Father's Day Is Cringe (A Father's Rant)
Bill Walton was a one-man Venn diagram. He was a two-time NCAA champion at UCLA under the legendary John Wooden. A two-time NBA champion. A Basketball Hall of Famer. An inveterate winner whose high school and college teams, at one point, won an absurd 142 consecutive games.
The six-foot-eleven redhead was also an unlikely Deadhead who attended over 850 Grateful Dead shows and frequently showed up to call nationally televised basketball games in tie-dye. As an undergrad, he was arrested for protesting Nixon's bombing of Cambodia, after which his famously buttoned-up coach bailed him out and made him write a letter of apology to the President. Walton wrote it. What almost no one knows about Walton the broadcaster is that until he was 28 years old, he stuttered so badly he could barely say hello. He described himself in those years as "a very shy, reserved player and a very shy, reserved person." And then, somehow, he worked his way out of it, becoming one of the most uninhibited, stream-of-consciousness sports broadcasters in television history.
The man who couldn't speak became the man who never stopped talking.
And so it was, by pure accident, on a random Monday afternoon in late November of 2020, three and a half years before he died, that I happened upon Walton calling the Texas vs. Davidson game with his broadcast partner Jason Benetti on the opening day of the 2020-2021 college basketball season.
A Walton broadcast was always a reason to stop and listen. You never knew what was coming. Random tangents, music references, a five-minute meditation on John Wooden's pyramid of success, a story about something he had eaten that morning. But what he said that particular afternoon was something else. Walton and Benetti's conversation turned to fathers watching their kids compete at the college level, and somewhere in the back-and-forth, Walton spoke of his own dad.
A Walton tangent-sized lump formed in my throat. Sneaky little bastard had me wiping my eyes during a basketball game. Something about hearing this grown man, in particular, talk about his father with that much warmth and devotion and unapologetic missing knocked me sideways. I immediately scrambled for my Roku remote and rewound the broadcast as many times as I needed to, transcribing every word into my notebook.
What got me most was its complete absence of occasion. Walton wasn't doing a tribute or angling for a reaction or working toward a point. He was just remembering his father in the middle of doing his job.
That kind of unbidden remembering, the kind that arrives because the man you love is sitting somewhere inside you all the time, is the thing I keep coming back to. And it was this that brought to mind another father story, told by another basketball legend, one I have carried with me and shared with others for years, my own kids included.
When the late, great Jim Valvano was just starting out, he told his father not only that he was going to be a college basketball coach, but that he was going to win a National Championship. A few days later, his father Rocco called him upstairs and pointed to a suitcase sitting in the corner of the bedroom. See that suitcase? Yeah, what's that about? I'm already packed. When you win that Championship, I'll be there.
This is one of my favorite stories ever. For years I've been smuggling it into conversations, and it earns big smiles every time. Just think about what that suitcase meant to a young Jimmy V who hadn't done a thing yet, who didn't actually know whether he could do a thing, who only had the certainty of his own outsized dreams and was probably half-bracing for someone, most likely his own father, to gently inform him that college basketball championships are not in fact things that ordinary kids from ordinary towns end up winning. Think about what it meant for that same young man to instead be called upstairs to a packed suitcase. Now think about what kind of father packs a suitcase for a son whose championship is, on the day of the packing, still entirely theoretical.
Years after that conversation, in the 1983 NCAA Championship game, no one, and I mean no one, gave Jim Valvano's North Carolina State so much as a sliver of a chance. The Wolfpack were facing the Houston Cougars, a team so loaded with future NBA legends including Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler that their nickname, Phi Slama Jama, doubled as both team identity and warning label. The Cougars were favored by seven. Among bookies, sportswriters, fans, neutral observers, partisans on both sides, no one thought the Wolfpack could win that night in Albuquerque. No one, except Jim Valvano. And one other guy, who had been packed and ready to go for years.
