I’m a friend of The Public Professor going back several years now. When I first met him he had just crossed 8th Street in Manhattan and entered the liquor store where I was working, and he was wearing a fedora, jeans, and an unzipped army jacket showing that he had neglected to put on a shirt. He also had a walking stick of some sort, which along with his scraggly goatee and shirtlessness lent him an air of vaguely lethargic malevolence. My first thought was to reach for the Jeff Burroughs Louisville Slugger we kept hanging from two nails behind the counter, but I refrained from brandishing the weapon when it became apparent that he was in the 
company of a mutual friend. Two decades after veering away from a bat/walking stick duel that would surely have left me with my brains leaking onto the bottom row where we kept the overstock half-pints of blackberry brandy, my friend and I have agreed to a peaceful exchange of blog posts.
I usually approach writing on my own blog as a way to use sports in general and old baseball cards in particular to cling haphazardly to a facsimile of emotional stability, but I thought I’d try to follow the lead of my learned friend and bring a more scholarly approach to a consideration of some aspect of the sporting world. However, I failed miserably in sustaining such an approach and have nothing to show for the abortive attempts besides the following capitulation.
Five Things I Am Going to Teach My Kid About Sports
1. I am writing this because after 43 years barely getting by as a mostly hapless individual I may now be less than a month or perhaps mere days or, who knows, even hours away from becoming a father, and though I intended to write something more pointedly about sports and society, I find that I am too tense and nervous and scattered to attempt anything beyond internal babbling and anxiety-provoked list-making. I get this way sometimes, such as when I am about to board a plane or speak in front of a gathering, and my mouth gets dry, and my stomach turns all diarrhea-y, and all I can do to cope is make
up lists, hence this list, and hence the first item in this list of things I will teach my kid about sports: when in doubt, make a list.
While other cultural entities can supply list-fodder, the world of pro athletics works best as a launch pad into pointless hierarchical grouping. So list the five greatest low-post scorers in NBA history (my choices: Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin McHale, Hakeem Olajuon, Shaquille O’Neil), or list an all-star baseball team of the greatest fielders at each position (such as my brother, acting as my best man, instructed me to do while I was in the last nervous moments of single life, and my breathing deepened from pre-hyperventilation gasps as I rattled off the following: C: Johnny Bench; 1B: Keith “Spoon” Hernandez; 2B: Bill Mazeroski; SS: Ozzie Smith; 3B: Brooks Robinson; LF: Carl Yastrzemski; CF: Willie Mays; RF: Roberto Clemente), or list the five things you’ll tell your kid about sports. It can be a little soothing, a way to focus on something specific when your mind is tending toward vast, terrifying unknowns.
2. Pick a team to follow and stick with it. This will give you something to hold onto in life. Also, this way, when the team you lash yourself to loses, it hurts, and when they win, it feels like some part of you wins, too. I don’t know why this is a good thing, really. Why shouldn’t you live a life more directly connected with the world than this indirect emotional triangulation involving strangers and, let’s face it, wealthy corporate entities that are at best utterly indifferent toward you? The great minds of human history would scoff at this as complete diversion, a blindfold from life. Buddha 
would call it an imprisoning illusion, Karl Marx would see it as an imprisoning opiate, and Henry Thoreau would no doubt label it a pitiable detail from a life of quiet desperation. But I can only tell you what I know, and what I know comes from my life, and my life would seem somewhat shapeless if I lifted out of it my life as a sports fan, and this life has been most meaningful when I really cared whether a given team won or lost. So, fuck all those legendary eggheads and visionaries: care about a team. Or care about something anyway. I mean, you might as well. It’s horrible and wrenching and also often just kind of boring, but it’s also pretty sweet sometimes, such as when your team finally wins the whole enchilada and it feels sort of like all your unnamable wishes are coming true.
3. I find at this point in the list that I am tempted to start Marinoviching things. Also, Maraviching things. I don’t know what it is about those similarly sounding names, but the fathers of NFL Quarterback Todd Marinovich and NBA Guard Pete Maravich both took the impulse felt by many fathers to its extreme, trying to build their child from a very young age into 
the perfect athlete, a corrected version of their own flawed athletic attempts. Both fathers succeeded in getting their sons to the highest level of their respective sports, but both of these sons plunged from sports stardom to a darker world of haunted, sunken-eyed addiction. Luckily, I am too lazy to start drilling my future child several hours a day on chest passes or hitting to the opposite field or footwork for the perfect three-step dropback, but I do feel the urge to pass along knowledge gained from my own failed athletic endeavors.
I’ll rein it in. I’ll go with this old bromide instead: Have fun.
4. But don’t quit at the first sign of a challenge or a setback. If you love the game, keep playing. If you love a team, keep rooting. Life can get bleak, but this, like everything else, will change. Keep going.
5. I’ve rooted all my life but never so much as I’ll root for you. Whatever you do is worth something. Whatever you see is worth something. So in closing I’ll pass along the advice my non-athletic father gave to me: write something every day, which is just another way of saying pay attention. It took me a while to follow this advice to pay attention, and I still veer from it. There’s an inherent passivity in sports fandom, and I’ve embraced it as much as anyone. Probably, in macro-sociological terms, sports fandom, especially as influenced as it is by the wholly corporate nature of professional 
sports, functions to control the masses, to channel their potential revolutionary power into politically impotent rituals of collective elation or anger or woe. Why would someone center their well-being on the fortunes of, say, Carl Yastrzemski? Why aren’t I chaining myself to a tree at the beleaguered edge of an endangered forest right now? Because I have to quickly check my fantasy baseball roster and then rush off to my Thoreau-disapproved cubicle job so I can buy you diapers and maybe, down the road, once in a while, take you to a ballgame. Not for nothing, this last part sounds as good to me as anything.