It was Carlos Mac Allister, dad of Liverpool’s Alexis, who came up with the ideal phrase for an increasingly common sporting type, the papa tonto. These are the crazy sport parents, those energetically deluded dads and mums of sporting kids (but yes: mainly dads) who insist on being micro-involved to a comically obsessive degree.
This is not to take an anti-dad stance. Like being a mum, which seems to the outsider basically impossible, being a dad is hard enough. This is an unmapped path, an unrelenting assault of tender feelings, the protective gene, the competitive urge, the fear of failure (the one key ingredient to not actually failing, but no one tells you this). Plus the shadow, in all our inherited words and deeds, of previous tonto dads, the dads of history, who were as it happens also just making it up as it came their way.