When the NC State's Lorenzo Charles caught Dereck Whittenburg's airball at the buzzer and jammed it home for the win, sealing the Wolfpack's improbable 54-52 victory, Valvano sprinted across the court in that famous, now-iconic, slightly delirious lap, his arms thrown wide open, looking for someone, anyone, to hug. His father, Rocco, of course, was there, exactly where his suitcase had been promising he would be for years. Bob Valvano, Jim's younger brother, was also there, also racing around in his own delirium trying to find his older brother in the chaos.
The suitcase Rocco Valvano showed his son all those years earlier may or may not have actually been packed. Doesn't matter. What it carried was the only thing that was ever going to matter, a father saying to his son with big dreams the only thing a son with big dreams ever really needs to hear. I see you. I believe in you. Dream big, kid. Dream as big as you want. Whatever it is, however far it takes you, I'll be right there with you. I'm already on my way. Valvano put it best himself, in a single sentence that has, to my mind, never been bettered:
—Jim Valvano on his father
Two basketball legends, two fathers, two stories that tell you, with absolute precision, everything you need to know about what fatherhood actually is when you strip it of all the cards and brunches and staged occasions we attach to it.
I said most precise. I did not say most complete.
For that you'll need to watch a video. We'll get to it.
Most things in my life have required real work. Fatherhood is not one of them. I have two kids, and I have thought about almost nothing as carefully or as obsessively, across the better part of three decades now, about what it means to take on this role and do it well. About what it means to be the kind of father Walton was talking about when he said his dad never got pissed off, never had a bad day, never made his kids feel like they were a problem to solve. About what it means to be the kind of father who packs a suitcase years before there is anything to pack it for. About what it means to see your kids for who they actually are, the unspoken interior version, the one most parents don't pay nearly enough mind to.
I have spent years now talking to young people, listening to them describe what it feels like to be parented by people who love them and somehow still don't quite know them. In a recent piece, I wrote about a conversation I had with a twenty-one-year-old barista named Jacob. I had asked him months earlier why he hadn't just told his parents what he needed them to understand about him. He sat down across from me one afternoon and said he had finally figured out the answer. I didn't want to have to ask. I wanted them to already know. Walton's father knew. Valvano's father knew. Jacob's parents, by Jacob's own account, did not. The gap between those two kinds of fathers, the ones who already know and the ones who require the asking, is not the only gap that matters to me as a father, but it's near the very top of a short list.
It's the "I want them to already know" frame, more than just about anything else, that makes Father's Day, by my reckoning, a perplexing occasion. Fathers signed up for this job. We chose it. We are not supposed to need a Sunday in June for our kids to acknowledge us for showing up to the role we took on. This holiday is what fathers get instead of having spent every other day of the year actually doing the work that would make the ritual unnecessary.
I am not picking on Father's Day specifically. I'm an equal opportunity skeptic when it comes to this whole catalogue of contrived holidays. I have never been able to make sense of Father's Day, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Grandparents Day, Boss's Day, the entire extended family of occasions built on the same baffling logic. My confusion is not performative modesty where I say I don't want a fuss but absolutely do. You'll have to trust me on that. Or just ask my kids, because they both know how much I mean what I say.
These are celebrations of people for inhabiting roles they chose, for doing precisely what those roles require. We don't have Surgeon's Day. We don't celebrate plumbers or pilots or electricians or accountants or the people who fix the boiler in February. But every May and June we perform this ritual of honoring parents for parenting, as if showing up to your own life and loving the people you decided to love is an achievement deserving of cards and flowers and the entire small industry of branded gratitude that springs up around the second Sunday in May and the third Sunday in June.
