis. I found that out when he came up lame at 15, a year after I bought him strange-looking shoes used in drills that were supposed to let him dunk a basketball with ease.
He still beats me one-on-one, even with ruined knees. He still knows I had “the best intentions” as I ranted from the bench and the sidelines. He still understands the fundamental lesson was “to give my best effort under any circumstance.”
But when your kid finally admits that, like a prisoner of war with Stockholm syndrome, he grew to like torture, it hurts everywhere.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
