There’s humiliation, and then there’s the humiliation that your parents bring to you. That specific cringe-worthiness that you feel when someone who looks like you, raised you, and lives with you does something that you would never do yourself.
Growing up, there was really no one that embarrassed me like my dad.
Like there was one time, when my dad and I went to my brother’s soccer game. At the time, he was in elementary school, playing for a neighborhood team. I remember my dad sitting in the bleachers, facing these 7-year-old kids, and just screaming at them,
Hey kid, block ‘im on the right!
Mason, he’s coming up the side!
Go Tyler run run RUN!
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Totally egging these kids on, acting like he would at college football game. I would see the looks that other parents gave us, like what on earth is this man doing right now, it is 10 a.m. Sitting next to him, I would shirk and smile apologetically at them.
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The thing is, my friends loved my dad and thought he was so funny. He’s a chemist who sold cat food to international companies, and he loved entertaining people with his adventures from all around the world. At every dinner party we went to, his presence at the table would bring guests to roaring laughter.
My dad’s loud mouth came in extremely handy one day.
On this fateful day, my dad became friends with Charles Barkley.
“I was on a business trip and stayed in one of the hotels..."
Charles Barkley is a NBA hall-of-famer, and one of the hosts of Inside the NBA, a show that’s on after almost every NBA basketball game. As my dad tells me, he was a player who fell right in line line Michael Jordan. He having a drink at the bar next to the lobby, and my dad was walking through. He saw Charles and decided to go up and ask for a picture.
“I say hi and had a little conversation with him and he was sitting at the bar and he said why don't you just join us sitting in the bar. There's not many people there so i just sit together with his friend and chat..."
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My dad and Charles saw each other again in the bar another night, then another. And on the last night
“Certainly I had a good time talking with him, hang out with him and he said the same thing to me and he left the phone number to me he said whenever you're in Atlanta, New York City or Phoenix check out with me. If i'm in town, we'll hang and have a good time”
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Over the next few years, whenever my dad was in those cities, he would send him a text and they would get dinner, or hang out in the TNT studio, or watch a basketball game together.
To me this relationship was unfathomable. My dad was just a plain dude, a 50-year-old man who now lives a quiet, suburban life in Iowa City.
"Why do you think out of all the people that he's interacted with, that you became friends with him? What is it about you and him that made that last?
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"I think we had a good conversation, we agree with each other a lot of point of views ..."
“You know he grown up in the 70s. He was born in 1963 in the 60s and70s in Alabama, little town called Lids Alabama. You can think about it, his father left him and his mother when he was little he grown up with grandma and mother and they cleaned houses for somebody else to make a living ..."
My dad came to the U.S. in 1992 with only 100 dollars in his pocket. He enrolled in Kansas State as a graduate student, got a job, and lived with his friend until he saved enough money to get a place of his own.
This is a story he loves to tell me. That he came here with nothing and now, he feels like he kind of made it.
Nowadays, Charles has become somewhat of a surreal figure to him. Someone superhuman.
Last May, my dad was diagnosed with heart cancer, and now all he does is spend time watching Charles' shows.
Charles has become someone who in many ways, keeps my dad company.
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