{"id":432432,"date":"2026-01-25T14:38:27","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T14:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/432432\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T14:38:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T14:38:27","slug":"football-fathers-day-and-the-fleeting-moments-of-parental-joy-we-all-dream-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/432432\/","title":{"rendered":"Football, Father\u2019s Day and the fleeting moments of parental joy we all dream of"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Globe columnist Adam Radwanski, right, and his son Alec Radwanski at the Toronto Argonauts’ Grey Cup victory celebration last November.Adam Radwanski\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t think the Toronto Argonauts would ever mean as much to me again as when I was younger.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d been there as a bond with my father<\/a>, a semi-ironic shared passion with my friends, an opportunity to connect with Canadians from outside my Toronto bubble while drinking unhealthy amounts of beer at Grey Cups around the country.<\/p>\n

But my dad died, and life got too busy for my friends and I to get to every game together, and family responsibilities and financial pressures and fear of worse hangovers meant the Grey Cup trips pretty much stopped.<\/p>\n

And yet here we are, and I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve ever been more excited for an Argos home opener.<\/p>\n

Fitting that it falls on Father\u2019s Day weekend. Because what\u2019s reignited my passion for the CFL<\/a> is the football journey onto which it\u2019s sent my nine-year-old, and what that\u2019s unlocked in me, and the idyllically old-fashioned little slice of father-son bonding it\u2019s giving us.<\/p>\n

When I first took Alec to see the Argos at BMO Field, a couple of years ago, my expectations were not sky high. The only sport he\u2019d really embraced was basketball. Football is not an intuitive game that\u2019s easily graspable for kids, especially in an era of constant digital competition for their attention. I figured if we stayed much past halftime, without resorting to excessive bribery via stadium snacks, we\u2019d be doing well.<\/p>\n

Instead, we made it through the whole game. And another one. Then another. <\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t get every nuance of the sport immediately, which was more than fine by me, because it meant I could give fatherly explanations that flexed my knowledge of something he was interested in. But he knew a big play when he saw one, and to make noise when the Argos were on defence, and even during blowouts he insisted on staying in our seats to the end, because that was what real fans did.<\/p>\n

For my part, I saw anew the singular appeal of CFL football that had drawn me in decades before. Here was a game sufficiently big-time that Alec could watch elite athletes make highlight-reel plays in front of tens of thousands of people, and sufficiently small-time that he could go down to the players\u2019 tunnel and jostle with other kids for autographs. Less corporate, more boisterous and chaotic than a Leafs or Raptors or Jays game, out in the open air, it was pretty magical through a boy\u2019s eyes. And it was cheap enough that I could take him often.<\/p>\n

Dad Bods explores the science of fatherhood \u2013 and brings good news<\/a><\/p>\n

When the Argos ended their 2023 season by losing a playoff game they were expected to win, he was the right level of disappointed. When they won the 2024 Grey Cup, he was so eager to go to the championship celebration downtown that I couldn\u2019t resist pulling him from school.<\/p>\n

It was, I know, to some extent a product of my own steering. I wouldn\u2019t have pushed him to embrace Canadian football if he hadn\u2019t warmed to it initially. But once he did, I wasn\u2019t above letting him stay up way past his bedtime to go to the odd evening game or saying yes to buying Argos merchandise more often than I should have. And I didn\u2019t go out of my way to disabuse him of the notion that they were as beloved a team as any in this city.<\/p>\n

But if I was the one who\u2019d led us to that point in our shared football experience, Alec took us into the next phase of it, if not entirely intentionally.<\/p>\n

Over the winter, he got wind from a couple of friends at school that the Toronto Flag Football League, sponsored by the Argos, had a recreational division in our part of town for kids his age. He was eager to give it a try, and with some manoeuvering we got him into the spring season last-minute. (For the uninitiated, flag football is basically touch football, but with defenders needing to pull pieces of Velcro off ball-carriers to end plays.) <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite losing 63-0 in his first game in the Toronto Flag Football League, Alec Radwanski has been enthusiastic about his first season.Adam Radwanski\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

When I brought him to the field, two things quickly became apparent. <\/p>\n

One was that the league, which takes over high-school football fields and has kids play width-wise across them, is more organized than I expected. It not only has referees and sideline spotters, but staff tracking stats for each player \u2013 receiving yards, interceptions, defensive metrics like deflected passes \u2013 updated on its website. Somehow this adds up to both a dream come true for kids who\u2019ve watched pro football, and a welcoming environment for newbies.<\/p>\n

The other was that Alec had landed on the one team with confusion about who was coaching it, which was a possible explanation for losing their first game 63-0.<\/p>\n

Although he still said he\u2019d had fun, a whole season of that threatened to put a damper on the experience for him and a bunch of other eager kids. So I took a deep breath and offered to help coach the rest of the way.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard for me to fully explain how far outside my comfort zone this was, despite my CFL love. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just that, with very limited experience playing organized football myself, my play-calling abilities were limited. (Fortunately, I wound up coaching alongside another dad who\u2019d played university football.) <\/p>\n

The bigger obstacle was that, while I like to think I\u2019m a pretty fun dad to my own kids, I\u2019m not naturally one of those extroverts to whom other people\u2019s kids gravitate. Trying to direct nearly a dozen nine- and 10-year-olds to play a complicated team sport in front of their parents would\u2019ve sounded to me, until this spring, like a nightmare. <\/p>\n