(A historical footnote I find darkly useful. Mother's Day was invented in 1908 by an American woman named Anna Jarvis, who created it as a sincere tribute to her own mother and to the labor of mothers everywhere. Within a decade, the holiday had been swallowed whole by the floral industry, the greeting card industry, and the candy industry, all of whom Jarvis came to despise with a holy rage. She spent the rest of her life trying to undo what she had set in motion, organizing boycotts, getting herself arrested for disturbing the peace at a Mother's Day convention, even petitioning to have the holiday formally rescinded. She died in a sanatorium in 1948, broke and alone. Nobody listened. And so five weeks ago we celebrated Mother's Day, and this Sunday we will celebrate Father's Day, and I'll call the many dads in my life, and my kids and parents and sister and friends will call me, and everyone will say Happy Father's Day, and just like every year before this one, I won't entirely understand why.)
My real indictment of these holidays runs deeper than the commercial machinery that has grown up around them, because at least the commercial machinery is honest about what it's doing. The deeper problem is that these holidays have it ass-backwards. They mistake the receiver for the giver. And in doing so they introduce exactly the logic that real fatherhood, the only kind worth having or being, must be entirely free of.
Real fatherhood is unconditional. Not philosophically or aspirationally, not culturally because we happened to invent a holiday for it, but because that is its nature, its core feature, the whole point of it. The operating premise of loving your kids is that you are doing it regardless, regardless of reciprocation or acknowledgment, regardless of whether anyone bought a card or made a reservation or remembered the day. We have muddied just about everything else in modern life with naked transactionalism. I cannot understand why we would choose to do it with something as important as the relationship between a parent and a child. The moment you introduce even the faintest breath of transaction into that, the moment your child owes you something, even once a year, even just a text or a card, you have changed the essence of what it is. Conditionality has entered the room.
And every single year, that's exactly what Father's Day and Mother's Day do. They put kids on the hook for performing gratitude on a schedule. Did it ever occur to anyone else that this implies that their failing to do so is some kind of failure on their part? That your parenthood depends, in some small but real way, on being acknowledged? Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds this strange. Because to my mind that is not fatherhood, or motherhood, or parenting in general. That is a contract. And any parent who needs their kids to celebrate them in order to feel like a good parent is, by that very need, not quite the parent they believe themselves to be.
Bill Walton's father didn't need Father's Day to be the man his son still misses every day. Jim Valvano's father didn't need Father's Day to pack his suitcase. Neither of them needed to be asked. Neither of them needed to be told. They already knew.
So maybe this Father's Day, instead of letting yourself be celebrated, spend some real time thinking about what your fathering actually means to your kids. Not to you. Your kids. Not the version you imagine you're giving them, but the one they would describe if asked. Real fatherhood does not need a Sunday. It's there in the fabric of every ordinary day, in the steady, unspectacular work of showing up and being there, over and over, without ever asking for or needing anything in return.
This leaves me with a question I have been turning over for as long as I have been a father, and one no one has ever answered to my satisfaction. Why do we have Father's Day, Mother's Day, Grandparents Day, Boss's Day (ludicrous), and not a Kids Day? When does the culture put its weight behind celebrating them, the actual reason any of this exists in the first place? Because the kids are the gift. The kids are the entire reason any of us get to be parents in the first place. If you trace the gift back to its source, you find them. Always them. Never us.
Earlier I promised you a video.
The video is from the 400-meter semi-final race of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The young man you see falling is Derek Redmond, who tore his hamstring 150 meters from the finish line in what was supposed to be the race of his life. The big man in the baseball cap and white t-shirt who comes down from the stands to help him across the finish line is his father, Jim.
You want beauty folks. This is beauty. This is also fatherhood.
Walton nostalgized about it. Valvano remembered it. Jim Redmond just does it.
I have watched this video hundreds of times and I cry every single time, without exception or apology. I have shown it to my kids, to friends, to my own father. I have sat with it alone, late at night, when I needed to remember what kind of father I am trying to be. And every single time, it does the same thing to me. A father sees his son go down. The father goes to him. PERIOD, end of story. There is no other story.
Do you imagine Jim Redmond woke up the morning after that race and waited for his son to thank him for being a father? I assure you, he did not.
I'm with Rocco Valvano on this. For both of my kids, I have been packed for years and I am not unpacking anytime soon.
Happy Father's Day. I'll take the eggs.