Of Lads & Their Dads

“Did you see the game?” my dad asked me on June 1, 2019, a question that sounds absurd – of course I watched Liverpool win the Champions League final – until you understand the context.

What he really meant was: did I see Brian Henderson and his son, Jordan, embrace after Jordan Henderson lifted the Champions League trophy, a feat very few people thought Jordan Henderson could do, but something he did do? Something that Brian Henderson, suffering from throat cancer, was at real risk of missing, but instead was there to witness and drink in? 

Did I watch Jordan Henderson smother his footballing dad Jürgen Klopp, who believed in him and gave him the armband and said, go on son (in a more colloquial sense but with all the pride, and love, and respect that particular term of masculine endearment carries), go on son and do the job?

Did I see Jordan Henderson weep, and did I see Jürgen Klopp carried away on the same wave of emotion? Did it all carry me away, too?

What my father asked me was: Did I see what this all meant – to fathers, and to sons?

I suppose I should have begun with the context, so: my father died on Feb. 10, as I was holding his hand.

I suppose I should also tell you -- to help explain why I, a 41-year-old man, am using a Liverpool FC fan blog to tell you all this -- that he and I both followed the Reds. Me, because of a mix of arbitrary choices made more than 20 years ago now that the ensuing decades have re-affirmed in ways that I could not have conceived of when I first heard YNWA sung (on “Fearless,” from Pink Floyd’s Meddle).

And he, because I liked them. 

Because, though it was never explicitly stated and though it took me some time to figure it out, my dad wanted to find another excuse for us to have something to talk about, something fun to do together as adults, maybe while – and he never explicitly said this, either, but I believe I am perceptive enough to guess at it – while he waited for me to get everything together and create some grandkids.

It was a simple and easy way of demonstrating interest and investing time – showing up, like he always did.

So it was, and so it all worked out in that way. It included me, with decreasing patience, trying to explain how offsides worked and what a wingback was – and to me eventually realizing that, in addition to the shame I feel now in allowing annoyance to creep into my voice whenever I felt like I was repeating myself once too often, that in the VAR era, maybe I didn’t and don’t really understand offsides like I thought I did – to us standing together on the Kop for a ho-hum 0-0 draw with United in October 2017, a time when both Watford and Burnley were ahead of Liverpool in the table.

And then it ended, with me dragging the laptop and his bar scarf into his hospital room so we could watch the Liverpool game together one last time, just a month after the two of us – and one of my sisters, too – shouted and sang along and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly during the 1-1 draw with Arsenal.

I am also telling you this because, and I hope I can convey this and how meaningful it was for me in a way that is not mawkish, how celebrity soccer players’ relationships with their fathers – and how they navigated losing them – is helping me navigate losing mine.

****

Did I see what happened? my dad asked me, sometime after Feb. 24, 2021. Jose Becker, whose son Alisson played in that 2019 Champions League final and in another one a little later, died suddenly and tragically. Drowned, while on vacation.

I can’t find any written exchange, but I know we talked about it and I know something of what we said. We agreed it was terrible – to go without any advance warning, as my father’s father had when I was eight years old; to go when you are too young; to go before you can say all of the things you need and want to say.

But we also agreed that Jose was surely extremely proud of his son, whom he loved. The two of us felt for the two of them, and we weren’t alone: The love that the club and the fans showed Alisson and his family seemed to mean something. He took some time off, and then Alisson Becker went back to work, raising his eyes to the sky every now and then.

My dad was in the hospital for a month before he died. He’d been dealing with a few issues for a while, with nothing but the usual positivity and humor, but the year before had been a rough one, with a couple surgeries and hospitalizations. Even so, there was nothing to suggest that three weeks after the two of us were working outside at my parents' house he would be in the ICU too weak to talk, a twist I find abjectly cruel. But he could listen and respond with winks, hand squeezes, a shake of the head, even a wry look. He did not lose his mind, nor did he appear to lose his spirit or even his sense of humor, even as mine and those of the people around me shook and crumbled. He did not seem to care too much about what was going on with the club. I can relate. When I heard Klopp was leaving, towards the end of the second week of my father’s final act, it didn’t matter quite as much as what the intensivist and the neurologist were telling me. Which was: Everybody was leaving, too tired to keep going after a long run.

