Mike Vaccaro
Remembering sports rules to live by
IN A few weeks he will be gone 20 years, which is kind of remarkable because I hear my father’s voice, still, with the same distinct Queens-flavored eloquence as always. Father’s Day, naturally, makes that wonderful voice sound, and resound, ever clearer, with ever more clarity.
I was lucky. Our conversations through the years weren’t limited merely to sports. We shared many interests, and shared the joy of debate. My favorite? Once I dared him to come up with a songwriting team from his preferred genres that was the equal of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He chewed on that.
“Fine,” he said. “But then I get to pick the band to play their songs. And I’m going to go with my band — Tony Bennett, Buddy Rich, Doc Severinsen, Wes Montgomery, Thelonious Monk — over their band.” We ruled that one a tie. But sports was No. 1, which probably comes as no surprise. And though our back-and-forths were wonderful, what sticks with me were these five favored subjects. He never wrote them down, and I wasn’t smart enough to do that either, but the essence of his points ring true all these years later. And they go something like this:
1. “Always root for ‘New York.’ ”
My father’s teams were the Yankees, the Giants, the Knicks and the Rangers. But he was also happy when the Mets, Jets, Nets and Islanders won (he was agnostic about the Devils). He lived long enough to watch the 2000 World Series and was pleased by its outcome, but a day or so later he told me: “The Yankees won it. But New York was the biggest winner.” I didn’t realize it as a kid, but he was unwittingly training me for the neutrality required to cover sports in this wonderful sporting tapestry of a city.
2. “Find your own DiMaggio.” My dad understood that the good old days weren’t always best. When Bernard King played for the Knicks, he never insisted that Richie Guerin could’ve beaten him one-on-one just because they were young together. But he did see all athletes through the prism of Joe DiMaggio, his hero as a kid. “DiMaggio never embarrassed himself, and as a result he never embarrassed me for caring so much about him,” he said. “You’ll root for a lot of players in your life. But you’ll know when you find your own DiMaggio.” Mine turned out to be Tom Seaver. Dad wasn’t crazy about how Seaver left the Mets (he was a daily reader of Dick Young), but later conceded: “You picked a good one.”
3. “Play until they tell you that you can’t play anymore.” My father suffered a heart attack when he was 40, and thereafter he only rarely played basketball (his first love) and softball, but he’d play catch and later on he’d drive a cart with me as I played, grabbing my 7-iron on the par-3s, knocking it on the green 90 percent of the time even if it was his only swing of the year. He was an expert bowler. And as I’ve written, he was a legend in his Corona neighborhood as a billiards player. “Watching sports is the next best thing,” Mick the Pro always told me. “But it’s definitely the next best thing. Playing is always better.”
4. “Collect memories. They’re even better than baseball cards.” It was in the spirit of this that he won battle after battle in my childhood with my mother, allowing me to stay up late to see Hank Aaron hit No. 715, waking me up in time to see Carlton Fisk coax his home run fair in the 1975 World Series, so I could make it to the end of the 1976 ALCS, Chris Chambliss taking Mark Littell deep at the Stadium. I’ve had a job that’s allowed me to keep collecting memories and he was right: All of them are even better than the time I went to Carl’s Candy Store sometime in 1973, bought a pack of football cards, and uncovered a Joe Namath (the one where he’s wearing a ski cap with “JOE” on it). Though that was pretty cool, too.
5. “Don’t take it personally that she doesn’t care.” Dad realized from the jump my wife wasn’t ever going to be a sports fan. He understood. To the end he swore the worst argument he ever had in 48 years of marriage was when my mother turned off the TV in their Miami hotel room as overtime began for the 1958 NFL championship game. “If I could stay married after that,” he once told me, “it really isn’t that hard.”
Happy Father’s Day.