As a red-blooded American teen, Amber Fleeman should have decided by now that dear ol’ dad is obsolete, about as relevant as the rotary phone.
She’s 15 after all, and isn’t that about the age when parents are to be kept at a safe distance — if not in a locked and padded facility?
But thanks to a shared interest in auto racing, Amber still happily tags along with dad, Russell. They are together all the time, either out in their Dacula garage fine-tuning their cars or at some Georgia track seeing just how fast those loud machines might go.
“People see the connection between us and seem to admire that,” Amber said.
“There are kids who don’t like hanging around their dads. That’s not me. I love being around him.”
Turns out that oil and grease are also bonding agents.
Moms are huge in sports. They get an awful lot of pub — think of every athlete who ever looked into a camera and mouthed, “Hi mom.”
Today, Father’s Day, is for considering the Y chromosome’s contribution.
Sometimes when a father struggles to build a bridge between himself and his child, a sport can span the gap.
One never knows how a simple, silly little sport might create a life-shaping, memory-making, picture-taking connection.
What follows are but a few examples from our pocket of the world.
Russell and Amber Fleeman: Racing tough for girls
As a very little girl, Amber Fleeman would hear the same thing from her mom, Tammy, whenever she walked out the door.
“Don’t get dirty.”
“She always came back dirty,” laughed Russell.
You hang around cars, you get dirty. And Russell raced these big, roaring late model stock cars that fascinated his only child.
By 8 years old, Amber was racing go-carts. As a teen, she moved up to the slightly bigger bandolero class. Throughout the process, her father warned her how difficult the sport could be, how consuming, how it would be especially difficult for a girl to gain acceptance on the track. And when she crashed so hard a couple of years back that fire spit out of her broken car, Russell wondered if he needed to pull the plug on this endeavor or if the incident might spook her from the sport. The same night, though, Amber was asking what they had to do to fix it, and dad figured she had what it took to race on.
“I love working on a race car. I can’t do everything, but I’m trying to learn,” Amber said. “I ask dad a lot of questions. And he loves helping me.”
You could find the Fleemans last week at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Amber running in the weekly Thursday Thunder program. They plan a busy summer, a perfect summer, as Amber figures it, of racing at other smaller tracks around Georgia and South Carolina before she returns to Archer High School.
Amber was a little delayed getting to the track Thursday. Seems the kid who has been driving for eight years was finishing up a driver’s education course in preparation for getting her license.
Oh so soon, she will be taking that lead foot out for real. Around Atlanta.
Insert one father’s shudder here.
Bill and Bill Curry: Quitting not an option with Big Bill
Bill Curry is one of football’s leading statesmen, having represented the game as a player (chiefly Georgia Tech, the Packers, the Colts), a coach (Tech, Alabama, Kentucky) and a broadcaster. Now, at the age of 68, he finds himself building a program from the asphalt up at Georgia State.
If he wasn’t Big Bill Curry’s son, none of that happens.
At age 12, Curry was convinced by the school’s coach at the time to enter the football feeder program for old College Park High. Big Bill, a championship weight lifter, didn’t care one way or another if his son went out for football. But he did have one unbendable rule: Once you were in, you were all in.
“I wanted so desperately to cash it in because [football practice] was so uncomfortable. I hated it,” Curry said. Thus a lifelong career in football would have died before it ever germinated.
“But I couldn’t quit because he lived at our house,” Curry said, remembering Big Bill.
Big Bill had a stern side from his background as a weight lifter and former hand-to-hand combat instructor. And he slowly came to develop a compassionate side as he became a more spiritual man, Curry said. The two could share both the hardships of football and the pleasures of a good book.
Big Bill died in 2007, not before leaving behind one more example of stubbornness.
He was in death’s waiting room, in hospice care with congestive heart failure.
As he shifted about in his bed in great discomfort one day, Curry reminded him that there were drugs available to ease his pain.
But Big Bill kept resisting medication.
Said the man whose days were so obviously numbered: “I don’t want to get addicted.”
Skip and Chip Caray: Friends first, then father and son
Not every family resembles the Cleavers.
The Carays had a long line of dysfunction. Harry, the Hall of Fame baseball broadcaster, divorced Skip’s mother. And Skip, the Braves longtime broadcaster, divorced Chip’s mom.
Skip was out of the family home in Chamblee by 1970, when Chip was just 5.
