Bob

Dolgan

Violinists are OK, too

I don't know how this idea of parents pushing their sons into athletics began.

In my neighborhood, it was just the opposite. The attitude of most fathers there went something like this:

"That's all you want to do is play football. Damnit, don't you ever do any work? Go help your mother clean the basement.”

or, "What? Are you playing baseball again. How often do you think I'm going to buy you a new pair of shoes!"

Along those same lines, there was an incident in the life of Lou Gehrig, the baseball immortal. When he first signed to play ball his mother was furious.

"A grown man playing ball," she cried. "I want you to be engineer."

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The attitudes seemed to change about 30 years ago, about the same time people began to become more affluent and the suburbs to blossom.

Suddenly you saw parents organizing Little Leagues, encouraging their children to compete, watching every game they played from the Pee Wee leagues through high school. It became an important status symbol if your kid was a star high school athlete.

The attitude was exemplified in the words of a father of four daughters who once said to me, "If I ever had a son and he didn't play high school sports, I'd knock his ears off."

Naturally it is nice if your son is a good player. But some parents go overboard, trying to achieve something through their offspring that they have not been able to achieve on their own.

When the obsessions become unhealthy, all sorts of abuses take place. Coaches scream at children who are not ready to take pressure. Children give up the fun of games rather than disappoint their anxious fathers. Aggressive mothers phone coaches, demanding they put their little darlings in the starting lineup.

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One reason so many parents become preoccupied with making sports godlings out of their sons, I suppose, is the cliche that boys who don't take part in athletics are sissies.

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This is nonsense, of course. It takes just as much drive and gumption to make good grades or to learn to play the violin as it takes to be an athlete.

We've all known dozens of boys who never showed much interest in sports who turned out to be just as masculine as their ballplaying brothers.

On the other hand, there have been star athletes who have turned the other way. Dave Kopay, for example, was a hard-hitting professional football player who happened to be a homosexual.

A case could be made that boys who are not in sports every waking minute are at an advantage: While their jumping, sliding, running colleagues are perfecting their physical skills, they have time to work on the social and intellectual qualities.

In the long run, brains usually mean more than muscle.

A friend who used to be a high school star and is now a mailman said to me: "It's a funny thing. All these kids who were nothing when I was a boy are all big shots now. We didn't want them around because they were no good in sports. Now they all seem to be presidents of their own companies. Now I'm delivering mail to them. It makes me feel funny."

As far as I'm concerned, I would naturally like to see my son take part in sports, but only if he desired it. If you're really inclined that way, sports offer some of life's great pleasures. But other people hear different drummers.

I'd just as soon see my son be a pianist or a straight A student. But even if he wasn't that, I wouldn't care. More than anything else, I'd like to see him be happy, doing whatever he wants.