(This will appear in my column in the Monday, August 4, 2008 edition of the Business Mirror.)
Fathers & Sons II
by rick olivares
So much for rush hour. The stretch of road from Quezon City to Makati is jammed with cars on a humid Friday morning and no one is rushing anywhere. It’s a slow crawl and this early and nerves are already frayed. You can actually read the mouth of a driver in a nearby SUV; it’s actually expletive-laced.
Inside the cab I‘m riding in, the driver, let’s call him Nestor for now since he asked me not to divulge his real name, is cool as a cucumber. And to think that his air-conditioning unit is on the fritz causing me a little annoyance until I realized the scarcity of available cabs justified it. It was either I got in or I was going to be late.
Patience. For some other grasshoppers, it is more than a virtue. In Nestor’s case, it keeps you focused on his foe’s chin for an uppercut when the noise from a half-filled gym with toothless old men who yell for blood and self-professed small-time agents casually dressed in slippers who are calling in their bets.
Boxing teaches patience. Fortunately in some way, Nestor is not one of those former world champions who have hit the skids after wasting away their fortunes on drink, booze, women, and a song. He never got within an inch. Not even a whiff of stardom when he was a hand in one of the country’s most famous boxing stables. Back then he wasn’t even sure if he was a boxer or a hired helper. Before gym work, Nestor and all the other young guns would be asked to toil in the construction of a building owned by their boss. Maybe it was all part of the training he now postulated.
He grew up in Davao and while his friends gravitated towards basketball or billiards, he loved the smell of leather, the slap of glove on glove, and the muted grunts of shadow boxing. He even learned to love the taste of his own blood that turned him into a raging inferno.
Only he never got the breaks. He thinks for all the up and comers like Boom Boom and Bazooka, no one will come close to being a world-beater and the scourge of Mexican machismo like the man they call Pacman. He is unique.
Now his son, just into his teens, has been inspired to hit the gym and the punching bag. He hits pretty hard for a kid his age the father beams. The kid has won a couple of fights as well. He can box, the local cognoscenti like to say.
Nestor smiles for a few seconds before he steps on the brakes. He’s thinking of the one-in-a-million chance of his son hitting the big time. He thinks of the sharks who circle his son and other hopefuls who can smell blood and opportunity. That’s why he drums it into his son’s mind that he stands a bigger chance of making it if he’d hit he’d the schoolbooks more than the punching bag. Education is the great equalizer and as lethal as a mean 1-2 combination he intones to his son who he says listens well and follows even better.
Do your work and be a good person and good things will come your way he urges.
Patience. It’s a virtue.
The Man upstairs must love Nestor so much that his son isn’t like his mule-headed father in his youth. Schooling to his mind, was introducing foes to the canvas. Except he and the canvas became bosom buddies. Fortunately, his son now doesn’t need to get some sense knocked into him for him to go one-up on his pop.
Nestor smiles even if his passenger chafes at the never-ending metro traffic.
Several thousand miles away, another man waxed poetic too about home improvement. Only it’s the other way around. It was the son extolling a father’s virtues.
Former Kansas City Chiefs cornerback and Washington Redskins Assistant Coach Emmitt Thomas was being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio along with couple of Redskins legends like Art Monk and Darrell Green whose presence turned the normally boisterous proceedings wild and in rapturous Hog heaven.
Inductees to the Hall of Fame either have the owners of their clubs or teammates introduce them, but Thomas was one of the three new members who gave the honor to his son, Derek.
In a moving address by the younger Thomas who was most recently the head coach of Western Illinois University’s basketball program, there was not a dry eye left in the house.
“My dad provided my sister and me with a lot of great advice throughout the years. Like most kids, we didn’t always follow that advice. A piece of advice he once gave me was, ‘Never make athletes your heroes because they are human and they make mistakes too. I guess I didn’t listen to that advice very well. I’d like to introduce you to my hero, my mentor, and my father, Emmitt Thomas.”
Note: The linemen of those great Washington Redskins under Joe Gibbs were called “The Hogs” because of the way the wallowed in the dirt and mud as they protected their equally great QB Joe Theismann.
I also had a previous column titled Fathers and Sons that sort of delved on the same story.
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