How Baseball Mended My Complicated Relationship With My Father

To celebrate the opening of baseball season (Go, Cards!), an essay (and lesson about writing them) about relationships with our parents, how sports can bridge a gap and the power of unconditional love

Note: Before I share my second lesson on what an editor does and how a strong relationship with yours can save your book (and, sometimes, career), I wanted to share — considering it is the start of baseball season — an essay I wrote for

Zibby Owens

Zibby Mag, which was named one of their Ten Best of 2023. It’s a deeply personal essay that sums up my memoir, MAGIC SEASON, which was named a Michigan Notable Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Father’s Day selection, a USA Today summer reading selection, and a Best Book of Summer by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The essay (and memoir) are about the complicated relationships we have with our parents, how sports can bridge a gap, and how unconditional love — love without conditions — can allow us to overcome obstacles, rise above judgment and love another. Writing essays is a HUGE part of book publicity and promotion today. In fact, I think it hovers at the top of the list as it is not only a way to get the heart and soul of your novel or memoir in front of the eyes of countless readers but also possible to accomplish for any author (as opposed to praying for a Reese book club pick). Moreover, there are many avenues (from newspapers and magazines to blogs and author pages) to explore in order to get your essay published and your work the attention it deservers. Writing a winning essay, however, is not easy, and getting the attention of editors isn’t either. It requires all your skills. DO NOT WRITE A QUICK DRAFT AND SEND IT OUT! Work on it tirelessly. A great essay is distilling a complicated story into a few hundred words that still mimics the structure and arc of a book. It is like hiking to a tall peak: You can only pack what is necessary to get you to that highest point. I will be sharing many more lessons this year about memoir writing and essay writing, and I’ll be back next time with my second lesson about editors.)

---

“In over 150 years of Major League Baseball, and some quarter million games, there have only been 23 perfect games. No pitcher has ever thrown more than one.”

“I’ll be damned,” my father says. 

“That comes out to a percentage of 0.0001,” I say. 

My Missouri-born father seems pleased with this statistic. I try to come up with one before every game we watch. He turns up the volume on the St. Louis Cardinals game that is starting and pats the end of the couch. This is my signal to join him. It’s as close as we have ever allowed each other to be. 

“Harder‘n hell to get it right every time, ain’t it, boy?”

I nod at my dad. I understand exactly what he is saying. 

I tried, son.

Over the course of our 50-year relationship, baseball was our love language—the only way a gay son could communicate with his Ozarks engineer dad without a benches-clearing brawl. For years, my father and I were as rivalrous as the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. Ironically, these were the teams playing in the last game we would ever watch together, an October 2015 playoff game to decide the National League champion.

Growing up, my father had constantly chided me for not being a real man, a concept I could never grasp. I am a writer, all emotion. You get the picture. But I had a lot of the Ozarks in me, too, which can make a man as hard and unforgiving as the rocky terrain. What did I have to forgive my father for? Well, that depends. How much time do you have? 

Nevertheless, I loved him. To this day, my heart still flutters in my chest when I think of him, just like a good knuckleball.

Looking at my dad—bloated and weak, a whisper of the huge presence he once was—as the game started, I think of how hard it is to throw the perfect pitch time after time. Sometimes, the sinker doesn’t sink. The fastball isn’t on the corner but right down the middle of the plate. And yet every pitcher who walks out to the mound strives to throw a perfect game, just like every dad who holds his newborn son for the very first time vows to be the perfect father.

Baseball is just like life. It’s a short journey from the first inning to the ninth, and the outcome is often determined by tiny circumstances that decide the final score. In the last game I ever watched with my dying father, the only things I wanted were for my dad to say how much he loved me and for me to let him know I forgave him. But that would be as hard to come by as a big hit for the Cardinals.

A boy had to learn to play baseball in the Ozarks, just as he had to learn to gut a fish or shoot a gun.

My father spent every night after work trying to teach me the game, but I was built like a cartoon sponge. When he’d throw the ball to me, I’d stand lifeless as it zipped into the blackberry bramble in our woods. 

“Git it, boy!”

I’d return, scratched and bleeding, and we’d try again. One day, he tossed his glove down, never to return. 

“You’ll never be a real man,” he said. 

When I walked into the house, a Cards game was playing on the radio, Jack Buck’s voice our mediator. At first, my interest in the Cardinals was driven solely by my desire to please my father.

“Baseball is like life,” he’d say. “One calculated move at a time.”

Over time, I began to love the intricacies of baseball. And, over time, my father and I never spoke of my life, only the game. I began to get glimpses of my father, to connect the dots and understand how he became the conflicted man he was.

My brother was killed in an accident in 1979.

He was 17, and I was 13. Todd was the Skoal chewer, hunter, tinkerer of engines, and I was convinced God had made a grave mistake. I could never give my father the things he wanted: a daughter-in-law, grandchildren, a legacy. 

While my mother grieved in bed, my father knocked on my door, handed me a garbage bag and told me to pack. 

“We’re goin’ to a ballgame, boy.” 

I didn’t speak a single word the entire drive to St. Louis, hurt and confused as to how we could leave my mother. My father talked incessantly about the 1979 Cardinals—a talented, highly inconsistent team filled with icons like Keith Hernandez. We had nosebleed tickets to the old Busch Stadium. Ninety-six “Crown of Arches” ringed the roof, echoing the Gateway Arch which rose from beyond the outfield. As the sun moved across the sky, the shadow of the roof was tossed onto the AstroTurf, and mini arches ringed the playing field, presenting a nightmare for batters and outfielders. 

