Mythologies
Missing heroes, fighting sorrow, and falling in love with sports (again), on my own terms.
The peppery, charcoal scent had dogged my senses all evening, from the moment I removed the jersey from its drawer in mid-March. It was too familiar to be the musty odor of a dark corner and lost time, but still, I could not place it.
Ten years had passed since I’d last worn it to a Carolina Hurricanes game, since the final time I had met my father on a Wednesday night to carpool to PNC (née RBC) Arena in Raleigh. There, for a few more hours, as Ric Flair’s orange face screamed from the Jumbotron, I became the daughter my dad needed, and he was the father I had adored my whole life.
“Last game,” he had typed with his usual brevity that afternoon in April 2014. “See you at 6.”
Many weeks earlier, without mentioning it to me, he had decided not to renew the two season tickets that he and I had held for a decade. It was my mother who had called to explain. The arena stairs had become too difficult for him to climb, she told me, the parking too fretful, the whole proposition too vexing.
This reasoning was believable enough: The tortured computer that lived between my father’s ears had no off switch. The head’s-up display I assumed his brain overlayed to stadium parking lots and exits as he gamed the traffic flow trapped him in a furrowed state of grunts and sighs until we got out of the vehicle. From the passenger seat, with my 4th-grade math abilities and my feeble writer’s mind, parking was a tense and exhausting spectacle. I wanted either to chamois his brow or douse him with Gatorade afterward.
Still, his silent decision to end our Hockey-Night-in-Raleigh tradition broke my heart. And I could not shake the feeling that somehow, I had also broken his. That something had changed between us. That the abrupt conclusion of almost 40 years of sitting next to him at sporting events had not been prompted by an unpredictable armada of suburban families exiting in Escalades.
That it had been triggered instead by the fall of our mythologies—and the consequences of believing in them in the first place.
♣♣♣
It wasn’t until I stood on the concourse after the Hurricanes’ loss to the Rangers last March, trying to recall where we had parked, that I placed the scent my mind had been chasing all night. And when it came back to me, rolling in like a slate-blue fog, it nearly knocked me backward into my husband, daughter, sister-in-law, and nephew, who were all waiting for me to decide which way to exit the arena.
It came back to my senses as a dark gray upholstery, a tortured concentration, a furrowed brow, a tidy front seat, an old comfort, a treasured companion. It came back as the essence of him.
“Left or right? Which way?” I would have asked my father if he had been there, for I never knew which way to turn. Instead of speaking, he would have rolled his eyes with bemusement and pointed an outstretched arm in the proper direction. And I would have followed his outstretched arm through the crowd and into the open air.
For most of my life, I would have followed that outstretched arm anywhere.
“It’s his truck,” I told my husband after we found our way out of the arena. “The peppery scent. My jersey. It’s the inside of Dad’s truck.”
Randy turned and looked at me sadly, knowingly, without saying a word. He didn’t need to. And his look, that sadness, hurtled me backward in time: To my father’s face a dozen years earlier, when the good-guy morality I had always associated with Penn State football—the first team Dad had taught me to love, the team he had grown up with—shattered into a thousand awful pieces in November 2011.
To when I was grief-stricken and angry and reactive and refused to let Joe Paterno or any other adult associated with the program slide for Jerry Sandusky’s crimes.
To when I told my father as much, as we sat in a performing arts center, each wearing our pressed and sparkling best, waiting for a holiday event to begin.
To when he fixed his brown eyes with a sorrow that was directed not at Sandusky or Paterno, not at an adult world that had betrayed the trust of children, but at me, the mother of his grandchildren.
What I was asking him to consider hurt too much, shattered too many fairy tales, and tarnished too many bronzed memories. What I was asking him to consider broke his heart. And if there was anything that had brought my father and me together, it was the power of the athletic fairy tale. If there was anything we shared, it was the transcendence of fandom as an engine for wonder and belief. As an escape from what you were into what you could become. As a safe haven for dreams.
Dad had carried that magic since he was a boy peering at Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider from the stands at Ebbets Field with his grandfather, and I had carried it since he’d first introduced me to Beaver Stadium at State College. (More on this in my next Intrepid Post installment, “Thirteen.”)
But I was no longer the agreeable girl who had circled his orbit, the happy companion who had written about him in every school essay that described her primary influences.
And he was no longer the man who could do no wrong in my eyes, my unlikely refuge from the pain of never understanding how to belong to my mother.
I may never know why our hockey nights came to an end. But this was the era that interrogated, one after another, so many of the mythologies I carried: of sports heroes, of fathers and daughters, of what my family was, of who my parents should be, and of what it means to protect the powerless.
It was the era when my mother’s phone conversations became particularly barbed and cruel, when the charge in the air at our extended gatherings took on the tenor of a joyless rivalry. It was the era when my father sat by and watched, and listened, and never spoke up in defense. It was the era that foreshadowed the arrival of another orange face in an ill-fitting suit that would descend a gaudy escalator in New York and, over the next six years, abscond with breathtaking quantities of both of my parents’ reason.
It was the era that foreshadowed my excommunication from my family of origin. An era of dizzying grief.
That outstretched arm, which had helped point me in the direction of sports journalism 30 years ago, which had pointed me toward something bigger than what was expected of me, which had set me to gathering so much of who I am today, simply faded away.
♣♣♣
Sports fandom became difficult for me after that. For a while it became—and I cannot believe I am typing these words—pointless. A therapist would tell you that was the depression talking, but I’m not so sure. I think it was something closer to growth. As I thought about my conversation with Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde for this newsletter, I ran the question he posed through my head over and over:
How much of yourself are you still going to invest [in sports] while keeping perspective?
I don’t know what it’s like in other families, but in my admittedly dysfunctional one, fandom was a proxy for love, for power, for courage, for grief, for dreaming. It was a proxy for connection. And I don’t know if that’s such a terrible thing, particularly if it’s the only way you can express your emotions.
But I do know that it will crush your spirit if you’re not careful.
I know that there are heroes who believe they can opt out of their humanity when it doesn’t suit their terribly small definition of values, and I suppose being a hero to small kids and big kids and one of the faces of a franchise’s greatest accomplishment shouldn’t preclude one from choosing to limit his circle of acceptance. I suppose it doesn’t change his excellence on the ice. But I know that I can decide to sell that athlete’s jersey, which is autographed by the 2006 Stanley Cup Championship team, and donate the proceeds to a cause that supports my LGBTQ+ child’s identity.
I know that standing in the PNC Arena last March, wearing that jersey and all of the memories it evoked for perhaps the last time, I was a different person than I was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I will always adore my father, who has not spoken to me since June 2021; this I cannot help. But I don’t need him to know which way to turn anymore, left or right. The choice is often obvious.
And where it is not, I will ask for help from a trusted person who is willing to give it, like Sandy Rosenbush. I will take a page from Leon Carter’s playbook and return to the places that formed me. I will stand inside those places—as I will this fall at Beaver Stadium, for the first time in my life without my father, for the first time since the tsunami of grief—and see, and feel, and breathe what remains of the mythology that held my hand for a lifetime, that sent me on my way, that taught me how to dream. I will see what’s left.
Whatever it is, I know it will be enough. ♣
NEXT WEDNESDAY: Argentinian artist and interpreter Marta Singh explains how oral storytelling—and her foundation in fairy tales—helped unlock her buried memories of growing up under a military dictatorship.
THIS WEEKEND: “Thirteen,” a coming-of-age Intrepid Post about hope, football, and broken hearts.
Beth your writing conjures up memories and feeling I generally choose to ignore. Yet it is punctuated with wit which requires me to think. It was a whole brain experience. Good read.