Get To The Chopper!

My oldest boy graduated from high school and high school sports going on two years ago. I was not-very-secretly relieved that the middle one, who graduates this coming June, has shown a violent hostility to sports. Please note that this is a violent emotional hostility as physical hostility would require a coordination of motion and thought he has yet to display any level of mastery of in his near 18 years as a human person. It's not that he can't get around, it's just that he is EITHER doing something OR has a purpose. Never both. Makes an act like, say, kicking a soccer ball a bit more effort than it's worth.

After those sweet two years off, the youngest one, however, has been determined to find himself on a team of some kind. I don't know if it's the competition, the camaraderie, the free matching clothes or what that has compelled him so, but he's been a self-starter about it since he finished 8th grade. He worked his ass off to make the freshman basketball team, even with no practical experience playing basketball. When he failed to make the JV team this year, he surprised us all by immediately announcing he was going to be trying out for boys' volleyball, a sport, to our knowledge, he had never played. Imagine everyone's further surprise (except maybe his) when he made the JV volleyball team a month or two later. Inspired by his moxie AND his gumption and driven by fatherly pride, I decided right then and there to learn to pretend to give a shit about volleyball.

People say parenting is hard because of all the obligations, but I've found the real secret is to be born with compulsion issues motivated by a looming guilt of immense, world-crushing weight that follows you around every hour of every day, even while you sleep. Hey, there are a lot of kid-related events, right? What would be the worst that could happen if you missed one every now and again? Or at all? ONLY PROBABLY TOTAL DEATH, that's all. And the lifelong disappointment of your child who devalues you as a parent as a human being because they will only ever remember the ONE game out of a hundred you couldn't be fucking bothered to show up at. The one game where they made the big basket, turned that double play, did the... important... volleyball thing... look, I'm still working on the nuances, OK? Back the fuck up off me.

My point is I never miss a game. It's not because I'm better than you and all the other Game Missers out there, it's just that I'm not psychologically prepared for the emotional aftermath of not going to one. So I do. The downside to being the one at all the games, you're the one providing transport and emotional support, taking all the video, giving the pep talks, tolerating the post-game teenaged-boy all-pervasive car-upholstery-puckering funk. I also get a front row seat to all the intrateam drama between players and players, between parents and coaches and between coaches and players. The internecine machinations are often both byzantine and cruel, like a shitty episode of Game of Thrones where they only show Theon or Sansa. Fine to watch for a while, but eventually you're just glad you brought your pocket-sized stalking device/funtime arcade to get you through the talky bits.

It's different though when the drama drags in your own boy. This week the varsity coach (!) apparently pulled my offspring out of a practice to dress him down for leaving a road game too early. Now, the boy left this game "too early" because dad was there to drive him home, so we didn't have to wait for the varsity game to get done so he could take the bus back with the team. Apparently this is an intolerable breach of team protocol and he is the one weak link between the teams--all levels of the teams!--and the kind of total corporate cohesion that determines which school's volleyball program is for red-blooded American Islam-hatin' WINNERS and which one is a safe space for snowflakes to hide from their trigger warnings and also be homosexual socialists. OK, I didn't hear or see it, but THIS STRANGER YELLED AT MY BOY.

As a sports dad, I have a couple of options, of course. I could let this be a teachable moment where my son learns to understand that, fair or unfair, sometimes people in authority are going to single you out and say negative things. It's important to be exposed to things like this, deserved or otherwise, so we can calibrate an emotional response, little by little with each instance, that eventuates mature adult composure that will serve him in good stead for the rest of his emotional, professional and romantic life.

Or option #2: I could wait until Coach Shouty leaves practice one night and run him over with a rented minivan. Not to kill him, don't get me wrong. Or even really to break anything or debilitate him long term. Just so he experiences for a second the uncertainty and terror of a 5,000 pound automobile coming at him with all the inevitability of a Trump administration Bad News Day. Just a nudge. Let him contemplate whether or not the intersection of man and automobile might be fatal. Just for oooone second.

Just to release the suspense, I decided to go with a hybrid option,* where my kid bitches about the coach being kind of a dick and I say something pithy and wise along the lines of "Yeah, boy, sometimes people are dicks." And then we go get burritos. I'm really not sure how that sets him up for his future development as an emotionally responsible adult and as a future father himself after that. But worst case scenario, he got a burrito out of it.

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*No, this does not mean the one where I run over the coach with a Toyota Prius instead of a minivan. Yes, they're quieter but human adult male vs. Prius in fight is not an easy call.