This is not where I tell a heroic tale of how, together, we turned it all around and triumphantly marched toward the championship. The team finished the regular season last week with three wins, seven losses, and a tie. (And the rival team that walloped us the first week, a juggernaut that never lost, subsequently beat us 56-0 and 49-7.) <\/p>\n

Our daughter\u2019s arrival filled us with joy. Becoming fathers had never been a given<\/a><\/p>\n

But Alec and his teammates visibly improved. A player who initially looked uncertain on the field scored a game-winning touchdown; another whose first couple of attempts at quarterbacking went poorly started to figure it out. They all appear to enjoy football as much or more than when the season started, they seem to like each other, and maybe they\u2019ve discovered a few things about themselves.<\/p>\n

I sure have, about myself, which is a gift when you\u2019re well into your 40s. <\/p>\n

It turns out that, compensating for my limited technical expertise with decent communication skills and a possible excess of positive reinforcement, I might actually be decent at helping kids \u2013 even those who aren\u2019t my own \u2013 manage their emotional highs and lows and grow together.<\/p>\n

From the sidelines, I\u2019ve done my best to treat Alec like every other kid, even as I\u2019ve seen some nascent leadership skills in his combination of competitiveness and sportsmanship. But I\u2019ve relished our conversations about each game\u2019s highlights, what worked and what didn\u2019t, on the drive home and for days after. Between games, in the long daylight of late-spring evenings, we\u2019ve found ourselves tossing the ball around outside, playing mini-games with other local kids who join in. <\/p>\n

To the slight amusement of my wife, and possibly a few other parents who know me well, I\u2019ve become a Neighbourhood Football Dad.<\/p>\n

All of this may reach its pinnacle this weekend, when Saturday morning\u2019s flag-football playoffs \u2013 which every team makes, and where we might be able to pull off one more win before running into the juggernaut \u2013 will give way to the Argos\u2019 opener in the afternoon.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very aware that it may not last. <\/p>\n

Tastes change, as our kids like to say when we prod them to eat something they purportedly liked previously, and the younger you are the faster it can happen. <\/p>\n

Alec\u2019s Argos enthusiasm could wane if they have a bad season or two, or if kids at school convince him the NFL is what counts. His on-field career could come to a crashing halt anytime, too, if he decides another sport (or no sport) is for him; a flag-football craze that\u2019s swept through his friend group for reasons I don\u2019t fully understand could easily be replaced by something else. At a certain point, as he approaches teen-hood, his dad\u2019s involvement could become a bug rather than a feature.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Radwanski says he wouldn’t have pushed his son Alec to embrace Canadian football if he hadn\u2019t initially warmed to it.Adam Radwanski\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also not going to pressure Alec\u2019s brother, five-year-old Felix, to follow in his football footsteps \u2013 even if there were early signs of enthusiasm at his first Argos game last fall.<\/p>\n

But living in the moment is something I\u2019m always trying to encourage my kids to do, and it\u2019s probably time to practise what I preach.<\/p>\n

No matter how close and loving your relationship with your children, it can feel like a constant struggle to stay connected. I do my best to understand and embrace Alec\u2019s tastes in anime or Roblox video games or memes he\u2019s heard about from his friends, even as I try to police them. But particularly when it involves mediums that didn\u2019t exist when I was his age, there can be a distance.<\/p>\n

Then something comes along that fits how you vaguely pictured parenthood before the kids were born. Something more analogue, maybe, more transferable between generations, that you can nurture and share. <\/p>\n

You know it\u2019s giving you memories you\u2019ll keep the rest of your life, and your kids will too, but first you try to savour it and make it last as long as possible.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m signing up to coach again when flag football resumes in the fall. <\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll be buying tickets for all the Argos games we can go to this season. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be quietly thanking them, every time I\u2019m in the stadium, for what they\u2019ve helped us share. <\/p>\n

Alec won\u2019t be thinking about the game that way now; it\u2019s not how kids work. But one day, he just might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Globe columnist Adam Radwanski, right, and his son Alec Radwanski at the Toronto…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":432433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,521,875,522,520,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,82,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":{"0":"post-432432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cfl","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-ca","15":"tag-canada","16":"tag-canada-news","17":"tag-canada-sports","18":"tag-canada-sports-news","19":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","20":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","21":"tag-canadian-football-league","22":"tag-canadian-news","23":"tag-canadianfootballleague","24":"tag-cfl","25":"tag-economy","26":"tag-education","27":"tag-environment","28":"tag-federal-government","29":"tag-foreign-news","30":"tag-globe-and-mail","31":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","32":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","33":"tag-government","34":"tag-life-news","35":"tag-lifestyle","36":"tag-local-news","37":"tag-manitoba","38":"tag-national-news","39":"tag-new-brunswick","40":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","41":"tag-northwest-territories","42":"tag-nova-scotia","43":"tag-nunavut","44":"tag-ontario","45":"tag-pei","46":"tag-photos","47":"tag-political-news","48":"tag-political-opinion","49":"tag-politics","50":"tag-politics-news","51":"tag-quebec","52":"tag-sports","53":"tag-sports-news","54":"tag-technology","55":"tag-travel","56":"tag-trudeau","57":"tag-us-news","58":"tag-world-news","59":"tag-yukon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/432433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}