Unnecessary Roughness
Indoctrinating my son into football fandom, for better or worse. Mostly worse, these days. Stupid Dolphins. Plus, my thoughts on the Oscars for some reason!
Earlier this month it was my youngest son’s 8th birthday. Both my wife and I wrote Instagram posts to mark the occasion, and both my wife and I noted The Hammer’s sunny personality and happy-go-lucky attitude.
I also mentioned his newfound love for and obsession with football.
There are a million ways to ruin your kids, and I am familiar with many of them. (Just ask my 13-year-old.) You can do too much for them, you can not do enough for them. You can discipline them too much, you can discipline them too little. You can feed them the wrong food, show them the wrong screens, show them too many screens, leave them alone too much, smother them, breastfeed them or formula feed them or “Cry It Out” or co-sleep. You can spank them, you can yell at them, you can spoil them or not give them siblings or give them siblings or raise them to be intolerant and misogynistic and Republican and so on and so forth.
You can even indoctrinate them into being a Miami Dolphins fan.
That’s what I’m doing, and after my son’s first real year of following football and watching games, he was welcomed into the fold with the most typical of Dolphins’ experiences: early promise, a late regular season collapse, and a quick playoff exit.
(There are plenty of fanbases that have suffered as much or more than the Dolphins have; as a fan since the early 80s, I’ve at least gotten to see them in a Super Bowl, unlike Lions fans and Browns fans and Jets fans (born after Joe Namath). And some might argue that the Bills’ Sisyphean struggles (which are especially fresh!), the Vikings’ fruitless seasons, and the Chargers’ frequent near-misses and consistent and heartbreaking choke-jobs are even more frustrating. But I think it’s safe to say that over the past 24 years—since Marino retired—myself and my fellow Fins fans are at least in the conversation for most tortured group. Hooray?)
The desire for parents to coax their kids into having the same interests is strong. I recently wrote about my ongoing curation of a rock ’n roll centric Spotify playlist for Detective Munch (my 13yo). This comes years after I managed to stoke an early appreciation for the Beatles via repeated viewings of the kid-friendly (and stoner-friendly) animated YELLOW SUBMARINE movie, as well as their endless collection of kid-friendly (and stoner-friendly) songs. My efforts have been particularly aggressive in the movie category, from STAR WARS and THE TERMINATOR to THE KARATE KID and CREED. (There’s a Spike Lee exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that may force me to show him DO THE RIGHT THING but I suspect he’s a little too young. But he loved INSIDE MAN… which is quite different!)
Some of these interests stick and even take on lives of their own, sometimes to the point that my kid’s interest overwhelms my own. It happened with Detective Munch and mythology (I encouraged his early interest because I love it too, but once he found Percy Jackson it really took off and now he mansplains details of the myths to me and I HATE IT), and now it’s happening with his little brother and football. After Detective Munch’s outright rejection of all sports, both physically and philosophically, I achieved victory with his little brother. He loves it!
He’s on board with the Dolphins, he enjoys watching games (he watched the entire Bills/Chiefs game with me, and aside from Miami’s early season Broncos blowout, it was the most exciting game he’s seen, which seems to have hooked him either further), and he loves playing—Madden, which we got him for Christmas; flag football; pickup games he’s recruited friends to at recess every day; and just plain catch with me. It’s a lot. Literally every time I get home from work or anywhere else, he immediately accosts me and demands I throw him the football 300 times in a row, and when I don’t, he’ll throw it to himself for much longer than you’d expect.
It’s honestly a little annoying. He’s relentless! But I made my bed.
As he gets older, maybe he’ll keep playing (if we let him!), and if he maintains is current level of interest, odds are he’ll keep watching. Unfortunately, watching the Dolphins is no picnic. And it worries me a little. I can’t say that it’s the travails of my favorite sports franchise that have made me cynical and pessimistic and bleakly hilarious, but it definitely didn’t help! (I also grew up a Red Sox fan, and thankfully they eventually redeemed and unburdened themselves, myself, and the entire New England area, but not before despair—and the expectation of it—had found a home inside me.)
I don’t want that for my son, which doesn’t mean I’ll steer him away from Miami, but I will do my best to focus on the fun and hopeful parts of being a fan, which if the past 25ish years are any indication, may be difficult more often than not. But at least the hope part will be easy, because that’s about all I have. Plus Taylor Swift, whom he’s already been exposed to, at least aurally, and her presence can’t hurt—unless you’re an idiotic piece of shit.
Plus, if worse comes to worst, he can pivot to the far more successful 49ers, the team Mom and Buried favors, mostly because she had a crush on Steve Young.
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Pop Culture Stuff
So the Oscar nominations came out.
I don’t care about the Oscars. I don’t think they speak to what are actually the best movies and they often, if not usually, get it wrong. The instances are too numerous to count but CRASH winning? GOODFELLAS losing? FORREST GUMP beating PULP FICTION. That’s a bold statement, at the very least. But whatever. It’s not like when something wins they erase all the other nominees or movies from that year and we can never see them again, so ultimately they matter little to anyone but the people involved.
As for snubs, yes, it’s ironic that a movie that targets the patriarchy seemed to fall victim to it with Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie getting passed over, but just as with near misses Oscar snubs are part of the tradition. I really like BARBIE (though nowhere near as much as my wife and kids), but I’m sure both women are fairly content with what they accomplished; I’m not worried about them.
I do usually try to see as many of the nominated movies as possible, and so far I’ve seen five: OPPENHEIMER, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, POOR THINGS, BARBIE, and THE HOLDOVERS. That’s probably the order I’d put them in, when it comes to my own personal opinion, although I might swap KofTM and POOR THINGS, which is hilarious and strange and a little too long (which is a funny thing to say when comparing it to a three-and-a-half-hour movie).
I plan to rent ANATOMY OF A FALL, PAST LIVES, and AMERICAN FICTION, which I’m excited about, and I hope to watch ZONE OF INTEREST probably for the only time, given the subject matter. And so far I’ve skipped MAESTRO.
I’m sure I’ll let you know my thoughts on some of those in the coming weeks, but I expect it to and will be satisfied when OPPENHEIMER wins.
BUY MY BOOK, in which I mention non-Oscar winners like THE KARATE KID and SHREK. Stupid kids.
Your tweet about pausing to get water and find toys is spot on.