Inside Youth Baseball's Most Notorious Dad-On-Dad Rivalry |
"Daddy Ball," the story of a little league baseball rivalry between two passionate fathers, is currently being adapted by Jason Bateman into a dark comedy limited series. The story, by writer David Gauvey Herbert, appeared in a 2021 issue of Esquire and focused on an unbelievable dad-on-dad feud involving the Long Island Inferno and a ballpark aptly titled Baseball Heaven. For the two fathers, Bobby Sanfilippo and John Reardon, the rivalry extended way past little league ball. "When a father's anger about 'daddy ball' didn't erupt in the stands, or at a hotel bar on a tournament trip, it found its way to an online message board, Called Strike Three, the emotional sewer for Long Island baseball families," Herbert wrote. "Sons grow up, and one day dads must leave Baseball Heaven, too. But Sanfilippo hasn't moved on." |
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| How Psychedelics Helped a Skeptical Dad Heal His Broken Heart |
I've done my share of recreational drugs, but psychedelics always seemed like a kaleidoscopic bridge too far. Between hearing about friends' bad trips and reading too much Hunter S. Thompson when I was young, I preferred to stay grounded on the lowest plane of consciousness. Maybe it boiled down to this: I was afraid of letting go. When Rob died, however, there was nothing more to be afraid of and nothing of him to hold on to. The first trip was a low-dose warm-up: two pieces of dark chocolate infused with 1 1/2 grams of psilocybin mushrooms. This was just enough to produce a psychedelic experience replete with cascading colors, fractal patterns, trees pulsating with life, and a feeling of euphoria. I loved every second of it. The third trip—4 1/2 grams of raw psilocybin mushrooms dipped in honey—was a healing journey in which I saw what I can only describe as bird angel mechanics working on me with their tiny drills and fixing whatever it was they thought needed fixing. But it was the magical second trip—3 grams of mushrooms blended into a pineapple smoothie—that changed me forever. |
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What I've Learned: John Mellencamp |
John Mellencamp, 71, is an American singer-songwriter. His latest album, Orpheus Descending, is out June 16. He spoke to Esquire from his home in Indiana. I used to love to street fight. I didn't care if I won or lost. It was the adrenaline of fighting another male. I used to like to get drunk, get a little stoned, go into a bar, and pick a fight with the biggest guy I could find. Until one night in Vincennes, Indiana, this guy beat me up so fucking bad, he just left me like a wet rag in the alley. I was unrecognizable to myself the next morning. I looked in the mirror and said, "John, the drugs and alcohol are not working out for you." I never had a drink or smoked pot or did any drugs after that. |
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Am I a Superhero to My Sons? |
Ilive in the same county where I grew up. So when my family and I drive to the Oldham Theatre to see a movie, almost always a superhero movie, because it seems like there's a new one every single week, it's hard not to remember eating Jolly Ranchers in this same theater while watching Batman in 1989. My sons, fourteen and nine, are sitting in the same chairs that I sat in when I was their age, and they have to hear me say, every single time we go to the theater, "You know, I saw my first Batman movie in this very same theater." And they say, "Yes, god, we know. And you ate Jolly Ranchers from the concession stand." And I say, "But not the Jolly Ranchers that you kids eat—" And they interrupt to say, "Yes, they were a different size. We know. Dad, the movie is starting." Eventually, I think about the first time, probably in eighth grade, when my parents decided it was okay to just drop me off at the Oldham to meet up with friends, simply letting me walk up to the ticket counter on my own, the slight fear when I didn't immediately see any of my friends in the crowd. I remember looking back as my dad waved to me before he drove off. I think of how weird it is to have a formative moment in your life take place at a showing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. I think about walking out of the theater after the movie, searching for my parents' van, those little moments when you separate and come back together, over and over. |
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Everything smelled like cigarette smoke when I was a kid. You could smoke in an airplane. You could smoke in a taxi. You could smoke in Burger King. I smoked my first cigarette when I was nine. It took a lot of practice to learn to inhale and exhale without choking, but I was passionate, and I got very good at it. Self-taught, as they say. Imagine a ten-year-old girl on Rollerblades doing figure eights on a quiet evening road in the suburbs, flicking a butt into the neighbor's flower garden. That was me. I smoked riding my bike at night, no hands, with my eyes closed. That was freedom. At some point, I'd heard that smoking stunts your growth. That's why I started. I did not want to grow up. Can you blame me? Now, like my fellow millennials, I'm forced to confront the reality of entering middle age. I turned 40 not long ago, but I don't feel middle-aged. I don't have kids. I own a house and I'm married, but my husband and I spend more time making popcorn and wrestling than we do balancing a checkbook or watching the news. I don't have a clean house, and I don't have any friends who are doctors. I have no beige rugs. That's what I thought being middle- aged meant when I was a kid, being lame and organized and middle-class, like the parents in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I don't use Sweet'N Low. I don't belong to a racquet club. I still get pimples, I still watch cartoons, and with excruciating self-denial, I keep my weight the same as it was when I was 13 years old. In these totally meaningless ways, according to a rubric determined by my favorite movies from the 1980s, I have effectively preserved my youth. |
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Memories of My Father, By Ronald Reagan, Jr. |
Late summer, 1995. My father and I were lounging, fittingly enough, poolside at my parents' home in Los Angeles. He had recently revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and his powers of recollection had begun to falter—imperceptibly perhaps to strangers but more obviously to those who knew him best. Across formerly clear skies, scraps of mist had begun to drift. Sometimes they were blank patches, sometimes visitors from years past. Familiar names went missing. Different decades tumbled together, producing odd juxtapositions. A couple of minutes earlier, having ventured a few laps, I had climbed out of the pool to join my father under a large umbrella. He had looked me up and down, then suggested, straight-faced, that I try out for the Olympic swim team. I was thirty-seven years old. But in his eyes, who knew? Some memories, though, are remarkably resilient. Old athletes—and I count my father in this category—frequently reach back to long-ago moments of mastery or narrow defeat. I knew where Dad was headed: down a well-worn path, back about twenty-five years to one in a long series of good-natured physical contests we had engaged in as I grew up, back to the moment of my first real triumph, a swimming race both of us had assumed he would win. "You know what the difference was?" Rhetorical question. I nodded. I knew. |
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