“Gotta be able to see through the shadows and into the light,” my father told me. 

The skies opened up on that summer day, but we didn’t move from our seats despite the downpour. 

That’s when I noticed what, at first glance, I thought were raindrops cascading down my father’s face. But he was crying. The first time I had seen him do so since my brother’s death. I realized my dad had asked me to run away to a ballgame so no one in our small town could see him vulnerable, mourning the loss of his eldest son. As the rain slowed, my father held out a beer to me. 

“Don’t tell your mother.”

When I met my future husband, Gary, and came out to my father in 1996, he didn’t speak to me for over two years.

He wrote me a lengthy letter saying my life would be filled with darkness, and he wanted nothing to do with me. In the fall of 1998, I had just watched Mark McGwire break baseball’s home run record when the phone on the kitchen wall rang.

“It’s your father,” Gary said.

He held the phone out to me for what seemed like an eternity. 

Gary shook the phone at me and then, without warning, dropped it. The phone banged against the wall. 

“Oops,” Gary said. 

Gary refused to play games, be it baseball or life.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Can you believe it? Big Mac did it. How ‘bout those Cardinals?” This was my father’s apology. “History in the making!” he blurted. His voice was slurred.

I didn’t say a word.  

“I miss seeing games with you,” he continued.

I waited for something more. There was nothing, only the low hum of the ancient lights in our kitchen. What should I do?

He had hurt me more than I knew was possible. How many holidays had I missed? How long did I suffer until finally feeling nothing at all?

Through the receiver, I could hear my mother nervously cleaning the kitchen.  

As a hospice nurse, my mom—who had run away from home to spend time with me and Gary over the years—used to tell me that nearly everybody she cared for at the end of their life was filled with deep regret. 

“You don’t have to forgive and forget, Wade,” she would say. “The one thing you don’t want is to end your life filled with regret because it will eat away at the little time we are blessed with here on earth. Unconditional love is the hardest thing to learn in this world. If you can give—and receive—love unconditionally,  it will be life-changing.”

“How many homers do you think he’ll hit before the season ends?” I finally asked my dad.

“You know,” my dad said, “baseball’s not a one-man game. Mac needed help. Takes a team. Can’t go it alone.”

And this, I knew, was his big apology. I hung up and turned to Gary. 

“How can you just shrug off two years of pain?” he screamed. “Do you know how many times you woke me up crying in the middle of the night? He cannot just pick up the phone, not apologize, and have you take him back as though nothing happened.”

“He’s my dad,” I said. “I need a next season.”

Sometimes, a game ends with a whimper.

So it is with the 2015 Cardinals. The Cubs fans are riotous at Wrigley. 

“Screw the Cubbies!” my father yells. “Turn off the damn game!” 

That’s my dad. Dying and still able to turn off any emotion with a click of the remote.

“Why are you still here?” he asks. 

I look at my father. I know he doesn’t mean “Why did you stay to watch this game with me?” but “Why are you still here, even after the death of your mother?”

Why am I still here, on the end of the couch, watching baseball next to a man who I’m not convinced ever really liked me, much less loved me?

If there’s one thing I learned from listening to, watching, and attending thousands of baseball games with my father, it’s that a true fan must believe in his heart that even a terrible team can one day transform into a great one. Otherwise, why do we return, season after miserable season? Life and baseball rely on two things: hope and forgiveness.

When the game ends, I feed my dad and give him his meds. I rub lotion on his crepe-paper skin. It feels odd to touch him, to try and still be a good man. What is a real man? What is a good man? I wonder, but I don’t think I’ll ever know. 

However, I do know love. And we’ve had it wrong all these years. Love is not shaped like a heart. It’s shaped like a baseball.

Love comes right at you, pitch after pitch, inning after inning, season after season: sometimes it’s a fastball, sometimes it’s disguised as a knuckler, but most often love is like a curveball. You don’t know where it’s going. Sometimes, you’ll miss it—badly. Sometimes, you’ll foul it off. But sometimes you’ll end up getting a mighty swing at it. And if you make contact, you’re not lucky. You’re damn good. Because you never took your eye off it—you followed it all the way to the center of the plate and then out of the ballpark.

I comb my dad’s hair, pull a Cards sweatshirt over his sloped back and help him into bed. 

“Good night, dad,” I say, as I turn out the lights.

“Boy?”

“Yeah.”

“Sit a spell longer.”

I take a seat on the edge of his bed. He reaches back and puts his hand on mine, and the entire world falls away. It isn’t just the end of another day, another game, another season. It is the end. I know it. And he knows it too.

“I’m so tired, boy,” he says. “Dog tired.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s okay, dad. It’s okay to be tired. It’s okay to let go. You had a good run.”

“Like the Cards?”

“Better than that,” I say.

“What do you think about next season?” he asks.

“Well, I think it’s going to be tough,” I say. “Won’t be the same.” I stop and look at him, right in the eyes. “It won’t ever be the same.”

He looks at me. 

“I do love ya, boy. You need to know that.” 

I hear the crowd—my mom, my family, my ghosts—cheering wildly. A walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth! My father grips my hand: “Not a perfect game, but we finished. Together.”  I lean in and my father holds me, maybe for the first—and last—time in our lives. 

“You’re gonna be alright, boy,” he says, his voice strong. “’Cause I taught you to be tough, didn’t I?”

“You sure did, dad.”

And just before he falls asleep, he whispers: “You’re my next season. Always remember that.”

XOXO,

Wade/Viola