Is it All Right if I Brag on My Son

My son is twelve years old. Before he was born Spouse and I made a request of God for the kind of person we would like to be responsible for. We weren't afraid to be specific, either. Well, God not only answered our prayer, but he gave us someone a lot better. A lot better.

Son is at the top of his class academically. He is the youngest musician to be accepted to the school jazz band (tuba). He draws comic books (several hundred pages now). He has a great sense of humor. (Well, of course I'm going to say that. It matches mine perfectly. We watch movies on television and insert our own dialog.) And he's a good athlete.

He got to demonstrate the latter yesterday morning. Son plays basketball in an In-House League, as they call it. There are six teams made up of local fifth and sixth graders. Son, while not the tallest, is one of three "big men" (as the coach calls them). He is also a holy terror on defense.

The coaches for this league are mothers and fathers who are willing to volunteer. Sometimes they have to be dragged forward because there aren't enough volunteers. I actually coached for three years, but my style pi**ed off a lot of people and I quit. (I'm against keeping official score for players below seventh grade. At that level there should not be any "winners" or "losers". It's far too young an age for people to be learning what they can't do. They'll get enough of that later. But the world thinks I'm nuts and isn't afraid to tell me so.)

When I coached I would put Son against the opposing team's best player - no matter who they were. (I told him that if he wanted to know how bad he played, he should find someone not as good. If he wanted to know how good he was, he had to go against someone better.) I still remember him playing against the player that everyone said was the best. My instructions to Son were: Don't try to steal the ball. He's probably too good for that. Just try to stay between him and the basket. Make him take bad shots. In the very first minute of the game Son stole the ball. He played such a harrassing defense the poor boy he was guarding never got a shot off.

That's the kind of defense Son plays. Most of the time the players he guards never get the ball - no matter how good they are. More than one highly praised offensive threat has whined about wanting someone else to guard them.

As the boys have grown the game has become faster, and so Son can't always keep the ball out of the hands of the boy he's guarding. But they very seldom score. Son has also learned to go help out when a teammate gets beat. Which brings me to what happened yesterday.

It was late in the game. The score was close. Son's team was up by a basket, I think. The other team came down and their best player broke free with the ball. Son left the boy he was guarding and rushed across the lane. He arrived just as the ball was released. His arm went up and his hand caught the ball and smashed it back down to the court. The ensuing echo sounded like some sort of blast, and every parent on both teams stood up and cheered. After that Son was like some incarnation of the Tasmanian Devil. His teammates were inspired and joined him in the defensive assault and outscored the other team 20-6 in the final eight minutes. (And while I was so happy for Son and his team, seeing a boy on the other team cry only reinforced my belief these people are too young to be dealing with winning and losing.)

After the game I was telling Son how I overheard his coach say, "That boy can just plain play basketball." In typical fashion, Son set his face and looked away so that I wouldn't see how much he enjoyed the compliment.

It's just a game, but I'm glad he's good at it. He's good at a lot of things. What he's best at is caring about others. A couple of years ago, when he learned Spouse and I would not be exchanging Christmas presents because of our money shortage, he took the money his grandmother gave him and went to a school "garage sale" and bought us each a present so we would have something under the tree, too. I got a little Hagrid action figure (it was the only Harry Potter character he could find). I don't actually play with it, but it's on a shelf with other important things I own. I keep a diary for him. Have since the day he was born. It's got 4,449 entries now.

I think I have a great son.

Thank you, God.