Fathers & Daughters & Sports by ESPN

Author:ESPN [ESPN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52207-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

ERIC NEEL is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He lives in Sierra Madre, California, where Tess is now learning to be a softball pitcher.

It’s been said that parenting is a marathon. In this case, it’s actually a triathlon.

MY FATHER, THE CHEATER

Kathryn Bertine

I cheated,” my father says, panting slightly. We are at the finish line of the 2005 Escape From Alcatraz triathlon, which my sixty-eight-year-old dad, Peter Bertine, has crossed after almost four hours of athletic effort. After swimming 1.5 miles from the famous prison island of Alcatraz to the shore of San Francisco’s Crissy Field, then cycling eighteen miles of the notoriously hilly city, and topping it off with an eight-mile run over streets, trails, and sand, I attribute my dad’s cheating comment to temporary postrace disorientation. With perhaps just a smidgen of dementia. My father, cheat? This is a man who turns his head and shields his eyes if an opponent drops one of their Scrabble tiles on the floor. Not to mention, it is pretty difficult to cheat in a triathlon.

“How?” I laugh. “Did someone give you a ride?”

“Yes,” he says.

February 1986. 4:45 a.m. My father’s car has a thermometer that bleeps out a crisp ding! when the outside temperature falls below thirty-four degrees. My father starts the car. The ding! is immediate. It is a bitter New York winter morning. I am eleven, and my dad is driving me to figure-skating practice. For six years, until I can drive myself, he will take me to my beloved, freezing, half-outdoor Murray’s Rink every day at five o’clock in the morning. He will pick me up two hours later, with a chocolate chip muffin and an iced tea from the vending machine in the rink lobby. He will watch me skate, giving me the thumbs-up through the Plexiglas after each maneuver I attempt. I point upward through the Plexiglas, reminding him not to stand under the rafter with the pigeon’s nest. This is our routine.

The waters of San Francisco Bay are known for three things: frigidity, rough currents, and great white sharks. A delightful trilogy of complications for the bizarre tastes of an endurance athlete. On the remarkably beautiful, clear, warm June day of my father’s race, sharks and water temperature are not factors. The current is another story. As is often the case with open-water events, swimmers pick out a target on shore to “sight,” or help keep them in line while they swim. Sometimes it is easier to follow the swimmer who’s leading, provided they are sighting correctly. When the seven competitors of my father’s age group (sixty-five- to sixty-nine-year-old men) jumped into the water among the 1,500 younger triathletes, the collective of wetsuit-clad seniors smartly swam their own pace. It wasn’t until the rescue boat pulled up alongside them that my father realized no one had been sighting properly, and their whole tribe had drifted so far off course that the Golden Gate Bridge was almost within grasp. The boat picked up

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