I’m supposed to be sitting on the beach, reading a Steven King novel. Instead, I’m scanning Twitter for any signs of how my son is doing in college football camp in the middle of a heat wave. This is what it means to be a football mom.

I pray the boys— men, really—are practicing indoors, but I know they will not be. Games are played in over 90 degree heat. I felt for all the boys this morning as I jogged along the boardwalk, the sun beating down at a mild but muggy 80 degrees. I had no pads. No helmet. No turf to radiate more heat. I only had the ocean breeze, stifling enough. So as I jog, I pray.

I pray that my son keeps his spirits up. I pray that he doesn’t lose too much weight this month. He drops eight pounds a practice in sweat. He doesn’t want to eat after, because who wants to eat when it’s that hot out. But he has to, if he ever hopes to play. I pray that he doesn’t get pushed too far, like Jordan McNair, the University of Maryland O-lineman who died after practice. I pray for all the boys.

It’s hard, sometimes, for me to get my mind around this thing called football. If someone is, say, in the marines, at least I can console myself that they are sacrificing their bodies for their country. But for football, it’s only for the love of the game.  I read about a Michigan State player who declined the opportunity to play for a fifth year, saying how it’s both mentally and physically tough.

My son is a pack person. Always has been. I call his high school friends the football bro’s. But college is different. Every teammate is a brother, but also a competitor, looking to take your spot. It’s a question of who’s hungrier, smarter, stronger, tougher. I wonder about the anxiety such a mixed sense of bonding must bring my son where every teammate is a member of his pack but willing to sacrifice him if it means they will get more play time.

And yet, my son will tell me about a teammate, who came from nothing, who sends his stipend checks home every month; my son says this teammate will have his back if he ever gets caught in the bad corner of a city or some difficult situation. I want him to bring these boys home, because I am a mama bear. But he doesn’t want to. He thinks we look too rich.

My son knows that I largely put myself through college and would live off a box of pasta and packet of hot dogs for the week tuition was due.  But current appearances don’t reveal that back story, and he’s right, our house looks cushy.

Does the fact that I have saved my whole life for my son’s education make him just the little bit softer on the field? Gosh, I hope not, but that damage is already done. My son has options, choices; most of the other boys do not.

I understand with college football, there are lines I cannot cross, questions I cannot ask.  Even on the closed, parents-only Facebook page, I don’t express my worry about their practices in the heat. I don’t ask if anyone else read about the autopsy on Washington State quarterback, Tyler Hilinski. He was 21 and had a brain of a 65-year old. At most, we ask who’s tailgating or who’s going to fan appreciation day.  Or on birthdays, does anyone know how we can get some cupcakes to our sons (as long as it’s a son not having to keep his weight down.)

My husband, a soccer and rugby player, seems better able to handle the pressures. I guess it’s a guy thing. My son sends him the occasional video of him throwing up after a weight lifting session.  They think it’s funny.

Can we go back to flag football, where the whole town cheered for both sides, and at most, I worried about grass stains on the uniform?  Where we raised money for local charities at the annual Milk Bowl? Now, it’s millions of dollars at stake for a major network TV spot. I can’t even make my next hair appointment because the game time will only be determined last minute based on TV ratings (and trust me, my hair color leaves no wiggle room for last minute scheduling!). I watched my son’s snaps on TV, comparing his to the other center’s. My role as football mom started when my son was five, the first time I let him stay up to late enough to watch the Super Bowl halftime show. It was the same year as Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. I should have known then that football would push the boundaries of a mother’s heart.

This is my son’s dream. His journey. I am just the silent supporter. So I read my Football for Dummies book, trying to keep the differences between intentional grounding in the NFL versus college football straight. I try not to think too much about the darker sides of the game, just like every other football mama.  I suspect the prayers of all football moms are largely the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Cindi Michael, author The Sportscaster’s Daughter

When I think of my father, I think of the way he fought for custody of my brother, sister, and me, despite being a rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey and bachelor at the time. Our mother had been neglecting us and he won sole custody of us when I was eleven; in 1976, sole custody was a rarity for any father.