My dad did seem to have a little bit of a turn for the better after the Norwich win. This means he heard, in between us reading him chapters from the book he never got to finish and us telling and retelling our favorite stories for the 100th time, some of the Connor Bradley excitement.

I don’t think I told him about this, but when Connor Bradley lost his father a few days after he, Connor Bradley, a 20-year-old man, scored in the Premier League for the first time, during my father’s third week in the hospital, I had to stop and sit with it for a minute.

Oh, what Joe Bradley got to see. But oh, what Joe Bradley will not, and what Connor Bradley will miss.

***

Virgil van Dijk carries his father’s name on his passport but not on his back. The reason why is at once complicated – it is a family dynamic, after all, with decades-long grievances and different versions of “the truth” depending on who you ask – as well as simple. It can probably be reduced to something as basic as “showing up,” or not. But that’s their relationship and not ours, not ours to theorize or sensationalize like the gossip rags lining the bin do. Maybe they will yet resolve their quarrel before it is too late; maybe it is already.

When guerrilla kidnapped Luis Diaz’s parents last fall, it was not so complicated. It was all very simple – as simple as political unrest turned search-and-rescue under an international spotlight can be. In a chaotic and fluid situation, what control people could exert, they did. Lucho’s teammates showed up for him, Diogo Jota holding up his absent friend’s shirt to the world, so that the club and the fans and everyone else could see. Then, with his mother free but his father not – missing; lost? Dead? -- Lucho went back to work. Then he managed to show up, finding the occasion “in the most difficult of personal circumstances,” the tv announcer declared after Diaz scored in extra time against Luton, to steal a draw and a point. When he lifted up his shirt to reveal the message for his father that the kitman had prepared for him, I wondered if the guerrilla were watching.

Then, helpfully, the entire Colombian state showed up, a show of force and public opprobrium that brought the arc to this absurdly happy ending: Luis Manuel Diaz, rescued safe and in time to witness his son score both goals, the equalizer and then the winner, not for club but for country, for Colombia against Brasil. To have your night, with your dad alive and in the stands with everyone else he know and tens of thousands more than you don’t all watching you do it, all after you’d certainly feared the absolute worst?

I lost track of how many times I tried to explain to my dad the difference between the League and FA Cups. I do remember when it stopped annoying me, which was too late. I think I was used to having him understand everything about the world better than me, so suddenly having to teach – and to feel like a smart and perceptive guy wasn’t heeding me – was a role reversal that sometimes frustrated. 

It also took me a while to recognize this wasn’t because he didn’t care. Not that he didn’t care at all about the game, but that it was just background noise to the main event: spending some time with me. So when he texted me the final score or that Mo Salah scored a goal or emailed me to alert whether the game was on Peacock or not – all things I knew full well -- I knew what he really meant. He was saying hello. Hello, thinking about you. Hello. I love you. 

It took me until I was 41 and losing my father to really understand how all of this – sport, celebrity, personal tragedy, professional triumph – is just embroidery, a vehicle for something else: what happens when you raise a child and what happens when the child grows into a human who can start to guess at what that act entails. A shared interest, be it working out in the yard or a brief text exchange or even a trip to Anfield, is just a venue. This is so whether your kid is the goalkeeper or the winger or the captain or the thirtysomething squeezed in next to you, a little self-conscious that neither of you know all the words to Fields of Anfield Road.

I was blessed in that I had an extremely uncomplicated relationship with my father. Aside from a few teenaged shouting matches and the friction that follows when two strong-willed and stubborn people disagree on something in adulthood, we almost always got along well. There is not much more to it. It helped that he was extremely patient and loving-- almost to the point where I wished he’d give me some more constructive criticism – but it was clear he loved and respected me.

I can say, honestly and without qualification or any significant lingering regret, that I loved and respected him back. But it is in that cruel and unfair asymmetry that seems to be a parent’s lot with their child, who only much later can recognize the size of the gift they were born with. My father did a lot more than show up for me throughout my life. In the end, that was all I could do for him. And it wasn’t enough. I showed up. Away he went.

All I have now are the memories and the bar scarf, and a fun hobby – watching some strangers play a game on TV – that for the rest of my life will remind me of something else, someone I miss dearly and would give everything I had to see again, for 90 minutes or for an instant.