Celebrating Father's Day
A piece about fatherhood and the ways in which fathers shape our lives
Hi friends,
I hope this finds you safe and healthy. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. This week, in honor of Father’s Day, I bring you a piece I wrote two years ago for The Athletic.
However you spend your Sunday, I hope you enjoy this reflection on the many dimensions of fatherhood. —Matthew
As a kid, I wasn’t much of a reader. I later came to appreciate how reading fuels and transports our minds in remarkable ways. The first time a book moved me, the first time one shaped me, I was about 8 years old. My father and I were sitting on my bedroom floor one afternoon. He perused the children’s paperback, “Roberto Clemente: Young Baseball Hero.” At first, all I enjoyed were the photographs: a young Clemente playing baseball in Puerto Rico, his friends and family working in the sugar cane fields, the images of him in a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform. A few minutes passed before my dad set the book on his lap. He raised one of his hands to his eyes. They were wet. It was the first time I saw him cry.
The book ended the same way Clemente’s life did, in a plane crash on Dec. 31, 1972, while he was flying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was 38. This baseball player, this humanitarian who happened to play baseball, brought my dad to tears. As a young boy, I saw Dad, a person who’s supposed to be flawless, in tears. That doesn’t leave you. Men are raised and conditioned not to show vulnerability, and my dad was no different.
Something magical happened. At that moment Clemente began to feel like a friend. Considering the day now, it is a powerful reminder of the preciousness of life. I’ll never meet him, but from that day forward I adored Clemente. The values by which Clemente lived, centered on living for the people around you, drove me to find something worth loving to do for the rest of my life. My dad’s appreciation for Clemente, as well as Clemente’s greatness in itself, taught me how to love life with all its beauties, and how quickly everything we have can fade away. Embrace the mundane. Find a person you want to emulate. Treat others with kindness. Chase your dream.
I never saw Clemente throw out baserunners or smack line drives that whizzed by fielders. Yet I will never cease to weave his legacy into the fabric of my life. I do 21 pushups at the gym, heat leftovers for 21 seconds, wear his No. 21 in sports, run 21 minutes rather than 20. Growing up, I’d wake up to a photo of him swinging at an off-speed pitch, which he drove into the gap for his 3,000th and final career hit. Coincidentally, this came on my dad’s birthday, Sept. 30, 1972. Clemente photos will hang on the walls around me all my life. They remind me of the man he was and the love I will always have for my dad.
This piece is about Clemente and the influence one person can have on others. Which means it’s about the difficulty of admiring a man you never met. It’s about carrying on the legacy of a man who died almost 50 years ago, the importance of ensuring he’s never forgotten. We must continue to honor heroes such as Clemente, whose foundation and museum pass on his story to younger generations.
I’ve written about this before, in 2016 for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where I interned for a summer. Sometimes I left my downtown apartment in the heart of that beautiful city and walked the long way to the paper’s North Shore office. I wanted to pass PNC Park, the 21-foot wall in right field and Clemente’s statue in center field. That column prompted far more reader emails than anything I’ve written. Remembering and honoring Clemente seemed to infuse baseball fans with a certain pride, a certain charm. “I still remember the feeling of relief when we knew that Roberto was next up, those catches, twirl around, and then the rocket throws from right field,” one reader wrote. “What amazing luck to be somewhere so treasured during a moment in time,” wrote another.
Clemente, Joe Posnanski of The Athletic wrote, “is an ageless summer song that takes us back and takes us forward at exactly the same time.” He was known for visiting sick children, giving time to those less fortunate, and holding baseball clinics for kids, especially for those from low-income families. “Anytime you have an opportunity to make a difference in the world and you don’t,” Clemente said, “then you are wasting your time on Earth.”
Clemente taught me that each of us can channel his greatness in our own ways, small or large. One image that comes to mind: Around the time I discovered Clemente, Dad picked me up from school one day. It was snowing as we neared a hill. On the side of the road, a man was riding his bicycle. The path ahead, up a steep climb in a snowstorm, presented a challenge. Seeing this, my dad pulled over and offered him a ride home. The gentleman said he was a dishwasher at a country club riding home for the evening. It was a short drive during which they exchanged a few words in Spanish. We dropped him off near his house. I associate Clemente’s legacy with simple acts such as that one. Acts of kindness mostly everyone can perform.
Years later, my father drove me to Syracuse for college. The morning we pulled out of the driveway, a Clemente photograph among my belongings, I left a note back in my room. At some point, you realize life comes at you fast. For me, this was one of those points. Childhood was over with. I thanked Dad for 18 years of unconditional love and support, something I will never be able to repay. The letter was intended for him to read only after he dropped me off and returned home. One of the things I mentioned was the moment I saw him cry for the first time and the indelible mark it left on me. Rather than tell him as we hugged goodbye outside my dorm, I felt the message would resonate more on paper.
A few weeks later, a handwritten letter arrived in my dormitory mailbox.
“We grew up that ‘men don’t cry,’ ” my dad wrote. “I learned that crying is natural and can be useful. It can be a way of handling a situation and transitioning to a positive thing, growth. In this case, it was being able to pass on the story of a great man to my son.”
I often think about the first time my children may see me cry. Maybe it’ll be thanks to Clemente, and passing to them the story of a great man.