I think of the way he would make us a hot breakfast – usually pancakes loaded with butter and syrup – before school when we had an important test. I remember, too, how patient he was in helping me learn how to throw a softball and sometimes make contact with the bat, despite how pathetic a player I was. My father was not a patient man. He was an overachieving perfectionist, once rated the best DJ in the country by Billboard magazine and later the best Sportscaster in the country. Some say he inspired ESPN’s Sports Center; for sure every aspiring sportscaster studied his show and several of the current sportscaster’s interned or worked for my father. This is the other side of my father:  his public image and fame.  I admire this side of him for all his accomplishments, but I wonder about what it cost him as a father.

In the years before and after my father got custody, we were close. He was larger than life as a person and even larger as my father and sole parent. The cracks in our relationship started slowly, a tragic trifecta of my high school years, his getting fired as a DJ, then working relentlessly to succeed as a sportscaster, and his remarrying. Our step mother did not want children, but we were part of the package, like it or not. After our move from New Jersey to Maryland, as my dad was building his following at WRC and later for his nationally syndicated show, The Sports Machine, his 60-hour workweeks turned into 80. In New Jersey, we saw our father most days; in Maryland, it was only a few hours a week, on Saturday or Sunday mornings before we each went to work, him to the TV Studio or to a sports event, me to a weekend waitressing job. My stepmother worked with him, so taking care of the house and my younger sister again became my responsibility. Initially, I lived up to my father’s high expectations, but when I put on weight, he would say, “Boys will only want you for one thing. Two tons of fun are better than one.”  He’d laugh his boisterous, deep laugh, trying to be cool while softening the blow. The remark hurt, of course, and I resented that he expected me to be that perfect. I mean, at least I wasn’t home alone throwing wild parties while he was away for a rodeo or Super Bowl. Being a good girl and honors student was not enough for him.

Tensions were rising between my father and me, worsened by a boyfriend he didn’t like, but the final straw happened when I was a freshman in college; my father called me on the dorm phone, angry that I had not told him about an award I had received for student of the year and told me not to bother coming home again. His temper is legendary. I’ve seen him throw a carousel of music tapes across a studio; he broke his foot once for kicking a chair in anger; and we had at least one hole in the kitchen wall from one of his outbursts. My father had often threatened my brother with not being allowed home (he was the wild one), but not me.  At the time, I didn’t understand enough about family patterns and narcissism to realize my father was imitating his own father’s parenting approach. Pop, my grandfather, had disowned a daughter for getting pregnant out of wedlock. As devout Catholics, perhaps that was the norm in the 1950s.

During our first rift in college, my father’s anger lasted a full two years. By the time we eventually reconciled, I had learned to pay for my own tuition and rent, working multiple jobs to stay in school. I was used to taking care of myself—a point of both pride and irritation for my father.  My father wanted me to need him, to not be able to survive without him, but he would have been embarrassed if I had failed. In those two years of our estrangement, I learned I could survive without him financially, but not emotionally; I needed his love.

After we reconciled, he declared me a success after seeing my name on a store plaque for sales person of the month for multiple months. He vowed never to turn his back on me again. But he did.

The next transgression was for moving away and marrying the only boyfriend my father had ever liked – a Swiss foreign exchange student, a man as ambitious as my father. The build up to our wedding makes Megan Markle’s family look normal; I walked myself down the aisle, still hoping my father would show and not wanting anyone else to take his place beside me. I didn’t understand then that my father probably wanted me to marry the Swiss boyfriend, but to stay in Maryland instead of moving to Switzerland. This is the other tricky thing about narcissists; they expect you to know what they want, even when they can’t say for themselves.  This next rift would last for 20 years. My first marriage was short-lived. While I was used to the emotional roughness, I called it quits after my Swiss husband drew blood by slamming me into a wall for failing to remember a particular German word. (Bise. It means cold, north wind, and I have never ever forgotten again).

I later remarried, so I did get to a happily ever after, but one my father was never part of. I wrote to him for years, until he eventually told me to stop.  I sent him pictures of his first granddaughter, offering to bring her to DC so he could meet her. He never responded. Ditto when my son was born. Does this make him a bad father? Or simply a broken person? It’s only with 30 years of hindsight that I understand that my moving away hurt him in a way that he could never get over. Anger, for him, was the best antidote.  Fans who idolized him could fill whatever void I left, and could fill the need his own abusive upbringing created. No doubt, my step mother fanned the flames of anger, an unfortunate cliché in an already fragile family dynamic.

