Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

My Dad, the Sports Fan

My dad was an avid sports fan who would watch any sporting event as if it were a world championship match. As a one TV family we spent most of our weekend TV time watching them with dad, I remember my sis saying he'd watch grass grow if they had a local team to root for. Truth be told, the only reason we bought our first TV was because the Brooklyn Dodgers finally beat the hated New York Yankees in the World Series while dad could only listen to it on the radio. Some of my earliest memories of my dad were seeing him with his ear next to the radio, as he would listen to the boxing matches of his hero Rocky Marciano. I'd listen with him, trying to imagine the bout in my head but because of my lack of knowledge of the jargon of the sport, I just couldn't do it.

Fast forward thirty years or so to a Sunday dinner at my parent's house, Dad now has a color TV although small and somewhat blurry, it is located so he can watch as he eats (of course, this is something we were never allowed to do growing up). Today, he says we are going to watch World Cup Soccer, but dad you don't even like soccer I tell him. He goes on to tell me how important the World Cup is and how it is a four year elimination match to get to the championship. Today's match is merely a preliminary game but is important to my dad because it is Mexico against the hated communists in Russia.

Mother calls us to the table and as soon as grace is said dad turns the TV on. It turns out the only station that is carrying this must see game is the all-Spanish station. None of us can understand any of the announcers other that the world renown, 'goallllllllllll' when someone scored. Even my dad knows nothing about this game and with the language difficulties; it reminds me of when I listened to those fights so many years ago. We root against the team in red for that must be the Russian colors, watching them all run up and down the field without a clue what was really happening. We went home that evening thinking that Russia had won the match for that was what looked to have happened. The next day I found out in the paper that Mexico was actually the team in red and that Russia had lost the game. Also unknown to us the game had gone into four overtimes and it was only after two rounds of penalty kicks that Mexico won. We had rooted for the wrong side, we had no idea it went into overtime and we didn't know anything about the penalty kicks. So, what did my father have to say about all this? He wished it had been announced in English so he could have known what a great game it was.

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