How an immigrant intellectual & sportswriter son found each other: a Father’s Day tale
The notion of Father’s Day conjures certain idyllic images, Norman Rockwell sort of stuff. Perhaps because I’m a sportswriter, I envision images straight out of “Field of Dreams” and the power of “want to have a catch?”
Like the way it has been with Royals general manager Dayton Moore and his son, Robert.
But my father, Vartan, never owned a baseball glove, and I doubt he ever put one on. The only time I convinced him to throw around a football ended in my exasperation when he treated it like a soccer ball. He couldn’t swim, and I don’t believe he ever dribbled a basketball.
Beyond the day he ran alongside me when I got the training wheels off my bike and his enthusiasm for wrestling with his little boys, perhaps the most sporting activity we shared was chess — which I treasured but doesn’t fit everyone’s definition of sport, either.
As an immigrant from Iran consumed with education and its place in making the world better, there was no hint that sports later would become a sweet and meaningful part of our attachment.
And that’s something I think of now, on this first Father’s Day without him, in much the fond way I do his habit of pulling his sons close to have his arm around us any time he could.
The last few years, for instance, he started leaving phone critiques from New York after watching Chiefs games, from a simple “thrilling” assessment after Super Bowl LIV to “they need more fat guys” after the blowout by Tampa Bay in February.
For years, he routinely sent envelopes stocked with news clippings about sports events and issues, a loving gesture he customized for others including my brothers. Once, sitting near Kansas coach Bill Self on a plane flight as I opened one, I proudly told him what it was; I’ll always remember him telling me to treasure those.
Twenty-five years ago this summer, after I co-authored a book with Gary Barnett called “High Hopes,” he flew from Rhode Island with my mother, Clare, to St. Louis for a book signing. Then they took out to dinner what had to be 20 or so friends and made me feel like they were the proudest parents on Earth before one of my favorite trips: just my dad and I driving back to Rhode Island.
Over the years as his own jobs intersected with sports, it was fascinating to hear his perspective on such issues as Title IX while he was embroiled in a related controversy as president of Brown University.
Or learn what he was up against in hiring Charles Harris as the first Black athletic director in the Ivy League when he was provost at the University of Pennsylvania.
Then there were conversations about his encounters with Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, Darrell Royal, Gale Sayers and others … but we’ll get back to those.
While some of those sports associations were incidental to his remarkable life, much was part of an enormous gift he gave my younger brothers, Raffi and Dareh, and me over the years: The gift of loving us for who we became, just as our cherished mother did before she died in 2018.
This was no small thing for someone from such a different world than ours, with no way of grasping then why sports became so meaningful to me that they’d become my life’s work.
Not that he didn’t try. He took me to the Cotton Bowl and some Phillies games, invariably asking why there wasn’t a longstop to go with the shortstop. He worked almost every Saturday but was ecstatic when he made it to a high school game in which I scored a touchdown.
But between his general shunning of the sports realm and the formality embodied in his wearing a suit coat about all day every day; between the heavy Iranian accent he retained (while speaking his seventh language )and absence of home improvements skills — my mother liked to say having him help was “like two good men quitting” — he was entirely different than other fathers we knew or heard about.
That was confusing to an adolescent with an unusual name trying to fit in as an American boy, a boy who didn’t yet understand how proud he would become to also be Armenian, a boy who didn’t comprehend from what his father had come or the momentous places he was going.
That he was a hero to so many but no one more than us.
So we clashed at times.
Until I was about 17, that is, when I was asked to speak at a dinner honoring him around the time he became both a U.S. citizen and provost at Penn.
Because I was so ambivalent about how we related, I agonized over what to say as I sat in my bedroom listening to “Father And Son” by Cat Stevens. That led to an emotional conversation with my mother.
She consoled me by describing the harsh circumstances of his childhood and how he had essentially run away from home when he was 15 to end up at Stanford by way of Beirut. About how all that drove him but left him with a poor example as a father. And about how much he loved us … even if he was still learning how to do it in the context of our culture.
It sounds so simplistic now. But I immediately saw him in a different light. And that became a pivot point in our relationship as I was headed to Penn.
When I visited his office, he’d stop a meeting to see me. When I broke my ankle during a freshman football game, I took deep comfort in his long stay that night at the hospital.
As I was recovering from surgery in a foot-to-hip cast, he’d come to my dorm room to take my laundry home on the train — only to once have the plastic bag burst open.
Somewhere along the line, I had this goofy vision of the two of us appearing on a Sports Illustrated cover as “The Provost And The Pass Receiver.” (Ridiculous for many reasons, starting with the fact I was “not fast enough for my size and not big enough for my speed,” as coach Jerry Berndt pointed out.)
