Even Dads Cry Once in a While

I cried in public Friday night. On two separate instances, actually. Now it wasn't the breakdown, sobbing, 'hand be a box of tissues' kind of crying. More like the lump in your throat, can't talk, crocodile tears in the corners of your eyes. A Man-cry.

My middle daughter is a senior in high school and she plays on the her school's basketball team that currently is 22-0 and ranked number 1 in the state in its classification. My daughter is not a star, but she's gotten to play a fair amount this year. She's played since second grade, and we're all hoping that her senior season concludes with a handful of gold medals for the three championships they will compete for during the next month and a half.

I'm not too concerned with the winning stuff. The kids will take care of that. I will cheer my brains out for these girls over the next six weeks, but if they earn silver medals instead of gold, it's still been a pretty awesome season in my book.

I wondered Saturday morning why I got all choked up. After all, I've been through this with my oldest daughter already, and I'll most likely go through it again with my youngest four years from now.

The Athletic Association organizes the night's festivities. Before the game, each player is introduced and is escorted to center court by her parents. They recite the clubs and organizations the girls participate in outside of athletics, and they announce the college to which they've committed. They then present them with flowers and balloons. Finally the game begins, and the coach usually starts all of his seniors; except this year there were seven, so two started a previous game and the remaining five Friday night.

After the game there is a get-together for the players, coaches, families and friends. The coach says a few words about his seniors, then underclassmen each select a senior to talk about, and they take turns giving a brief presentation about why that senior is special to them. The final moment is a video of all the seniors, and this year it was put together by one of the seniors instead of an adult. It was pretty cool.

I think I got choked up during the game because I realized how much respect and admiration I've acquired for my daughter these past few months. She worked really hard for this season because, as a senior, she wanted to be a key contributor, and, most importantly, she wanted to help the team win.

She was in the gym, working out three and four days a week from July to the middle of November when  preseason practice began. That came after a full spring of AAU practices and games, and a full schedule of summer league games. I had her in the driveway three nights a week on a shooting program that I developed specifically for her, and we were shooting between 900-1,100 shots a week.

She was ready to go! Unfortunately, her coach undervalues and underestimates her skills, her intelligence, and most important, her desire to help the team win. She and I know that she's not the best player on the team, and we would never make that argument. But we also know that she's a much better player, a more complete player, than a couple of girls who play in front of her. Which means that the team is missing out on the positive contributions she could be making to it.

So, I think when I see my daughter sitting on the bench and cheering her heart out for the girls who play in front of her; when I hear her talk about the team and never utter a negative word about the players who get some of the playing time she knows she worked hard to earn; and when I hear from others how she's been a mentor and a positive role model for the younger players in the program, I can't help but admire the young lady who cries herself to sleep after games in the bedroom next to mine because it hurts her to be devalued and dismissed.

Of course, the second time I got a lumpy throat was during the video presentation. I have a special bond with many of the players on this team because I coached most of them in youth sports for a number of years and have gotten to know them better than some adults have an opportunity to. Seeing the video of pictures from years gone by, and now seeing the tremendous young ladies they've turned in to, it was hard not to grab a napkin and dab my eyes. Luckily the lights were out.

I guess, looking honestly at the emotions of it all, I think what it really boiled down to is this. There are days that I go to bed wondering if I was a good Dad that particular day. Sometimes I wish I could take back things I said or did, or wish I would've said something but didn't.

But every once in a while, I'm lucky enough to get a little reminder that, maybe, I don't always mess up.

P.S. Don't forget to tell your daughter that you love her.

Lindsay Lohan....Grace period is Over

For a long time I had a soft spot in my heart for Lindsay Lohan for one reason. When my daughters were younger, she was the star of the remake of The Parent Trap, along with Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson. That was in 1998. My youngest was four. All three daughters loved the movie and my youngest was a modest Lindsay Lohan fan for a number of years.

That was until my daughter began to understand that as Lohan got older, her behavior continually got worse. It's amazing to me that my daughter, who's about half Lohan's age, has a better understanding of what good behavior should be than does the former star who's going on 25.

For a while I gave Lohan the benefit of the doubt for a variety of reasons. Her mother started her on a modeling career when she was three years old. Three! By the time she starred in The Parent Trap at age 10, she'd already shot more than 100 television commercials. I don't know how you feel about that, but I think it's pure lunacy to put your child into that environment at three years old, and continue the activity at such a rigorous pace during a time in the child's life when she should be playing with Barbie dolls, selling Girl Scout cookies and playing beehive soccer. So strike one against the mother.

The second reason I gave Lohan a pass was the bad behavior of her parents. Her father, Michael, was a Wall Street guy, and her mother, Donata, is a former singer and dancer who just happened to form her own movie production company about the same time her daughter was rising in the industry. Coincidence? Her parents separated when she was three years old, got back together, separated again, then finally divorced several years ago. The relationship was allegedly pretty turbulent and it was rumored that Lindsay often had to get in the middle of her parents arguments.

Her father has had run-ins with the law on several occasions, and in 2009 he released recordings of private phone calls to the media, phone calls between he and his daughter. Add to that what I consider the mother's exploitation of her daughter, beginning at age 3, and I can only conclude that Lindsay didn't have what I'd consider a normal childhood. Strike two against Dad, and the parents as a team.

But here's the reason I put Lohan on the list of Females we Don't Want Our Daughters to be Like. Despite the rocky relationship, brushes with the law, and sometimes offensive behavior by Lindsay's parents, and despite the fact, I believe, she was deprived of a normal childhood, there comes a time when you reach a certain age and you have to put those things behind you and act like an adult.

Lohan has failed to do that. Her transgressions began in the middle 2000s starting with all-night partying that caused her to be late for acting jobs in movies, or caused her to miss work all together. Then she began accumulating DUI arrests like the old ladies at Sunday Bingo collect good luck charms. She's made several visits to drug rehab, and and she's done a couple of short jail sentences. The jail time could've been avoided. She's worn the orange jumpsuit because she's stupid. The Hollywood media calls it 'defiant.' If the judge tells you that as part of your sentence you are required to submit to weekly drug tests, and you then fail one of those drug tests, that to me is stupid.

If the judge tells you what the conditions of your parole are, and you then violate those terms, especially after people have put up money to bail you out, that is stupid. No, this isn't Forrest Gump-stupid. This is Flounder-stupid (Animal House, remember, "zero, point, zero, zero. Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son.").

Of course, in an attempt to endear herself to the judge who mandated her recent three-month rehabilitation stint (in which she was released in early January) Lohan decided to steal a $2,500 necklace from a posh jewelry shop near her home. Of course, Lohan says she borrowed it. The owner says that is not correct and that the store has a very specific procedure to follow and paperwork to fill out if a celebrity wants to take a piece of jewelry out on loan. That procedure was not followed, and apparently the police have store video showing Lohan wearing the necklace in the store, but never paying for it. How it ended up at her home is a mystery. Or so she'd like us to believe.

Probably the best way for Lohan to get back into everyone's good graces would be for her to behave more like the characters she played in movies like The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday and Herbie: Fully Loaded instead of her more famous turn as Cady Heron in Mean Girls.

P.S. Don't forget to tell your daughter that you love her.