He had a perfect season. How cool is that?

Last night after saying goodnight I love you to my girls I did some school work, some work work and tried to read myself to sleep with Joel Osteen and Max Brand, but sometime after midnight I found myself making a dumbdumbdaddyo post. I had one last photocopied picture from the sticky note batch and thought I would post it and think of something to write later. The picture was of my dad and his senior class teammates it looked like a football picture from a game program or yearbook. As I looked at their faces, a memory of my dad came to me, crystal clear, out of nowhere.

We were driving the 10 hours from Maryland to Oxford for my freshman year at Miami. He said, “I know how hard this thing you’re about to do is going to be. I really want you to know that it will be OK if you quit, I will always love you, no matter what. I only want you to be happy.”  It shocked me. I’d never heard him say anything like it. He went on to say, “But if you stick it out, if you keep going even when it hurts, if you keep going when others start quitting you’ll experience something really special. When school starts everyone else will be alone and you will already have a team full of friends. If you make it to graduation you’ll be standing there with a handful of brothers who you will love and respect.”  Many times I wanted to quit and many good friends walked away, but in the end he was right.

As I looked at this picture of my dad’s band of brothers I was struck at how familiar I was with their names. Coach Tatum, Ed Modzelewski, Chick Fry and Bob Ward, especially, so I typed in Bob Ward into Bing and was treated to the best surprise since I started this blog.

Wikipedia showed me one of the best pictures of my dad I’ve ever seen. A picture of the locker room celebration after the Sugar Bowl, something about how happy he looked struck me deeply.  I lay there and cried. It’s not that I never saw him happy, but never like that. I realized that after losing a child in a horrific way, after losing your job, after losing your life savings and your homes, after losing your health and mind and your foot it’s hard to be really really happy. So this is why I blog to remember my father happy and well and to honor his bravery and strength in the end.

Wikipedia described his perfect season. Undefeated season and beating #1 in the Sugar Bowl in his last game ever and named an anchor of one of the best defenses in college history and I thought by his senior year he didn’t even play. How, as his son, could I have not known and appreciated what he had accomplished and what he had meant to the team. I guess he thought it would be a lot to live up to. I guess he didn’t want his success to overshadow his son’s. I guess in the end he just wanted me to be happy.

He had a perfect season. How cool is that?

That reminds me of the thing he said most about his years at Maryland. He would say, "By far the best thing I ever did at the University of Maryland was marry your mother!"