When I was growing up in Lakewood, summers brought my mother’s shout: “I don’t want you in the house today; go outside and play.” The games that ensued had no parental involvement. There were the basketball games, the brutal tackle football contests, the dunk ball tilts at the local elementary school, and hours and hours on our bikes, sojourning all over the place, unhindered. We learned to work out our differences, to develop independence, and the joy of getting better in athletics.
Today’s kids don’t have this kind of freedom. It’s not only our fault as parents for being overly restrictive, it’s also not good for children or for the nation’s athletic future.
It all hit me the other day, on the cusp of summer, when my 9-year-old daughter had a friend over and they wanted to play tennis. I took them to the courts and told them to have fun, but they wanted me to play. I was prepared to play some matches or just goof around hitting balls, but they insisted I put them through drills. I realized it was the only way they knew how to play the game.
Without parental involvement, they were totally lost.
This lack of self-sufficiency, which exists in many children, will have adverse consequences as they try to figure out life on their own. It will also create a sub-standard athletic nation.
Visit Puerto Rico, where boys play on dirt fields among abject poverty. This land is the life-blood of Major League Baseball. Or watch the U.S. Open and admire Tiger Woods, who wasn’t exactly a poor kid but, compared to most of his PGA brethren, he was hardly born wearing a Cutter & Buck shirt. Woods regularly creams the silver-spoon set.
Poor kids have more guts, and more heart. They want it more, and they are often given the luxury of developing their skills on their own. In golf parlance, they learn their swing in the dirt.
Pete Carrill, the ex-Princeton basketball coach, has said that a “player’s ability to rebound is inversely proportional to the distance between where he was born and the nearest railroad tracks.”
While not everyone agrees, many people who have experienced childhood freedom usually concur that athletes from more humble backgrounds have a psychological advantage of sorts because they tend to play the games on their own, and a natural meritocracy develops. Parents are paranoid about letting their children play sports on their own. This super-involvement is actually counter-productive to creating a great athlete.
Want proof? ESPN’s list of top North American athletes of the 20th century tells us (at least anecdotally) that a tough financial situation tends to lead to less parental involvement and organized sports, and becomes a factor in athletic immortality. Let’s look at the top 10:
The No. 1 selection, Michael Jordan, was never considered a financially disadvantaged kid, but he didn’t come from money: His grandfather was a sharecropper, and his dad operated a forklift for GE and later became a supervisor. Michael was one of five kids, and it wasn’t until he was 16 that his parents could afford to buy him his first bicycle.
A pattern of excellence
Go down the rest of the list and a pattern evolves: Babe Ruth was raised in an orphanage; Muhammad Ali, a high school dropout, was the son of a sign-painter; Jim Brown’s mother was a housekeeper and his father left when he was a baby; Wayne Gretzky’s dad was a repairman for the phone company; Jesse Owens was the son of a sharecropper; Jim Thorpe ran away from home after his brother and mother died; and Willie Mays was the son of two 18-year- olds who sent him to live with his aunt.
Babe Didrikson grew up in Beaumont, Texas, where she lived with her six siblings on seedy Doucette Street near a Magnolia Oil Refinery. Jack Nicklaus was the exception to the poverty rule, growing up in a family that was comfortably middle-class.
So of those top 10 sports immortals, nine came from incredibly humble backgrounds.
You can argue that children of the working poor have fewer options and that sports offers a way out, but does poverty bring something tangible to athletic greatness? In the ring, the arena, or on the golf course, the mental part of the game separates good athletes from great ones.
Does the ability to deal with and overcome difficult times create a winning spirit within our greatest jocks, and does their self-sufficiency allow them to figure out how to best develop their natural abilities?
Go to any upper-class suburb and the rich kids are outfitted with top-notch equipment, receive better nutrition, and play on nicer fields. They don’t have the pressures of the electricity getting shut off. So why don’t they dominate our sporting life? Because they don’t know the pressures of getting the electricity shut off. And they don’t develop the skills through play.
Our over-emphasis on traveling teams, private coaching and super-involved parents is hurting our kids and their athletic future, and this over-involvement has become a characteristic of all parents — rich and poor — of this generation.
Tiger a self-starter
Tiger Woods is undoubtedly one of the best athletes alive, and has been marked for greatness ever since he showed up on the set of “The Mike Douglas Show” to hit balls at the age of 3. Admittedly, Woods had an intense father teaching him skills and pushing him competitively from an early age, and unfortunately many men are copying this model to the extreme. With his father’s input and his natural abilities, Woods seemed predestined for great athletic accomplishment — but it was not always an easy road.
His parents were the only interracial family in an all-white neighborhood. “Their home was pelted by limes and BB-gun fire,” writes Tim Rosaforte in “Tiger Woods: The Makings of a Champion.” “He was the only black child in his kindergarten class. The older white children once tied him to a tree.”
Undoubtedly, other PGA golfers didn’t share this sort of abuse, and his intensity was born through some of these experiences. But Woods is also totally self-motivated. His father pushed, but he expected Woods to want to practice on his own.
There are cracks forming in America’s athletic prowess that has been going on for almost 50 years. On the heels of the disastrous showing by American athletes at the 1960 Rome Olympics, President John F. Kennedy penned an article for Sports Illustrated, cuttingly titled “The Soft American.”
JFK wrote: “Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds, corner lots and fields of America. In a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security. Physical fitness is as vital to the activities of peace as to those of war, especially when our success in those activities may well determine the future of freedom in the years to come.”
JFK, not a bad golfer himself, would have undoubtedly appreciated Tiger’s brilliance — and likely would also have been worried about how soft our kids have become.
Gary Andrew Poole () is author of “The Galloping Ghost: Red Grange, an American Football Legend” (Houghton Mifflin), coming in September.
