Like Father Like Son

This past Saturday, just before the 19th century baseball research conference opened at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, a man approached me and asked if I was the one from Verona, New Jersey. When I said, yes, he told me that while he now lives in New Hampshire, he used to live in Bloomfield and proceeded to ask me some questions about Verona. I then tried to confirm that he had lived in Bloomfield and he said yes, "I grew up there, I went to Bloomfield High School."

That led me to ask what Junior High School he went to, thinking for sure he would say South Junior High, but to my surprise, he said North. My response was to say, my father was a teacher at North for a hundred years. He said, "Not Hank Zinn?" - I said, "Absolutely." The man then told me that he had played basketball for my father and how my father didn't like any fancy play, just the basics.

Later in the day, he was kind enough to buy a copy of Paul and my book and he said he remembered something about playing for my father. Apparently the team only lost two games that season both to South, the other Junior High in Bloomfield. The first lost had been a close two point defeat at home, but then in the rematch at South, North had played poorly and lost by 20 points. To make matters worse on the bus ride back to North (which probably took all of 15 minutes) the players started to laugh and sing and joke around. According to this gentleman that provoked an outburst from my father like nothing any of them saw before and they won all their remaining games just to be sure that they never saw it again.

I didn't tell him that when I heard him mention the laughing and singing after a loss, I could feel myself starting to get mad at them as well. I never played or managed for my father, but all of the coaches I ever worked with through High School and College were the same way. To behave that way after a loss was worse than the defeat itself, it meant a lack of respect for the game and ultimately a lack of respect for oneself. It still annoys me to no end when I see athletes, especially at the college or high school level behave like that. To quote an old Charlie Brown cartoon, "Winning isn't everything, but losing isn't anything." The point is that to act as if a loss doesn't matter is to act as if what you are doing isn't important and, if so, why are you doing it.
To me the long term value of participating in sports is how it carries over into how we live our lives - inappropriate behavior in sports makes it less likely we will learn the things we need to learn.

While I wasn't surprised by how my father reacted in that situation, it wasn't something we ever discussed. He would never have told us at home about such an incident, but that aside, it's something I never remember us discussing. So after all these years it is interesting to know that we shared those values. Upper left on this post is a picture of the 1938 High Bridge soccer team, my father is the one in the bow tie (always a natty dresser!). That in itself is an interesting story, he went to High Bridge having never played or coached soccer, yet in his first season his team won the county championship, a feat they repeated the next year. While not in any way the same thing, I had a lot of success coaching Paul's recreation league soccer teams, again a sport I never played. Maybe some things are the genes after all!