re: Share some of your experiences you had with your father

I like to think that my father gave me the gift of Tiger football, though not in the conventional manner.

I was raised a thousand miles from Baton Rouge, in a place where Billy Cannon's run never echoed on the airwaves. Purple and gold heralded only a visit from the Minnesota Vikings. I was expected to follow in my father's footsteps and attend a small liberal arts college. Perhaps that is even what my father wanted, though he would never burden me with his own hopes. But my dad also knew me in that way unique to fathers and the sons they make. He saw this prematurely somber young man needed some leavening, some lightening, an era of abandon, a few loyal friends, maybe the affections of those mystical southern girls, so he encouraged me to seek out a very different undergraduate experience at LSU.

He drove me to spring testing, fourteen hours in a beaten Toyota: the father driving, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel in rhythm with time, the sullen son staring out the window, watching the miles unspool. We stayed at Pleasant Hall. When the pencils were down and the tests were over, he took my arm and told me he wanted to show me something. We walked through a landscape of heat and ruddled tile and sagging oaks as alien to me then as it is familiar now. I can't even tell you the route we took, but we emerged at last in the shadow of Tiger Stadium, beneath that sheer concrete cliff with its dingy colonnade. At that age, I was habitually jaded, unimpressed with everything as only a naive sixteen year old can be, but there was no denying the immovable power of that towering bowl. For reasons I never knew, a gate along the east side hung open. We walked right in, trotted down a side tunnel, and approached the chain link fence that encircled the unlined field. We stood for a moment and just marvelled as the sun poured down onto that infinite space. My dad smiled and raised his arm, pointing at the "Welcome to Death Valley" sign that adorned the western stands. Our shadows were long and lean. The light glinted on the metal bleachers. It was quiet and warm. No sound but my breathing, a father and son shoulder to shoulder, dwarfed by immensity of that place. My father smiles and points, points the way, and I stand beside him, with the whole damned glory of my youth stretching out ahead of me.

Thanks dad.

(P.S. I really enjoyed everyone's stories in this thread.)