I have often wondered how my father would see my husband, now of 24 years. He would have liked him as a jock (rugby and soccer) and sports enthusiast. But would he have looked down on him for choosing his family—putting me and our kids first — when he traded a high-powered corporate career for a less glamorous job with less work travel?  It hurts to ponder that.

I never gave up on my father, though, never stopped believing that he could once again be the good father I remembered him as. I assumed it would be after he retired, when he would be forced to slow down and allow the memories and what-ifs to re-ignite his soul.  He would have relished in my son, his grandson, being recruited to play football in college.  Some might say such a reunion was wishful thinking on my part. For sure, I wished—and prayed— for this, but also, Pop too had softened and eventually made peace with his disowned daughter.  Couldn’t my father have repeated this pattern too? Maybe I would have been less hopeful had I thought more about how my father never spoke to that sister again, even though she and Pop had reconciled. Or maybe we too would have had our happier ending if my father hadn’t died so suddenly after retiring; his friends say he thought he could beat the lymphoma.  I can only wonder now and remember the times he was a good father.

 

 

 

I was in the doctor’s office, sitting in a regular chair, avoiding the examination table, when Dr. Matteson declared, “the stone has to come out. It’s too big to pass on its own.”

I had had a bout with kidney stones four years earlier. I was one of those lucky ones who never had any pain, just some other symptoms that announced the stones’ presence. “Okay, so can we do the sonic thing again?”  They blast the stones with shock waves in water. There’s very little pain and it’s a speedy recovery.

“No. It’s too low down for that.”  He drew a picture of what he was seeing on the CT scan, placing a big blob near the bottom. “This time the stone’s here.”

We debated back and forth as I had seen with my husband’s experience with stones that this invasive surgery Dr. Matteson was now proposing could be truly awful, and the stent worse than the stones themselves.  I did not want this surgery, period. I also explained it couldn’t be any time soon as the next two months I was traveling a lot for work.

Dr. Matteson countered. “I’m worried you’re on borrowed time with this. If this thing moves mid-flight, you will have quite a problem. You might lose the kidney.”

Oh, for Pete’s sake, I thought. Do we really need this fear mongering? I mean, I had zero pain. Zip, zero, nada. Most people would not have even come to the doctor. I had just a little bit of blood for a couple days—months ago!   And really, the doctor had canceled at least one appointment on me, albeit due to a snow storm. Ignorance was indeed bliss. How long had the mysterious stone been sitting there? How much longer would it lay dormant before causing a crisis?

The doctor and I discussed-argued a bit longer. He declared I was being difficult (I disagreed), then handed me the number to schedule the surgery.

As I drove home from the doctor’s office, I thought of my sister, Michelle, even though she hadn’t spoken to me in 30 years now. She seemingly had had a problem with her kidneys a few years earlier. I heard she almost died. I didn’t believe it at that time, because surely someone would have called me if my sister were really that ill.  But then again, nobody called me when my father died suddenly on Christmas Eve. Instead, it was a neighbor who heard of his passing on the radio, who called my husband, who informed me. So why, then, would anyone be more considerate about a sister I had mostly raised until I was 18 and she was 13? This is the other painful side of being estranged from family: I don’t get to know the medical issues that run in our family. Whenever I have to fill in some form at a doctor’s office about such questions, the pain of so many secrets, and all that I don’t kno, resurfaces.

So as I drove back home that day, I could only wonder just how serious my situation was.

I’m not a risk taker, and I do normally follow doctor’s orders. But the Sydney trip was the kick off to our summit season—Sydney, Dallas, London—back to back travel. It’s like asking a tax accountant to take off during tax season. Would it be career ending?  And who was I kidding here? I am my father’s daughter:  over achieving and never calling in sick.  For my father, it would be like missing the Super Bowl.

