I berated my six-year-old stepson during a back yard football game on Saturday.
It was Jack and I against his mom and older brother, Michael. They’d just kicked off to us. It was time for our first play from scrimmage, I noticed that Michael and his mom were talking, with their backs turned.
It was an opportunity for a trick play: the quick snap. We’d score before they knew what hit them.
But we’d have to move fast. I bent over and murmured in Jack’s ear: “I’m going to hike the ball to you, right now. You run.”
“No.” Jack said.
No?
“I want to tell you a play,” Jack said.
This was not the time for Jack’s famed stubborness. I glanced over at Rachel and Michael. They’re still distracted.
“You can tell me next time,” I said.
Jack’s face clouds. “No!” he said. “I have a good IDEA!”
His mom and brother glanced in our direction. It’s now or never.
“We can score a touchdown!” I told Jack through gritted teeth. “I’ll hike…”
“No!” Jack said.
“Jack…” I try again, but it’s too late. Rachel and Michael have wandered back to the line of scrimmage.
“Great!” I said to Jack, exasperated. “You blew our chance!”
Rachel took me aside. She tried out some of that “it’s just a game” stuff on me, and, when that didn’t make a dent, she tried some “he’s only six“. I think she even suggested that her boys just wanted to have fun, and didn’t care so much about winning.
I’m not having any of that crap. Rachel’s a wonderful mother, but what I’m thinking at that moment is that she’s not doing her boys any favor by babying them on the football field.
Some Buddhist teachers can trace their lineage, teacher by teacher, back to the Buddha. I can do the same with my hyper-competitiveness in back yard football. In 1928, Knute Rockne yelled at one of his players, a lineman named Frank Leahy. Leahy later became head coach at Notre Dame and, in 1948, berated a one of his players, a skinny farmboy from Denison, Iowa – my dad.
My Dad didn’t berate me or my four brothers when we played backyard football, but he did carry forward the no-excuses approach he learned on the practice field in South Bend, Indiana. When I failed to catch a football after diving for it and having it skid across my outstretched fingertips, there was no pat on the head, no “Nice try!”.
Instead, my Dad said: “If you can touch it, you can catch it.”
When he heard someone taking solace in a tie game: “I tie,” he said, “is like kissing your sister.”
I called Rachel later last Saturday, after my game-time adrenaline subsided
“Sorry,” I said.
Maybe the hard-nosed Rockne/Leahy approach isn’t right for a first-grade boy. Maybe.
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