Try to recall your earliest memories.
Chances are they reveal something about you, a reason they've stayed with you all these years later.
Most of mine involve sports and my father.
Watching games, going to games, talking about things that happened somewhere in sports with Dad.
I was three weeks past my fifth birthday when Paul Henderson scored for Canada in 1972. And while I don't recall watching it, I remember my father telling me about it.
I do, however, remember two months later, when USC running back Anthony Davis scored six touchdowns in a game against Notre Dame. Well, I don't exactly recall all six, just the last one because my father insisted I watch once Davis got to five.
My first live sporting events took place in crowded lacrosse barns where from my father's lap I would complain how the noise was hurting my young ears.
Those early memories became a preview of my life right up to this day: watching sports with Dad, going to games with Dad and talking sports whether it be in person or on the phone. In many ways, it's always been the way we relate to one another, his views on sports often reflective of how he sees the world and mine of how I see it.
"When I moved away from home … sports became the way my Dad and I would keep up."
As a kid, I always felt lucky to have a father who was as passionate about sports as I was.
We'd watch football, baseball and hockey mostly, and sometimes we'd order in pizza for a weekend afternoon game. Once a year we'd go down to Maple Leaf Gardens together when his uncle Earl would grace us with a pair of his season tickets to see the Leafs.
While I played my share of sports growing up, I was never as good an athlete as my father, who had grown up in Brampton, Ont. where he played baseball, hockey, football and basketball at various times.
But his real love has always been lacrosse, for which he's been honoured by both the Brampton Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame. He played junior and senior lacrosse with the Brampton Excelsiors, was part of several championship teams and then embarked on a short pro career, first as a player and then as a referee.
When I was about 10 years old, my father was referee-in-chief of the Ontario Lacrosse Association and had to evaluate officials around the province. That meant lots of trips to such places as Orangeville and Peterborough and Elora - small towns and cities where lacrosse is a very big deal. And often I got to join him.
My dad would go to see the officials in between periods to give them feedback on their work. I can still remember the time I offered up an opinion on one of their calls and got a lesson shortly thereafter about keeping my mouth shut.
In front of the television with my father, however, there were no such restrictions. And over the years our shared passion for sports grew. Dad and I would attend lots of Blue Jay games and a yearly trip to Buffalo to see the Bills where we tried our hand at the art of tailgating.
And of course as televised sports expanded, so too did the time we would spend together in front of the television - watching games and debating them back-and-forth. I always figured that instead of being a school principal, my Dad should have been in the sports media because he has this knack for saying something about a game or a player, just seconds before the expert analyst on television would echo his thoughts exactly.
When I moved away from home for university, sports became the way my Dad and I would keep up. Never would a conversation occur on the phone that didn't involve some breakdown of a game he or I had witnessed, an opinion on something that was happening, or just sharing something we'd seen or read.
I'm sure there are times our entire conversation was about nothing but sports.
I'm truly lucky can share this passion with my Dad right to this day. We still go to the occasional game together, get together to watch all kinds of games and of course still debate whose opinion is right and whose is wrong.
It's still our language, our common experience, him in retirement and me as the host of a daily sports talk show on TSN Radio 1050 and TSN2.
And there's nothing my father seems to enjoy more than telling me something I didn't know about a topic I've discussed on TSN Drive, just to remind me I've still got some things to learn.
I could never have known it at the time, but I realize my father helped me begin training for my chosen profession almost before I could walk, being born into a world where talking about sports is actually something you can do for a living. (My father often says he wishes that his own father could be alive to see what I do for my profession, predicting that as a lifelong labourer he would likely say something like, "you have a job, but you don't work.")
Today's sports world is hardly recognizable in comparison to the one my Dad and began sharing all those years ago.
But our passion, handed down from him to me, bonds us to this day.
