See God Today?

“My mother never really helped me with sports. I’m not even certain if she loves sports. All she ever did was pack me up in the car for the first 17 years of my life, dragging me out of bed and telling me to eat something before driving me off to tryouts, to practice, to tournaments and playoff games that I can no longer remember. All she ever did was make sure that I always had a ride home after the game. All she ever did was abandon huge chunks of her day—her life—to make sure I could play sports with my friends because I enjoyed playing sports with my friends.

I am not sure what the big deal is about this. It’s not like my mother taught me how to throw a curve ball.

All my mother ever did was make me take swimming lessons, even though I hated taking swimming lessons. She enrolled me in a basketball camp, even though I was never going to be any good at basketball. She bought me a bike, even though I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 9 years old. Why she did all that, I have no idea. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that, decades later, I continue to swim, play basketball and ride my bike.

All my mother ever did was drive me to strange towns and ball fields and sit in the stands with a bunch of parents and watch some of the sloppiest Little League and youth soccer you’ve ever seen in your life. Sometimes it would take hours to get there, and the games were so boring. I don’t know why she never complained. Mothers can be weird.

When the games were over, my mother never gave me a hard time if I won or lost. She never made a big deal about my pathetic batting average, or how many runs I gave up, or why I spent most of the game on the bench. She never asked why that fly ball hit my nose, why I didn’t make that tag, why that guy was able to score a goal. She never bugged me about any of these things. Bizarre, right?

All my mother ever did was pay for everything. I was little then, so I didn’t know how much stuff costs, but I always had cleats and shin pads and a baseball glove that I got to pick out at the store myself, and broke in with neatsfoot oil. She bought the neatsfoot oil, too. Apparently, it also costs money just for kids to play sports—team fees, equipment fees, league fees. My mom must have had a job or something. Maybe that’s why she went to work every day.

In my town, all of the awesome kid jocks wore personalized satin jackets with their first names on the sleeve, because that’s what you got when you were an awesome kid jock and played on a great team. I was not an awesome kid jock but my mom went to a sporting-goods store and paid for them to make me a jacket with my first name on the sleeve. For some reason I wore that jacket all the time.

When I wasn’t playing games, all my mother ever did was help me find stuff I lost. I lost almost every piece of sports equipment I ever owned. I lost my cleats, my glove, my hats, my socks and my jerseys far too many times to count. I forgot my bike at the park. I remember leaving that satin jacket at the field. We went back to the field in the darkness and found it.

When my kid brother got older, my mother did all of these things for him too. My brother was a lot better at sports than I ever was. He made all of the All-Star teams and got the real satin jacket with his name on the sleeve. He got so good that people came to watch him play. But my mother never once compared him to me. She never pointed out he was better. I wonder if she noticed.

Now my life is surrounded by sports, by games and superstar athletes privileged to be paid millions for games the rest of us would play for free. And though there is a whole warm nostalgia built up around the idea of sports, fathers and sons, of passing the game from one generation to the next, I can tell you that whenever one of these superstar athletes wins a championship, or breaks a record, or signs a big contract, the first person they thank, 99 times out of 100, is not their father, or a coach, or an agent, or a friend, but their mother.

I am older, and I think about all these things and I wonder if I had it wrong. Maybe my mother really did love sports.

Or maybe just me.”–Jason Gay, WSJ

Carrie-Chicago, IL