These are words I never wanted to type: My father died. Sports, to my dad, was never an obsession. It was a three-hour passion when a game started. It ended when the game ended. It didn't affect his life any more than a good meal or a card game.
These are words I never wanted to type:
My father died.
He was 95. We were lucky he lived so long and had his mind all the way. I find myself telling people he had a good life and passed away quietly. But it still hurts. I’ve reached for the phone several times this past week to call him only to realize that option’s gone.
Many people say they had regrets or unresolved problems with their father or mother. I was fortunate that way. The only kind of trouble I had came when I was a teenager and my dad forgot to put the plug in our 15-foot boat. We nearly sank that night fishing in the middle of a lake. He insisted I forgot about the plug. We debated it ever after.
“You can tell the truth about the plug now,” he said in his final days, as we sat alone in the hospital talking about his life, recounting family stories, laughing with each other and watching an occasional game on television.
He actually couldn’t watch games by then due to macular degeneration that limited his eyesight. He couldn’t hear too well, either. I told him he was the perfect date if he’d just learn to not talk.
So, he sat in the hospital with headphones on and listened to a Cincinnati Bengals game. He liked quarterback Joe Burrow, who he felt didn’t get a fair shake at Ohio State, which was the team he followed most living in Columbus, Ohio.
“What are they doing!” he shouted at one point, his voice loud in the manner people wearing headphones can create.
A passing nurse asked if everything was OK. “Yeah, we’re just losing,” he said. “Again.”
Sports, to my dad, was never an obsession. It was a three-hour passion when a game started. It ended when the game ended. It didn’t affect his life any more than a good meal or a card game.
He was a businessman. Sports was an outlet, a diversion — sometimes uncomfortably so. I played in a youth era when fathers umpired games, and his umpiring left me brooding and silent on the way home. My boyhood friend, George English, who dad called out on strikes, said only from the backseat, “That wasn’t a strike, Mr. Hyde.”
Dad made sure to show up late for games after that.
In the larger picture, sports was primarily a conversation to him. A debate. A fun harbor. Oh, he played games growing up, like lacrosse with Native Americans near Syracuse, N.Y., He became good enough to be a leading scorer at Syracuse University as a sophomore.
He contracted polio after that year, back before the vaccine, which ended his lacrosse days and was the first time he cheated death. The second time came at 72 when he beat kidney cancer.
He lived his final decades with one-third of a kidney, thanks to that cancer. He also had a newspaper notice he carried around that read: “Warren Hyde, who is 74 and was supposed to be dead of cancer, shot a hole-in-one on the 130-yard, No. 8 hole …”
He bought everyone in the nine-hole course’s clubhouse a drink that day. When he later repeated the feat, he swore his playing group to silence.
“There were a lot of people in the clubhouse, and I didn’t want to spend your inheritance,” he told me.
As the years wore on, his body didn’t allow him to play golf. Then he couldn’t walk much. Getting old isn’t for sissies, he’d say. My mother’s death last year weighed on him, because she suffered a stroke and Alzheimer’s and ended in assisted living.
“I need you to promise me something,” dad said one day.
Before he reached the point of assisted living, he wanted me to take him to a place for assisted suicide. I’d only thought of that in the abstract, and here we were looking at various laws in states across the country and the world. We talked about a plan.
A few weeks ago, he had some trouble and my sister took him in for a pacemaker. There were complications, as there are can be for a 95-year-old man with a sliver of one kidney. The next thing we knew he was being propped up by medicine to stay alive.
“Remember what you promised,” he said to me then.
I couldn’t tell him we had passed the option of assisted suicide, that the law demands it be undertaken before the point he’d reached. So, it was the best of bad news when he decided to be taken off the medicine, slipped into unconsciousness and passed quickly and quietly.
I feel a little self-indulgent writing this. I cover players who never knew their father. I can’t imagine the void and anger inside them. How many people are fortunate to grow up in a loving, two-parent home and be in their 60s when they pass?
I was doubly-fortunate that the best man I ever met was my father. I told him so right to our final conversation. There were no unspoken words or unresolved issues as he died.
There’s just little things that tug at me still. Maybe a story I saw, maybe something my sons or daughter do, that I know he’d want to hear. I sit here typing knowing that conversation can’t happen anymore.
