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Football fantasy? Dad tries, and fails, to make his daughter a fan

For weeks now I’ve been trying to get my toddler to watch football games with me. And, I’m sad -- but not surprised-- to say, it’s not really working.Here’s a mostly faithful recreation of what happened in our living room a few Sundays ago:“Hey NJ, come over here and sit down with Daddy. I want you to see something.”(NJ pads over cheerfully, climbs onto the sofa, plops down.)“What’
Bob Trott and daughter NJ
Bob Trott and daughter NJBob Trott / Today

For weeks now I’ve been trying to get my toddler to watch football games with me. And, I’m sad -- but not surprised-- to say, it’s not really working.

Here’s a mostly faithful recreation of what happened in our living room a few Sundays ago:

Bob Trott and daughter NJ
Bob Trott and daughter NJBob Trott / Today

“Hey NJ, come over here and sit down with Daddy. I want you to see something.”

(NJ pads over cheerfully, climbs onto the sofa, plops down.)

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to the TV.

“Baseball!”

“Close! Football. This is a football game.”

“Football!”

“That man has a football and he’s … hey, wait! Where are you going?”

(A smiling NJ hops off the sofa and toddles down the hall – I think to her room, where she and her mom had a stuffed animal tea party.)

Appreciation of football runs deep in my Texas family. I remember my grandmother, in her 80s and 90s, sitting on the edge of her sofa, hands balled into adorable little-old-lady fists, whispering “Get him! Get him!” and other words of encouragement while watching her beloved Dallas Cowboys. She talked about quarterback Roger Staubach and coaching great Tom Landry as if they were 1) gods among men (Granny was a great judge of character), and 2) her best friends.

And that’s just the NFL! There’s also college football, and this is the first time in a while that NJ hasn’t had some Texas Longhorns clothing that fits. She does have a stuffed Texas Longhorn, a stuffed Texas Longhorn teddy bear (I make sure my fellow Horns get preferential treatment at NJ’s tea parties), and a big, stuffed “Hook ‘em Horns” hand.

I’m not unreasonable. I don’t expect NJ to be a fanatic, like the play-diagramming coach’s daughter in “Remember the Titans.” And I’m not trying to turn her into a boy or compensating for not having a son --- c’mon, I already told you that nothing makes me happier than being the father of a daughter.

I successfully turned my wife onto football, if for a brief while. That brief while came when she was working with some Buffalo Bills fans and, on my thumbs-up, entered into some friendly wagers on a Bills-Cowboys Super Bowl. (She cleaned up.) But nowadays, when she asks why I’m bothering to watch Podunk State play the University of Nowhere, my standard “It’s football and it’s on TV” reply doesn’t carry the same roguish charm it used to. And she only cares about a football game if it has the potential to affect my mood.

My wife doesn’t care that I’m trying to recruit NJ to football. (Not yet, anyway – I haven’t done anything drastic.) She knows it’s one of my big interests and it’s only natural to share it – it’s the same reason I try to expose  NJ to music I like, even though probably nothing will be more useless to a teenager in 2024 than knowing all the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

Of course, with music the kid can dance and sing. But football? It’s not really a useful sport for dads and girls to share – like, say, tennis or golf, which we could actually play together one day. She won’t ever play football (sorry, NJ, no Lingerie Football League for you).

I’ve read and heard plenty about historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s relationship with her father and their shared love/obsession with the Brooklyn Dodgers, or the father-daughter sportswriter duo of Dan and Sally Jenkins. (Those father-daughter relationships, and others, are discussed in “Fathers & Daughters & Sports,” a book I haven’t read but which is now atop my Christmas wish list).  

In the end I suppose it’s just me sharing something I love with someone I love. Perhaps she’s too young for this to be practical – Goodwin writes in a memoir that her father taught her how to keep score with Dodgers’ games when she was 6. So there’s plenty of time – and yes, I’ve got baseball in mind for NJ, too, although my teams (Houston Astros, Seattle Mariners) haven’t exactly been setting the baseball world on its collective ear lately. Why force the kid to watch her dad in misery?

But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s too soon to start the indoctrination. Anything I can do now to prevent her from walking through the door one day wearing an Oklahoma Sooners sweatshirt because she likes the colors – or, heaven forbid, dating a Pittsburgh Steelers fan – can only help.

Bob Trott blogs about his adventures in parenting at Dad Solo.

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