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.
Being a dad is a pure and addictive joy, because nature has made it so. But it also scrambles the senses and bends you into the weirdest shapes on a daily basis. At the end of which, just as you’re finding some kind of balance, they chuck you into the wild frontier of junior sport. Welcome to los padres tontos del deporte. We’ve been expecting you.
Anyone who has been around this world will have come across examples of the breed, will know also that craziness often goes hand in hand with more benevolent qualities, and will recognise the urge to share tales of the most extreme examples, to thrill at the spectacle of people madder, even, than you.
Often these are just funny details, like the story the England batsman Keaton Jennings tells about being coached by his dad, Ray, who insisted on a hardline pro-sport rule that all childhood net sessions must instantly cease once Keaton had got out three times – leading inevitably to a situation where a four-hour round trip to the nets would last three balls, protocols mercilessly enforced, engine already revving for the journey home, and yes son, you’ll thank me for this one day.
The freshest material tends to come from cricket, a place where the mad dads run wild and free. Last week ESPNcricinfo published a profile of Sanjay Dhas, father of India Under-19 breakout star Sachin Dhas, which among many excellent details kicked off with confirmation that Sachin is indeed named after you-know-who, because, “Even before he was born, I had decided he would be a cricketer and nothing else.” Okayyyy then.
Dhas senior had his son facing 1,400 balls a day from the age of four. He started a cricket academy so his son could be in a cricket academy. He demolished part of the family home to build a personalised indoor training hall. He also stoically fended off the concerns of his wife, who would occasionally talk about the need for things like schoolwork, but luckily, “I didn’t listen to her”.
The outcome, in an outcome-based world, is there to see. This month Sachin scored 96 against South Africa in the Under-19 World Cup semi-final. And only this week there was a father-son companion piece in the rise to prominence of Naushad Khan, dad of Indian Test debutant Sarfaraz, who appeared on the Rajkot outfield as his son received his cap and was pictured weeping, as the newspapers put it, “inconsolably” (at one point Khan senior took the cap in his hands and seemed to be trying to eat it).
This is not meant as criticism. Like everyone else I cheered wildly for Sarfaraz’s dad, who went all husky and brave and quiet as the cameras picked him out during his son’s debut 50, and am desperate now for Sachin to also make it, or at least to do enough to leave his mad dad happy in his mad dotage.
It is worth pointing out at this point that to be an Indian cricket parent is a very distinct experience. What is being celebrated here is a triumph over impossible odds, the elevation of a humble kid into another economic sphere, an example of social mobility in a nation that has wanted to hear these stories.
It is also worth being clear on definitions. The papa tonto parent does not include actual harmful abusive lunatics. We’re also not talking about sporting parents who find themselves engaged in tonto- ness because of the need to fight some access-blocking shitshow of a junior system, not least the parents of girls who have often found it necessary to push and become micro-involved because their sport just isn’t ready to provide a properly supported pathway. We salute these warrior parents, and look to a day when the need for tonto-ness is removed by a functioning open door.
But there is wider point here, an echo of what elite sport is becoming. Cricket in particular has a massive access problem in England. Without an established entry point – posh school, mad parent, easy access club – it becomes almost impossible to know the sport exists, let alone use its facilities.
There are obvious reasons for this, most notably the death of sport in state schools, lack of funding and space to sustain rewarding but difficult pastimes. So we end up with a situation where England under-19 teams in the national summer sport (in a country of 60 million people!) are crammed with the descendants of former professional cricketers.
There is a problem in the success stories too. We see only the Sachins. We don’t see the thousands for whom the process is the same but the outcome different, obsessions that must come to nothing because mass failure is built into the system. Elite sport will sell you a way out, a ladder to the stars. But even this is built on the backs of those who must, out of necessity, fall on the same path.
There is another strand to this. For all the talk of endless repetitions in junior coaching, there is no real evidence this isn’t simply a talent thing in the end, a luck thing, a personality thing. The best cricket dad episode of the week, the absolute model, is the story of India’s other Test debutant Dhruv Jurel, whose father, a soldier, wanted his son to have a more stable career and actively discouraged him from playing cricket.
One day over breakfast Jurel Sr noticed something. “He was reading the newspaper. And he suddenly told me: ‘There is a cricketer that goes by the same name as you, and he has scored these many runs.’ I got scared and did not know how to tell him this cricketer was me.”
Dhruv even gave up playing for a couple of years, fell back into it, and is now, aged 23, playing for India. It is the most reassuring story, something we would all like to believe, that talent will bloom and find its shape whatever you do to it. As in all things a little bit of both, freedom and control, is probably the ideal. In the absence of plans, resources, structure, los padres tontos will continue to fill those spaces.
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