Now, Chip, who took up the family business, a Braves broadcaster himself, looks back and almost considers himself lucky in comparison to some children of a broken home.
At least he had baseball.
“I got to see or hear my dad and grandfather every night for two hours. They weren’t talking directly to me, but in a way they kind of were,” he said. “I lived my life through what the Braves [Skip’s team] were doing or the Cubs [Harry’s team] were doing. It sounds weird, but it worked for us.”
In the summers, Chip, who had moved to St. Louis with his mother, would spend a few weeks in Atlanta with his dad, much of that time at the ballpark. The game filled in some of the gaps.
“If you shared his interests, you were a lifelong buddy. Again it sounds strange, but we were friends before we were father-son close.”
The father-son relationship would bloom when Chip left a job in Chicago with his grandfather’s team to move south and do games with his father’s team, the Braves, in 2005. Finally, he had more of the day-to-day contact with his dad, and he savored that until Skip’s death in 2008.
When Chip decided to pursue broadcasting, his father sounded numerous serious warnings. Skip knew all the challenges of trying to follow a famous father in the booth, both personal and professional.
“Professionally, the biggest piece of advice he gave me was to be myself,” Chip said. “If I tried to be like [Harry or Skip], it would be career suicide. And I try to remember that every day.”
Chip imparts his personality on another broadcast today.
On his way to the mike on Father’s Day, he’ll pass, as he does every game, a portrait of his father. “It’s hard walking in that booth and seeing that picture every day. It’s a reminder that he’s not here,” Chip said. “I’m incredibly grateful for the legacy that he has given me.”
Roi and Angel McCoughtry: Talking through sports
It wasn’t until Dream star Angel McCoughtry was 17 that her father Roi really caught on to his daughter’s potential.
She had been after him incessantly to let her play with a men’s church league basketball team he coached. He kept saying no. Finally, Roi relented.
“She got out there and killed us. It opened my eyes,” he said.
Angel became Big East Player of the Year at Louisville and a first overall pick, by the Dream, in the 2009 WNBA draft. Roi and Sharon McCoughtry became the ever-present parents of a big-time player in the making.
Even now, they are in the process of moving from Baltimore to Atlanta, in large part to be closer to the first of their three daughters.
Maybe a father and daughter don’t open up to each other about everything.
“But sports was the instrument we both used to communicate. We’d get on basketball and could talk for hours,” Roi said.
It was through basketball that Angel found out the old man could be pretty sharp.
“He always gives the best advice,” she said.
So, when was the last time she, a full-grown woman, went to dad for advice?
Just last week, she said. Frustrated about a lingering knee injury, she told her dad she couldn’t move the way she wanted, wasn’t playing the way she knew she could.
“He just told me to go out and have fun and be free with my game. Just do the best you can do, he said, and everything will be all right.”
Wednesday she led the Dream to their first victory of the season with 18 points.
Fredi and Fredi Gonzalez: Don’t disappoint ‘pops’
Usually Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez will make the call to Miami after his game, on his way home from the ballpark.
He’ll dial up dad and do what they have done for the better part of 40 years: talk baseball.
“He’ll watch the game and stay up and wait up for me to call. And always, he’ll say something about the game.”
Fredi Gonzalez is 47. He has been a major league manager for nearly five seasons, on two different teams (Florida and the Braves). And, still, getting his father’s stamp of approval is important. “Oh yeah, absolutely,” he said. “You never want to disappoint your pops even if you’re pretty successful. I think we all feel that way.”
Fredi and Caridad Gonzalez came to Miami on a Freedom Flight from Cuba in 1966. Their first-born child, also named Fredi, was almost 3 years old.
The elder Gonzalez filled his son with tales of the great Cuban players of his youth. Gonzalez’s father had to work hard to make a place in his new country, driving trucks, pumping gas, and eventually landing a good job with a meat distribution company. He always made time to play a little catch with his son.
Just as he was always preaching honesty to his boy.
And modesty. “You let people talk about you, you never talk about yourself,” Gonzalez said, his father’s words echoing still. “My dad always said, ‘Don’t be one of those self-promoters, one of those guys who say, I did this and I did that. ... Pal, you didn’t do squat. You had good players.’”
Those lessons served him well, positioning him to be a perfect, natural successor to Bobby Cox in the eyes of Braves management.
At 72, Gonzalez’s father is still working at the meat processing company. There is no substitute for hard work in his world.
No matter how early he has to go in to work, he still waits up at night for his son to call.