As exciting and exotic as Sydney sounds, it is one of my least favorite destinations. I’ve already had two traumatic trips there. On the first, my father-in-law died suddenly and unexpectedly.  On the second, my then 17-year old son threw a party with the police called to the house. Fortunately, so many of his friends had shown up unexpectedly, the ratio of beer to kids was low enough that nobody was puking when the police arrived. But still, my son scarred me for life, with a week of worry not knowing if he would get kicked out of his Catholic high school or not. Would this trip to Sydney be the trifecta – a trip to the ER or worse, the plane being forced to touch down en route in Hawaii as the stone moved unexpectedly?

My husband and I read up on kidney stones and the like. It seems they can sit there for months without moving. What harm would another few weeks cause? I ordered a homeopathic vitamin called Stone Breaker, widely used in Brazil and in China, willing to try anything other than surgery. I gave up chocolate for Lent, bargaining with God. (For me, giving up chocolate is like giving up air.) Dear God, please, just don’t let the stone move mid-flight. I kept an old prescription of my husband’s back pain medication in my purse wherever I went.

One snow storm after another seemed to push this surgery past the Sydney trip, anyway. There was an X-Ray to schedule, and EKG, and no multi vitamins allowed seven days prior.  All the signs seemed to say it was okay to wait a few weeks.

My back started to bother me the morning of the 22-hour flight. Was that from a run or is that the first sign when the stone starts moving?  I called my husband at work and asked how much warning I would get if the stone was about to move.

He said, “five minutes. “And then you are throwing up and need to go to the ER.”

I imagined an attack starting mid key note. Gosh, what a memorable keynote that would be!

As I boarded the plane, the flight attendant set down a glass of champagne and box of chocolate. Oh, the temptation. I sent the chocolates back. A bargain is a bargain, after all.

I willed myself to think positive thoughts as I sat on Manly Beach on my day off, memorizing my script. My back bothered me the whole week I was in Sydney, but nothing dire happened.

I was home for two days before heading back out to Dallas. The events chairperson sent a treat to my hotel room to thank me for all my hard work: a bouquet of cake pops, propped up in a jar of M&Ms. I scarfed down the cake pops, telling myself chocolate cake was okay as long as I resisted the M&Ms. That jar taunted me all week long.

Finally, it was time for the surgery, my few days home between my Dallas and London trips. I grumbled about needing to do this before another difficult conference, but silently thanked God I hadn’t had an incident mid-flight or mid keynote.

As I came to in the recovery room, groggy from the anesthetic, Dr. Matteson said, “It was impacted, so you’ve had some damage to the ureter. I had to put in a long stent and it needs to stay in for three to four weeks.”

“Impacted? So you mean it was never going to move?”

“Right.”

All that fear mongering for nothing, I thought. “Then we could have left it?”

He looked over at my husband, by my side, as if it say, is she always like this?  Dr. Matteson replied, “Noooo, you could not have left it. You were lucky. Usually, these things, you end up in the ER and it can be quite serious.”

I started crying then, wondering if that’s what had happened to my sister. The nurse blamed my tears on the anesthetic.

I flew to London two days later, sore and cranky. I could only take the pain medication for two days; otherwise, it turns your contact lenses orange. My daughter tried to cheer me up, “But, Mom, lots of people get colored contact lenses.”

“Blue or green,” I barked, “not orange!” I worried I would look like a werewolf.  I just had to suck it up and hope Motrin would be adequate. In a way, sitting on a plane and in meetings was probably the best thing because walking made the discomfort worse.

As dates would fall, the doctor decided the stent could come out after two weeks, a combination that Dr. Matteson was on vacation the follow week and that I lamented I could not take one more week of stent torture.

As I awoke in the operating room, the Thursday before Easter, Dr. Matteson said he was pleased with how things were healing. I asked him, then, “I still don’t understand why I keep getting stones. I mean, I drink more water than anyone else I know.”

He shrugged non-committal. “Some people are predisposed. It must be hereditary in your family.”  The remark didn’t sting as much as it might have, as if he simply voiced what I had been silently suspecting for the past month.

As Easter Sunday rolled around and I was finally stone and stent free, the Easter bunny lavished me with all kinds of decadent chocolates. They never tasted sweeter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s my birthday today. If you read last year’s blog, then you know that sometimes it’s a bittersweet day for me.

