Magicians And Sports

As published in The County Times (countytimes.somd.com)

By Ronald N. Guy Jr.

Life is an interesting scroll.  As a child, you observe people around you adulting to a phenomenal level.  How food appears on the table, clothes get washed and garbage doesn’t pile up so high as to create some disgusting ecosystem of micro-organisms and hatching insects is beyond your comprehension.  Then you have the really exciting things like mortgages, insurance and taxes; such things are just words in a child’s world, annoyances for another day, if the obvious mood drain they cause your parents is any guide.

Quick story: a dear friend of mine was fielding complaints from his daughters about being out of a critical snack.  He reminded them of the grocery list on the refrigerator.  All they had to do was write down what they wanted and it would appear – bought, transported and stocked – days later.  It is like magic, he asserted.   

Magic.  Say it with me, kids: Adults are magicians!  Goodness knows I had many such magicians during my childhood.  I hope you can count a few from yours as well. 

As time and years and decades have flown by, I evolved from clueless child into an independent human, a parent and then, a rather adept magician myself, if you don’t mind me saying.  One day you’re barely capable of making lunch and the next you’re running a household and facilitating the life of other humans.  What once seemed impossible becomes routine tasking for some older, wiser version of you, one apparently adorned with a bottomless magic hat. 

Parenthood…how to even describe it?  The hardest and greatest thing ever.  A source of worry and incomprehensible joy to equal extremes.  The greatest purpose a person may ever have.  The answer to “what’s this life on earth all about?”  Something that taps in to the depth of unconditional human love like nothing else.  And it comes with a life-long membership to the parental fraternity. 

A little about that fraternity.  I’ve seen it over the years.  Leaned on it.  Contributed to it, I hope.  Sometimes words are spoken, sometimes it’s just two sets of tired eyes meeting in a grocery store – when you see a fellow fraternity brother or sister, you just know.  The fraternity is a source of strength, of answers to hard questions, of comfort with parental imperfections and inevitable mistakes, and, perhaps most importantly, inspiration.  The fraternity can be seen at band concerts, scouting events, birthday parties, after school pick-up lines – parents sacrificing sleep, forgoing their own interests and supporting their kids.  And then there’s youth sports…

Precisely when the life of sports families changed is unknown.  Best I can tell, purely from my own experience, it was sometime between the early 1990s and 2010s.  Youth sports used to be about a couple practices a week at a local park or school and games played less than an hour from home.  Now?  Daily practices, long trips, some consuming weekends, and travel teams.  It is…a lot, even for magicians.

After the Washington Commanders selected Jayden Daniels second overall in last week’s NFL draft, he thanked his parents for their 23 years of devotion (i.e. his entire life) in getting him to this dream-come-true moment.  It was a familiar refrain from other draftees, either in words or video clips from living rooms across the country – lots of tears, lots of mom and dad hugs.  A common quip to extraordinary moments is “I can’t imagine.”  Most parents won’t support their kids into college sports, much less the pros, but we can actually imagine the commitment of Daniels’s parents.  We can picture the tough games, the bumps and bruises, the long drives, the daily practices, equipment all over the house, and dirty jerseys in the laundry room.  They did it for the same reason we all do: simply because their kid wanted to play.    

As I type this, I’m on hour six at a track meet far from home, which, judging from the crowd, makes me exactly like a couple hundred other “fraternity” members.  Now, scale this to a state and nation and for all spring sports.  You get the point.  Magicians are at work on a grand scale.