The Right Way to do Wrong Things

Dunn playin Games

  The relationship between me and my old man was never the model to which every other father and son strive to be like. Even with everything we have in common, sports all we ever talked about. Things started off shaky and only got worse over the years. It is a known fact that in his day, the old man could play. Which sport it was did not matter much because he was just a well rounded natural athlete that could make the most difficult plays seem effortless. It didn’t take much to see that i was going to be better than the old man had ever dreamed of and this is where it all went wrong. It was almost like a wire got crossed or a fuse blew in my old man's brain and caused irreparable damage and quickly turned him into one of those dads that is way too invested in his son's athletic career. You know, a douchebag. The man went from a garden variety asshole to an asshole that was irritated and itchy, with the worst case of hemorrhoids ever recorded in modern medicine, at least since Elvis died. This was not a man that had just sprouted a hemorrhoid, bought some preparation H and lived happily ever after. No. This was a case of prep H resistant hemorrhoids that had sprouted a man. In his defense, he saw potential in me from a very early age, and a lot of it. He had always believed he himself possessed the skills to become a professional athlete and thought if he had gotten any sort of encouragement or help from his father, there would be no doubt that he could be living the dream! He tried to give me the support that he had never gotten himself.     I always knew I was good, and not to sound too full of myself, it was obvious. In the beginning I did enjoy playing sports and over the years I definitely learned that talent could easily be used to my advantage, especially with the ladies. But it didn't take long before my old man had sucked all the fun out of what should have been some the greatest years of my life. The harder he mashed the gas, the harder I hit the brakes. It was a correlative effect that became much more apparent as I got older because I became less tolerant of bullshit, plus neither one of us would ever back down. I knew I had to do whatever the old man said when I was a kid because like he always used to say, "This belt does more than hold my pants up." On the other hand, I hardly ever had to give it my all because just 50 percent effort still made me stand out from the other kids. Eventually I just accepted that it did not matter what I wanted. It didn't matter if I wanted to go fishing or ride 4-wheelers with my friends Trippin Trent and Fluffy from up the street, because I had to field ground balls in the backyard until bad hops off the centipede had both of my eyes swollen shut. Then, why not make the best of a bad situation? So that was the cue to transition to basketball. Time to shoot blindfolded free throws without the need for a blindfold. The uneven grass had taken care of that. This is how a father of the year contestant teaches his child about optimism right before being disqualified from the competition.

    Sadly, my old man took all the joy out of sports even though having fun is considered to be a major objective. All things comsidered, my childhood wasn't a total hell. There were some good times with my kids from the neighborhood. Fluffy, by the way, was not the name of someone’s dog either. It was my big, hairy, mutant best friend who apparently hit puberty in the womb and when George Thorogood wrote "Bad to the Bone" it had to have been about Fluffy. He was that kid that had to take his birth certificate with him to every little league game he ever played because when he didn’t, the opposing team would always b***h. Every time, without fail, when Fluffy came out of the dugout for the first time looking like a gladiator from the Collosium, the coaches and fans would get all worked up about the fact that we didn’t restrict the dads to just watching from the stands; oh hell naw, Rainy Valley let one of them bastards play first base. Its understandable though, really. It's not everyday you see a full grown, fully bearded 9 year old on the field droppin bombs like Nixon on Vietnam and making everyone else’s kids look like they have some sort of serious mental and/or physical disabilities. Lots of teams we played over the years also hated our pre game routine where the Fluufmiester would casually reassure other players that their parents would not certainly be getting a divorce due to the fact he had just because f****d their mom. Hell, even his own teammates had a difficult time deciding when he was joking sometimes.

    No matter how good I was though, I still could not just relax and play the game without pressure to win and be the best on the field at all times. I had tried it before and pops would not think twice before calling me out and embarrassing the hell out of me in front of everyone, so it was balls to the wall from beginning to end. No matter how hard I tried to convince my old man that it wasn’t going to be basketball or baseball that would ever really let me showcase my talents, because football was my true calling. That asshole just would not listen to reason. It wasn’t the fact that it was dangerous and I could easily get hurt and ruin my future, his reasoning was way more childish than that. What it all came down to was the fact that that pops was never completely in charge on the gridiron. Baseball, sure. He could throw hard enough that I could swing and miss and never even smell it, let alone make contact. Basketball, absolutely. The old man was 2 feet taller than I was. So crashing the boards and putting up a sweet jumper in his own son's face was never an issue. Football though, football was a completely different story. All it took was once for a little playful trash talk to piss me off enough to flip the switch and turn his lights out. Not realizing his own offspring had just bulldozed him and hit him so hard that it probably bruised GP, eventually he realized what had happened and it only took once before the old man learned his lesson. It wasn’t long before football season was ruined like all the others things I ever enjoyed. A degenerative disk disorder in my lower spine sidelined my promising football career before it ever began. Although I had learned about optimism and finding the silver lining in a bad situation, I tried to look at things on the bright side. This time it was a terribly painful and untreatable spinal disease had made my decision for me, but it least it wasn't my pops.