For some reason, this year, I don’t feel that angst that I’ve felt in some years. Is it because I know that it’s pointless to Google my dad’s name nowadays, that there will be no new stories? Or is it just the general healing process, when it’s finally only the happy memories and the current joy in my life that more overshadow the sad ones?

My first gift to myself was to take the day off work. I do love my job and am so blessed that I landed in an exciting and healthy industry of big data and analytics. But there are days I get run ragged. So I slept in, enjoyed a coffee in bed with the cat, a book, and gifts from my husband and kids. Honestly, if you are a cat lover, this Ragdoll cat is true to his name. My family wonders where they stand in the pecking order relative to the cat, and my son of course gave me a birthday card begging to paint a dog into the mix. We shall see. For sure, this empty nest feels too empty for my liking. Can’t we get to the grand kids phase sooner?

My family has always gone to lengths to make my birthdays so special. I noted that my daughter must have mailed my card the very day she went back to college, because the mail is so friggin slow from Florida. There is the one year that they baked me the most decadent chocolate cake ever, a recipe from O Magazine. What a labor of love given my husband is an awesome chef but has an aversion to baking. Thank goodness he downsized this year with just the two of us home.

I can think back too to the slumber parties my father used to let me host in middle school–all those girls and a bachelor, rock ‘n roll DJ father then. He made the best pancakes for us in the morning, loaded with butter, of course. I remember the year we all sat at the breakfast bar and he told one of my friends, Claire, how good her hair smelled. We all giggled knowingly. Anyone remember the shampoo, Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific?

In the year and a half now since my memoir published, I’ve heard from a range of people. Some never knew my father, never watched or listened to him on TV or radio. They could relate to my story from the shared scars that a difficult family upbringing leaves. Knowing that even a single person drew strength from my story makes sharing it worth while. I’ve also heard from people who were my father’s fans and friends. It hurts when I hear how some people are disappointed in him. Did anyone really expect him to be perfect? Perhaps that is often the case with people in the public eye, but it seems unfair to me. It’s helped me heal to hear from people who understood how equally generous and harsh he could be. Most say that their lives were better off for having known him.

I understand too that my family and some of my friends wish I would let him go. I get it. But I relate more to this view I heard recently in respect to our fallen veterans: they say a soldier dies twice – once when he dies and the second time when someone no longer says his name.

A New Year and a birthday is often a time for resolutions and goals. So here I sit, thinking it’s time to move on to the next story. It’s been bubbling away for several years now, only one chapter written. I have a title even! It’s fun. It’s warm hearted. And it’s about football. Ironic, right? But it’s inspired by my son and his friends- not my father. There is soooo much rich material to work with. I envision one of the mothers as a Tarot card reader. That will be fun to research. Now, if only I had more time to write! Let’s see what the year brings!

Cheers,

Cindi

 

 

 

One of the themes in my memoir, The Sportscaster’s Daughter, is forgiveness. I talked about this in my Fox TV interview and the reactions have run the gamut. Some agreed and others railed against it, thinking forgiveness is a pass, excusing a person’s bad behavior. It’s not. But I get it. Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness can feel like you are giving in and saying the other person was right, and if they weren’t right, then by forgiving, are we allowing ourselves to be a doormat?  Also, it seems like we are becoming less tolerant – of slights, of mistakes, of differences of opinion even.  If we can’t forgive the little things, then forgiving a bigger transgression becomes mission impossible.

I cannot say why I am able to forgive my father and when that feeling even surfaced. For sure, in college, when he first told me not to come home, I was pissed. I didn’t forgive him then and my anger ruled me. His anger ruled him, too. We were both being stubborn. The anger felt better, stronger than the hurt – a nice protective shell.  But I didn’t like the person I was becoming then: hardening my heart to my father meant I was also hardening my heart to others. I laughed less and barked more.

The sociologist Renee Brown talks about how much we numb ourselves to such hurts. That’s why we drink more, surf the internet more, use drugs more. It’s so much easier to numb ourselves, at least in the short term it seems. There’s a reason too that some are called workaholics, and not just “hard workers;” excessive work can be their drug of choice.