So I felt cheated a year later when Penn’s Board of Trustees betrayed him. Not so much by choosing someone else over him for the presidency but by denying him the honorable exit he had sought in that event by not first allowing him to remove his name from consideration.
What he considered a “calculated humiliation,” one that came with murmurs that he was “too ethnic” with his “thick accent” and “unruly hair,” made him feel “sad, stupid and dejected,” he wrote in his autobiography, “The Road To Home.”
I’ll never forget the anguish on his face at the meeting of the Board of Trustees at which the new president, Sheldon Hackney, was formally named and he resigned as provost.
In a fog that day, I was late to football practice, which, of course, you can’t do. When I got out to the field, our then-coach, Harry Gamble, pulled me aside. Instead of chastising me, though, he spoke about my father’s character and how life can be unfair but that better days were ahead.
His words were prophetic. That sorrowful time became a portal to another dimension for my father, to a magical world in which he would be the savior of the New York Public Library and become the president of Brown University and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It was incredible to follow his adventures and see what he meant to so many, including the last few years through the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.
As his sphere of influence and connectivity came to seem infinite, (and incongruous with the fact he was our father), I appreciated when any aspect of it converged with our lives. And I came to realize that in some ways those connections existed all along.
For instance, our interest in football began at the same time … just through different lenses.
When we moved from California to Texas in 1969, the Longhorns were about to win a national championship. I became obsessed with the game. Meanwhile, my father was questioning the expense of football during a faculty meeting.
That led to an invitation from Coach Royal to spend time with the team, he wrote in his autobiography, “to watch them exercise, train, eat tremendous portions of steak, to witness a strategy session, all that in order to persuade me that football was not just a sheer clash of bodies but that it also was a smart game, ‘a brainy game.’ ”
My father actually was impressed. And he developed enough of a relationship with Royal that the legendary coach once attended a faculty party at our house.
Before he arrived, 10-year-old me was strategically outside the house throwing a football with a friend hoping to be discovered. When he approached, he greeted me pleasantly but kept walking.
When my father was provost at Penn, just before my freshman year, he had the responsibility of hiring an athletic director in early 1979. Among the candidates was Sayers, the former Kansas and Chicago Bears star I’d known best for “Brian’s Song.” At the time, he was AD at Southern Illinois-Carbondale.
He considered Sayers “outstanding” but was infuriated by leaks from the search committee he felt intended to prevent Penn from hiring a Black AD. In his book, he said one “jock trustee” had gone as far as to say they should hold a dinner party to assess Sayers’ “social graces.”
My father was shocked and told the trustee his statement was racist. He dissolved the original search committee to form another that led to hiring Harris, then a 29-year-old assistant AD at the University of Michigan.
Then there was this: When he was helping revive the library, he seemed instantly at ease launched into an unfathomable place among a who’s who in New York society. That social scene seemed like bizarre, out-of-body stuff to my brothers and me.
To me, the juxtaposition was never more pronounced than when he was a guest on a radio show hosted by the obnoxious Cosell, best known for his 14 years on “Monday Night Football.”
With his typically rude edge, Cosell asked my father about being passed over at Penn. My father disarmed him with his response about the wonders of the library.
I’d replay a tape of the interview over and over at that part, in tears with laughter with my parents at the absurdity of these utterly unrelated forces being matched up like this.
Along the same “how can this be?” lines, there was Muhammad Ali’s unexpected visit to Carnegie Corporation in 2000.
My father’s staff had anticipated Ali’s wife, Lonnie, would be visiting alone to appeal for help building the Muhammad Ali Center. So the surprise appearance of the great boxer and social justice icon left colleagues gasping inside while trying to stay calm. But he couldn’t have been more gracious with them all.
Before he left, Ali told my father he was now on his advisory council — an assemblage so ceremonial in nature it was news to my father when I told him years later he still was listed along with the likes of the Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Bono, Bob Costas and Angelina Jolie.
Such was the improbable and inspiring life that my brothers and broader family have been processing these last few months.
In that span, I’d been thinking a term that defines him is “illuminator,” both as one who shines brightness and enlightens.
But the more I think about it, the more I understand him most of all to be a father figure: to his students and colleagues; to countless people he counseled; to those with names you know to the guy at the coffee shop below his apartment who saw him that way; to his nieces and nephews and grandchildren.
Most of all, though, to the three boys with whom he actually came to play catch … in his own inimitable way.
This story was originally published June 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM.