Caroline Bybee
If you want to get to my house from Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, you have to drive past downtown. My dad is always the one to pick me up when I fly in. By the time we hit downtown, we’ve inevitably run out of life updates to share. And so, seemingly without fail, as the distinctive Minute Maid Stadium flashes past to our right, my dad will make some comment about the Astros.
Ever since I was a kid, in proud Houston tradition, I learned that a deadpan “So…how ‘bout them ‘Stros?” was an appropriate filler question whenever a conversation went dead. Now as a college senior who returns to her hometown with woeful rarity, chatting about the Astros — and all those other astronomically-named Houston teams — has taken on a new significance.
I was never good at sports. I quit softball in eighth grade because the other girls started commenting about how they wished our coach wouldn’t play a girl who never hits the ball. Despite my coach’s promise that I would hit a ball to Jupiter if I practiced my swings 300 times a day, I rarely managed to make it beyond the batter’s box. Even my lack of softball abilities, however, was better than my other sports abilities; my absence of coordination meant that I tripped running sprints, whacked my head on the pool wall while swimming and couldn’t throw a football if my entire family’s lives were at stake.
Also, I didn’t care. I was a bookish kid, and I thought I was above the brutish world of sports. I always made sure to groan loudly when my dad flipped to ESPN on weekends, and never followed Texans’ football like a good Texas girl should. During family weekend my first year here, my dad sat next to me and explained each play to me as the game unfolded.
It has only been in the last four years here that I have come to appreciate the significance of sports in my relationship with my dad, and the importance of sports in general. Ever since the football game four years ago during family weekend — my first ever, actually — my dad has continued to occasionally enlighten me about the world of sports. And I’ve finally decided to listen.
There is something to be said about taking an interest in the interests of your loved ones, which has been my experience with sports. Am I going to be the next sports commentator on ESPN? Probably not — in fact, I’m not even sure if that’s a real thing.
But in the time since I started asking my dad about local teams and making a concentrated effort to listen when he tries to explain things to me, I have noticed us growing closer, be it through our snarky comments about the quality of the Astros (dismal) and our shared amusement at my utter cluelessness toward everything football. Is this a corny story of an only daughter bonding with her father over sports? Maybe. But is it also proof of the importance of (at least casually) taking an interest in the things that the people you love care about?
Yeah, it is.