During the second rift with my father, I wasn’t mad at him; I just didn’t understand him. During college, we had reconciled for two years and during this time, I tried to do everything to please my father. This included getting back together with the Swiss boyfriend, the only boyfriend my father ever really liked. When my father said he wouldn’t come to our wedding, it hurt. A lot. It hurt more so because my father had promised never to shun me again. In the days and years that followed, I didn’t think about the need to forgive him. I could only ask, “why?” Eventually, I blamed myself for all our problems, because that made more sense than a father turning his back on his daughter for no reason. I figured I must just be unlovable. (Yes, that feeling sucks.) It would take another ten years for me to start to wonder what was wrong with my father, to think perhaps the problem was with him all along.

Here, then, is what I see as one of my father’s faults:  he did not forgive. He never really forgave me for my mistake in high school and held onto this as a justification for never speaking to me again. My father’s temper is legendary. People loyal to him say how much he helped their careers and made their lives better.  With people who crossed him or disappointed him, he wrote them out of his life, no matter if a professional colleague or an extended family member.  He nurtured his hurts and grudges, letting them ferment into a potent cocktail. Some who know him blame my step mother for fanning his anger and for blowing any slight out of proportion; this seems too much of a cliché to me. She was a catalyst but not the spark. Instead, I place more of the blame on his own childhood trauma. Understanding him has been part of why I could forgive. Cherishing the good times is the other part. He was both a fabulous father and an awful father. Of course my father would say he didn’t need forgiving – he had done nothing wrong.

Forgiving does not mean we forget. There’s a reason we study history in school, in the hopes that we can learn from the past. There are times when I think, “I could never forgive that – be it sexual abuse, murder – things way worse than what I have dealt with.” And yet, I hear from people abused by a parent, and they have been able to forgive. This doesn’t undo the wrongs. It doesn’t take away the pain. It doesn’t excuse the behavior. It simply means we will not let the anger and bitterness rule us.

Probably the hardest thing for me to forgive him for is his dying on Christmas Eve, without saying goodbye. I understand he thought he had more time and that he was afraid. So I can only go with the subtle messages he left behind, and this coincidence from that 2009 Christmas Eve church bulletin:  a story from Henry van Dyke, the same Henry whose poem I found when I was eleven years old, rediscovered in my diary after my father died, and read at his makeshift memorial. “If you truly believe that love is the strongest thing in the world—stronger than hate . . . then you can keep Christmas.”

 

 

This chapter didn’t make it into the published version of The Sportscaster’s Daughter.  This post is in honor of Elvis’ memory and his passing 40 years ago this week. Be sure to catch RewoundRadio on Saturday, August 19, at 12 to hear the show.

The summer before 7^th grade, my friend from Alluvium, Jill Parker, and I took turns going back and forth between my house in Oakland in Northern New Jersey and her beach house in Brigantine, a small island near Atlantic City in South Jersey. 1977 was the summer of the son of Sam, the New York City black out, and of Jill and I helping to answer Dad’s fan mail. It was late afternoon on August 16, 1977, and we were walking home from the beach when a neighbor shouted out her garage that Elvis Presley had died. Elvis? He was too young to die.  We shouted back,”How?” Our neighbor wasn’t sure if it was a heart attack or a drug overdose.

Neither of us could believe it. We ran down the street back to Jill’s house to ask Mrs. Parker if she had heard about Elvis. I called home to find out if Dad knew.  Our baby sitter, Jane, had just heard the news too, and Dad was on his way to work. His show that night was a quickly-pulled-together tribute to Elvis, the King of Rock ‘n Roll.  (see this YouTube video of Dad on WABC that night.)

While details of Elvis’ death began to emerge, Dad began planning a tribute to the man that had shaped the music industry, whose life had inspired so many, including my father’s.  He envisioned a radio show that combined personal stories with music, a show that would tell the story of Elvis’s life. Dad didn’t believe Elvis had died of an overdose. He thought it was a heart attack and thought the press was trying to ruin a legend.

During the day, Dad worked the phones from our kitchen, trying to convince people to do interviews.  Priscilla Presley turned him down immediately. The Colonel, Presley’s manager, agreed to an interview. Ann Margaret eventually agreed. Sammy Davis, Jr., signed on, too.

I was in the kitchen when Dad again made the pitch to Priscilla Presley.

