Happy Father's Day

I'm proud of the young adults they've become. My kids are what I hoped they would be at their ages.

My daughter may have exceeded expectations. I credit sports. It's where she got her intensity. She was very passive until she grew (a lot) at fourteen. She was so afraid of not being eligible in college she got all A's. From there she has pushed herself even harder. 

This certainly isn't my story. But it's a good one. Gerry Callahan is a Boston sportswriter and talk show host.

Baseball was the game of life for dad, son

Today we re-run the Father's Day column written last year by longtime Herald columnist Gerry Callahan in memory of his dad, who passed away in 2015.

The big, thick, boring history books he had loved all his life no longer mattered to him. For the final few weeks, biographies of the Wright brothers and Calvin Coolidge sat like beanbag ashtrays on the coffee table, relics from another time and place.

A copy of the Herald was always in his room, but he mostly just glanced at the back and front pages and left it there for visitors, like a Newsweek at a dentist office.

The cancer and the chemo and the Skittles-like assortment of painkillers had sapped my father of much of his energy and curiosity. Once an inveterate news junkie, he no longer had to be in front of the TV at six o'clock to see what was happening in the world. We still flipped to Fox News at 6:30 so he could hear from his hero - the great Dr. Charles Krauthammer - but he didn't really watch anymore.

He just kind of sat there … and stared … and waited.

"Who's pitching?" he would ask as Remy and Orsillo appeared in his room at seven o'clock, like two more friends come to keep him company.

I would answer with names and numbers, stats and match-ups and anything else to break up the quiet melancholy, but he didn't care about any of it. It was a baseball game, a Sox game, and there would be a spark of life in his eyes as he watched them take the field.

The doctors told us to make him comfortable and this was one way we did it almost every day - with the Red Sox, with baseball. Even when he didn't eat, even when he could barely walk, there was still the Red Sox. They were part of his life for more than 70 years, and they were part of his life to the end.

He smiled when I told him his childhood idol, Bobby Doerr (now 98), was the oldest living baseball Hall of Famer. "I can't believe he's gonna outlive me," he said, as always, without a hint of bitterness.

The Red Sox won 78 games in the last year of my father's life. We saw at least part of every one of them. We saw all 84 losses, too. They finished last, of course, but that didn't matter to my father at all. He was usually asleep by the seventh inning anyway.

The next day I would tell him what he missed, and he would ask who was pitching that night, and we'd go through it all over again. He would say how much he liked Betts and Bogaerts and how much he disliked Sandoval and Ramirez - he never, ever used the word "hate" - and he would ask, of course, when they were going to fire the manager because that's what lifelong Red Sox fans do. It was something to hold onto, something to share, when almost everything else was gone.

It sounds corny, like I should be telling it in James Earl Jones' voice, but I'm not sure what my father and I would have done with all that time we spent on sports, and especially baseball. He took me to Fenway for the first time at age 6 and my guess is we attended more than 100 games together over the next 46 years. I was there in section 7, row 23, seat 23 for Game 2 of the 1975 World Series, and we were sitting together in front of the TV 10 days later when Yaz popped up to Cesar Geronimo in center field to end Game 7. Our World Series tickets cost $12.50 each.

We went to our last game together two years ago, Father's Day 2014. We parked at the Dana-Farber and walked down because we just felt like stepping out of that building and into the sun, no strings or tubes or IV attached. The last-place Sox lost to Cleveland in 11 innings, but again: Didn't matter. It was baseball and it was Fenway. There weren't a lot of great days in his last year-and-a-half, but that was one of them.

As a kid competing against other kids, I used to play a little game in my own mind. I wasn't always the fastest or strongest kid on the team, but I was never jealous because I knew I had one advantage. I knew I had the best father. He never missed one of his kids' games. He never said he was too tired to play catch when he pulled in the driveway at the end of the day.

He was a mentor, a coach, an umpire, a cheerleader, a fan. He was the most important thing a parent can be: there. Always just there.

His father was an old-school Boston cop, Station 10 in Roxbury. He was a terrific guy, but worked nights and weekends and, well, life was just different then. One day my father showed up late to one of my basketball games. I was annoyed. I think I had hit a shot or something.

"Where were you?" I said, whining, when we got in the car after the game.

He put the car back in park and glared over at me.

"Do you know how many times my father saw me play sports when I was a kid?"

I said nothing.

"Never. Not once," he said, and we drove home in silence.

God, what a brat I was.

And what a great man he was.

We didn't have a lot of money growing up, or maybe dad just didn't want to spend it. We didn't have air conditioning. We never stepped foot on an airplane or ate out. But somehow we managed to make it to Fenway and Foxboro and the Garden a handful times each season. It was the highlight of my childhood, and I know I wouldn't be where I am without it. He passed down a passion for Boston sports that has served my family and me pretty well over the past 25 years. We even have air conditioning.

My father died seven months ago, Monday, Nov. 23, my parents' 58th wedding anniversary. It still hurts like yesterday. I sometimes wonder if it always will.

I know I'm not going to have a great Father's Day this year, but that's OK. I had something much more important for the last 54 years: I had a great father.

The best.