No

“Look alive!”

DAD, EVERY TIME I WALKED ONTO A FIELD/COURT TO PLAY A
SPORT I WASN’T INTERESTED IN AS A CHILD.

Somewhere around 2010, the idea of saying yes to everything became a popular mantra. Agreeing to anything that is offered to you in a literal sense was encouraged, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading Amelia Bedelia and watching Kathy Hilton on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, it’s that not everything is meant to be taken literally. If someone asks you to draw the curtains, you don’t need a sketch pad, and if someone asks you to do something you’re not into, you don’t need to say yes, despite what self-help books and improv teachers tell you. As someone who has spent thousands of dollars and the entirety of his twenties taking improv classes, I can confidently say that the rules of improvisation are not always to be taken as fact or practiced in your everyday life.

Sure, getting out of your comfort zone can be a good thing. I never loved seafood as a kid, but eventually, as an adult, I tried a piece of sushi and I LIKED IT. If I hadn’t gotten outside of my comfort zone, I never would’ve discovered that my taste buds were turned on by a California roll (to be honest, my love of sushi is limited to basically just a California roll, so perhaps I should’ve used a better example here). The point is, it can be a good thing, but not always. Sometimes you need to say no, whether for your own sanity or for the sake of your kids’ well-being.

A lot of the yes or no decisions are made for you as a child. Most of my peers played soccer when I was growing up, and I was certainly no exception thanks to my parents’ decision-making. Little league sports are a rite of passage in northeast Ohio, and the older you get, the more you start to pick and choose what extracurriculars you’re into and discover what you’re good at. But those early days were about playing it all and my parents saying yes.

My dad wasn’t an absent father, but he worked. A lot. Usually he was dragging me and my brothers along to help out at the factory where he spent his days, teaching us wonderful life lessons about work ethic and the value of a dollar. School taught us money basics via selling magazine subscriptions and earning currency in the form of colorful pompom creatures called “weepuls,” but everything else we needed to learn at home. Mom was employed too, but she was part-time and otherwise home making sure the house was in order and food was on the table. Because of all this, Dad would sometimes miss dinners or school plays or sports games. I was recently watching Jingle All the Way, an unhinged Christmas film that was seemingly written for Tim Allen or Martin Lawrence but was instead led by Arnold Schwarzenegger as Howard, a hardworking father who occasionally misses his son’s activities, and he’s looked at as a monster by the other characters for doing so. The older I get, the more I appreciate how hard my dad busted his ass and how he and Howard didn’t deserve the holiday pressure that was placed on them by society, the kid from Star Wars, and Rita Wilson. There’s this narrative that a working family man (or woman) is bad, but I see them as doing what’s necessary to build a better life for their kids, and although my dad might’ve missed an event or two, he did his best and showed us how hard you have to hustle to get ahead in life. His incredible work ethic taught me that any dream I had was possible, but that I would have to make sacrifices to achieve it, and I’m forever grateful.

Mom, on the other hand, wasn’t always thrilled with his hours, and she would encourage him to take time off when he could to coach our little league teams or help out in our other extracurriculars. This culminated in him coaching my soccer team in the fifth grade, a sport he didn’t even know the rules to and has never once played himself.

Back in the ’90s, kids’ sports were a bit different than I imagine they are now. I can vividly remember baseball games where the dads would drink Miller Lite while they watched, and then they would get into verbal and physical fights with the young volunteer referees/umpires. It wasn’t unusual for a dad nicknamed Big Billy to get in the face of a local umpire at a baseball game for twelve-year-olds. Big Billy would verbally abuse a sixteen-year-old for miscounting the outs, and most of the other neighborhood dads were engaging in similar activities. I’ve heard grown men call teenage umps “rat bastards” through a cloud of beer breath at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and no one on the sidelines batted an eyelash. It was as if the behavior was as commonplace as handing out Capri Suns after the game. There were also plenty of dads smoking cigarettes while coaching first base. IT WAS THE ERA.

Anyway, Dad decided one year to take on my soccer team, and it was a hot mess. We didn’t win a single game, and every kid left that season as a worse player. Somehow everyone regressed in talent. The pinnacle of the year was when he thought it would be a good idea to attempt a “flying V” like they did in the Mighty Ducks movies. I was OBSESSED with the Mighty Ducks movies, and my pops knew that. If you’re not familiar, it’s a Disney movie trilogy about a hockey team who sucks but then gets good when Coach Gordon Bombay takes over. It’s Gordon’s punishment for drunk driving, which…what the F was that about? Anyway, he teaches the kids a play called the flying V, where the offense skates in a V shape, passing the hockey puck around to each other on the ice before scoring. It worked in the film because of movie magic, but I think even filmmakers assumed that everyone would see it as a haphazard play that wouldn’t be successful in real life, and never once did they assume anyone would try to do this play AT A KID’S SOCCER GAME.

We spent a whole practice trying to do it, never once perfecting it or even coming close to doing it in an acceptable way. Even so, when game day came along and our team was down by four, Dad huddled everyone during a time out and gave us a rousing speech that would leave Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday shook.

“The biggest battle of our professional lives comes down to today. We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. We can stay here and lose, or we can fight our way out of the hell. I think back on my youth—” he began.

“Dad, this isn’t halftime, they’re going to start playing without us,” I interrupted.

“Let’s do the flying V! Now let’s caw!” he instructed.

What the fuck’s a caw? I thought.

“You mean a quack?” I asked.

“Yeah, whatever the hell they did in that movie, I never watched it,” Dad replied before our team began to let out a few stray quacks.

The referee blew his whistle, and with control of the ball, five prepubescent boys with zero soccer talent got into a V shape, only to quickly lose authority of it. We went from what could only be described as a cursive F shape to the opposing team scoring on us yet again. We lost the game by seven.

Our team never attempted any fancy moves again, and Dad never offered his services to the sport of soccer. He has many, many skills, but that was not one of them. He said yes when he wasn’t qualified and also probably didn’t even want to do it. While self-help books may say otherwise, I’m here to encourage you all to occasionally come from a place of no.