Fathers & Sons & Sports (20 page)

I hug him.

“Good work,” I say. “Another takedown and that’ll put you ahead seven to one. Lock him up. Ride him through the second round. Got that?”

Logan nods.

“Keep that lead going into the third,” I say, “and it’s over.”

The rest period ends. Logan returns to the mat, and about halfway through the second round he scores yet another takedown. I suck in a deep breath. I let it out slowly. Assuming he doesn’t get pinned, there’s no way that the other kid can catch up. He’s done it. He’s won, and I’m proud of him. That he didn’t lose his cool. That he wrestled smart.

Then something happens. Something bad.

The kid works himself free. The kid scrambles to his feet, and I don’t believe that what happens next is an accident. I don’t believe that his hand catching in my son’s headgear is an innocent mistake, any more than I do his pulling the straps down
across Logan’s eyes, blinding him. Why the ref doesn’t call it for what it is—a blatant foul—is beyond me. Logan takes it for granted, as any good wrestler might, that the ref will shout for a time-out, and it costs him, this assumption, this belief that sport is fair. It’s a disappointing but necessary lesson, and I blame myself that Logan has to learn it this way, for not having taught him earlier that in sport, as in life, you must often assume the worst in another.

Dazed, confused, he stands up straight, and the other kid rushes him, like a lineman taking out a quarterback. He rams him in the stomach. As his back strikes the mat I actually hear the swell of air forced from his lungs, and inside of five seconds the referee blows the whistle. Logan has been pinned. He gets to his feet and rips off the red Velcro strip from around his ankle and throws it in the ref’s face. That’s when I snap, when the other coach, the guy with the goatee, starts screaming at my son.

“You apologize,” he says.

“Go to hell,” Logan says.

He steps toward my son, but I’m there now, between them. “You discipline your kid,” I say, “I’ll discipline mine.” “Your boy’s a sore loser.” “Your boy’s a cheater.”

For a few seconds we just stare each other down. I know I’ve crossed a line I should never cross, especially in front of my children, but how much can you reasonably take before you lose it? He turns away, and it’s good that one of us does it.

On the ride home that afternoon I ask my sons what they would like for dinner. “Anything,” I say. “You name it.” This is tradition. This is my offer after every tournament, win or lose, as a reward for a day well spent together. Typically, from Logan anyway, it invites a single word—steak, say, or shrimp. He loves both. And I love to cook either for them. Today, however, when I pop the question, I receive no answer. I look at Nate in the rearview mirror. Already a welt is forming above his left eye—the result, I imagine, of a well-placed elbow or knee to the face, a blow I hadn’t noticed. His arm, where the first kid struck him, is also bruised and sore. I watch him rub it. I watch him bend it up and down, slowly, like it must hurt.

“How about you, Nate?” I say. “Want anything special for dinner?”

All I get is a shrug.

For a while I let it go. For a while we drive in silence. Logan is pretty beat up, too, with bruised ribs where that kid speared him, and, from another bout, scratches on his neck and down one side of his face. I wonder if it’s worth it, if maybe it’s time to hang it up. I don’t want to ask the question, because it’s always been my favorite sport, because I live through my kids, as parents often do, but it seems the right thing now.

“Maybe we should try something else,” I say. “Like soccer. Or baseball.”

“What are you talking about?” Logan says.

“We don’t have to wrestle, you know. There are other sports.”

“No way” he says. “I’m nailing that stupid Mexican next time.”

Half my childhood was spent in Los Angeles, the other half in East San Jose. My stepmother is Mexican. My stepbrother and stepsister are Mexican, and two of my lifelong best friends are Mexican, one so close to the family the boys call him uncle. Uncle Orlando. I’ve experienced hate, and I’ve experienced the sort of acceptance and love that transcends it. My son, I think, ought to know better. I raise my voice.

“What’d you just say?”

He bows his head.

“Nothing,” he says.

“I don’t want to hear you talk like that again. You understand me? No more cussing, either. I’ve had it.” He’s quiet. I shake my head. I look at him again, hard. “You’re mad because he cheated. That’s it. That’s all. Don’t get it mixed up. Mexican has nothing to do with it.”

I would like to believe my own words, and I do. I would like to believe that I can offer my sons a better world where there is no racism, no cheaters, no parents who teach their children to hate and hurt others. But I can offer them no such thing. At best I can only instruct so that they might suffer less, and so that in surviving they know when to suspend the rules, for their own protection. As we drive home that evening, both boys staring silently out the window, bruised and shaken, I make them a promise.

We will have steak tonight.

We will have shrimp, too. The works. And afterward, when calm has prevailed, I will lead them to the middle of the living room floor and lovingly show them the moves I eventually had to learn, those dirty ones, the kind designed to hurt.

y the time I was born, boxing had become the family sport. My father and his friends, my brothers and their friends, and my cousin and his friends went to the Gramercy Gym every Saturday morning, back in the early eighties, to spar. There existed an understanding that usually worked: they were not there to beat the piss out of each other, but to learn a little about themselves. Some may disagree, but in my father’s world, boxing is truly one of the arts. This belief was fortified by
the presence on most Saturdays of Jose Torres, who had been the light-heavyweight champion in the sixties.

I was four years old at the time, but my dad let me come along on Saturdays and once even put me in the ring. Although I was considerably outsized by the forty-year-old man in the opposite corner, I had already come to the understanding that, when your time came, you just had to fight.

Of course, I was in no danger. However, someone happened to take a picture over the shoulder of the man in the opposite corner, capturing the look of terror in my four-year-old eyes. The expression on my face—I thought I was really going to have to fight this man—makes me smile even to this day, and I imagine gave the guys at the club no end of amusement. It was not unlike the time my dad got down on his knees to box with me in our living room. I had just turned three at the time. He let me catch him one on the corner of his chin and immediately dropped to the floor, pretending I had knocked him out. I had, for a few hours, the gift of believing I possessed the best right hook in the world.

s a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician, but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God’s rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word “beautiful.”

After he buttoned his glove, he would hold his rod straight out in front of him, where it trembled with the beating of his heart. Although it was eight and a half feet long, it weighed only four and a half ounces. It was made of split bamboo cane from the far-off Bay of Tonkin. It was wrapped with red and blue silk thread, and the wrappings were carefully spaced to make the delicate rod powerful but not so stiff it could not tremble.

Always it was to be called a rod. If someone called it a pole, my father looked at him as a sergeant in the United States Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun.

My brother and I would have preferred to start learning how to fish by going out and catching a few, omitting entirely anything difficult or technical in the way of preparation that would take away from the fun. But it wasn’t by way of fun that we were introduced to our father’s art. If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him. So you too will have to approach the art Marine- and Presbyterian-style, and, if you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess. The four-and-a-half-ounce thing in silk wrappings that trembles with the underskin motions of the flesh becomes a stick without brains, refusing anything simple that is wanted of it. All that a rod has to do is lift the line, the leader, and the fly off the water, give them a good toss over the head, and then shoot them forward so they will land in the water without a splash in the following order: fly,
transparent leader, and then the line—otherwise the fish will see the fly is a fake and be gone. Of course, there are special casts that anyone could predict would be difficult, and they require artistry—casts where the line can’t go over the fisherman’s head because cliffs or trees are immediately behind, sideways casts to get the fly under overhanging willows, and so on. But what’s remarkable about just a straight cast—just picking up a rod with line on it and tossing the line across the river?