“You owe it to your daughter. She’ll want to know about her father.… I promise you, I’m not trying to bury him.” “Bury” was Dad’s term for ruining somebody. Lisa Marie Presley would have only been nine or so, a few years younger than me at the time. Dad knew what he was talking about. I was not yet a mother who could fully understand how much a daughter needs to be able to look up to her father, but Dad’s argument was convincing even then.

Priscilla said she’d think about it. She wanted to hear some of the other interviews first.

Dad worked on the show for months, in every free moment he had. His goal was to have it ready for the one-year anniversary of Elvis’ death. It would be a three-hour radio broadcast that would be sold to radio stations around the country. Mike Phillips was Dad’s favorite engineer at WABC, and he would produce the show. Mike was one of the friendliest engineers to us kids whenever we went into work with Dad. Dad flew to Memphis and other places to interview people.

As Dad was already working three jobs (disc jockey, weekend sports caster, play-by-play for the Islanders), it was sometimes hard to schedule the personal interviews. He sent his then girlfriend Pat to interview some people. Dad crafted the questions, and Pat recorded the interviews.

When Pat came back from one of the interviews, there was a slight buzz on one of Pat’s tapes. Dad went ballistic. Pat shouldn’t have put the tape through the airport scanner, and Dad shouted that she should have taken it out or checked in her luggage. Pat stood her ground, that it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t dare pack the tapes in her luggage in case they got lost.  Hopefully, Mike Phillips would be able to work his magic in the editing studio and get rid of the buzz.

Dad sent Priscilla copies of some of the interviews. They revealed Elvis the person, not just the legend. They showed that Dad was trustworthy. Priscilla eventually agreed to give Dad the interview, and as she had not spoken to any media since Elvis’s death, Dad’s interview would be the first. Dad made Priscilla a personal promise that she would get to hear the final version of her interview before it aired. He wouldn’t leak anything to the press.

Shortly before the tribute was to air, Dad and us kids were stood in the Grand Union grocery store in downtown Oakland picking up a few groceries.  We were waiting in the check out line, when Dad noticed the cover of one of the tabloids. “Priscilla Presley Breaks Silence.”

Dad grabbed the tabloid and started skimming. “Sonofabitch! Sonofabitch!”

“What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked.

His face darkened in rage. “I’ll tell you in the car. Hurry up.”

We rushed to bag the groceries. Dad sped home. “That sonofabitch Sklar leaked the story.  I promised her. I fucking promised her!”

Rick Sklar was Dad’s boss at WABC. He had listened to segments of the show. Even though Sklar wasn’t personally involved in the project, Dad used the ABC studios to produce the program. Sklar had wanted to check on the show’s quality. Dad didn’t trust him, didn’t want him to hear anything ahead of the live airing, but in the end, he had to let him listen or he might lose studio time. Sklar had lied to him. He had betrayed and embarrassed my father.

The first person Dad called when we got home was Sklar. It was scary. When my Dad was mad, it was best to lie low and stay out of his way. Even from my bedroom downstairs, I could hear him shouting. The hole in the wall next to the kitchen phone was probably from that day.

The second person he called was Priscilla. He apologized. He took full responsibility, even though he hadn’t okayed the leak. He hadn’t even known about it, but a promise was a promise, and he had failed her.

I don’t know how Priscilla responded to Dad’s call. For me, it was clear that Dad made the show because he admired Elvis. He wanted Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie, to know the whole story about her father, not just the trash.

The show was aired around the country and eventually around the world. It was critically acclaimed. For years, it was broadcast on the anniversary of Elvis’s death. The royalties helped pay for my Dad’s wedding to Pat that fall. Even in 1978, my father had been an innovator. His bosses at WABC had told him nobody would want to listen to a 3-hour radio tribute. It was too long. But fans did listen. People told him he would never get Priscilla to talk. She had never given an interview, even following her initial divorce from Elvis. Why would Dad be any different? And yet she talked to him.

I wish I had a copy of this show. I consider it one of his finest works, both as a disc jockey and as a person. I wish someone would make a show about my own father, in the way that he did for Lisa Marie’s benefit. My father made a career of unearthing people’s stories, of understanding the person behind the public image. Some of his interviews of sports personalities inspired full-length movies, like The Rookie and Eight Seconds.

There is still so much I don’t know about my father. And yet I know such a show would only include his accomplishments, in radio and sportscasting. They wouldn’t help me understand him as a person, because my father didn’t let people get close to him.

Postscript, August 13, 2017

A special thank you to Lee Chambers of Digital Media Creatives who recently found a copy of the albums distributed to ABC stations on eBay and has restored it for me to be able to listen to.  I have also tried to find the article from the tabloid we saw in the super market that day, but have not been able to find it, the pre-digital era. I suppose too that tabloids are not as well archived for research purposes.

Postscript, August 16, 2017

Lee reached out to the disc jockeys and producers at Rewound Radio who is now airing my father’s show, Elvis Memories, on Saturday, August 19, at 12 p.m. I’ve been listening to the restored version. It may be hard to imagine the context, the historical significance now, in an era of instant tweeting, but to hear Priscilla speak for the first time after Elvis’ death gave me chills. She beautifully recalls the day Lisa Marie was born. To many, Elvis was a music legend, but to Lisa Marie, he was just a father. Thank you to Allan Sniffen and John Troll for rebroadcasting such an important show.  Thank you also to Sam Press, whom I met on Facebook and who uncovered the WABC TV interview from the night Elvis died.

 

It’s summer and I can’t wait for our annual trip to the shore, my place of peace, of happy memories, old and new. Except this summer, my daughter won’t be joining us, because she is in freaking Africa. Namibia, to be precise. I wrote in my memoir, “I revel to watch my daughter dive into the waves, the furthest one out; I have given her those wings, or more accurately, those fins.” Megan is twenty-one now, and a marine science major. She needed a research internship and apparently with the dessert and the water patterns and who-knows-what, Namibia has just the kind of dolphins and sea life that interest her. I pointed out: New Jersey has dolphins! She answered with a coy smile and silence. ….

                                Continue reading full article on Working Mother. 

Postscript, August 6, 2017:

My daughter returned home safely to the USA this past week. Phew! All is right with my world again. She truly has had a once-in-a-lifetime experience both travel and internship wise. She’s regaled us with stories and photos of marine life including spottings of mola mola fish (a huge creature), different classes of dolphins and wales, along with an array of safari animals. I love this photo from Sossuvlei, with the highest sand dunes in the world, salt base, and dead trees. She is glad to be able to once again sleep in her own comfortable bed, but loves the memory of sleeping on top of the jeep in a tent … to avoid getting accidentally trampled in the night by a wandering elephant!

We were checking out the community gym at our Bethany Beach rental Saturday, when I overheard the security guard at the desk say to a co-worker, “Jim Vance died.”

Vance. Jim Vance, one of my father’s best friends, one of the few people who probably understood him.

I had to stop and sit for a minute, because I had only just been talking about Vance to my husband earlier in the week. It seemed an odd coincidence.

The connection between Vance and my father was immediate, starting already when my father flew to DC in early 1980 for an in-person interview. Their on-air banter was as genuine as it was entertaining.

I wrote in my book about one particular exchange. During the commercial break, Vance had made a comment about women not baking anymore. When they came back on air, they were still arguing, Vance telling my father not to get him in trouble here. Vance countered, “I didn’t say they can’t bake; I said they don’t bake bread anymore.” Dad bragged, “My daughter Cindi bakes me raisin bread all the time.” When I heard that exchange, I immediately baked two loaves, one for Dad and one for Vance. The next night, on the air, Dad presented Vance his loaf of homemade raisin bread, and the camera zoomed in to show raisins poking through a golden crust. Vance wrote me a thank you note, a note I have cherished and saved for 30 years now.

They had their classic exchanges, Is “wrassling” as Vance called it, for real? Viewers joined in on taking sides on this debate, and I love the photo of the poster a fan made telling Vance to “sit on it.” There are the serious moments, too, when Len Bias, the University of Maryland basketball player, overdosed in 1986, my father gave way to tears on air and Vance had to finish the story for him. On the lighter side, I have watched the episode of them cracking up over the runway model stumbling, multiple times.

I wonder about their instant connection. Was it the understanding of how they both had succeeded despite their difficult childhoods? Or that, after accomplishing so much, they should have had an inner strength and self-confidence, but neither really did.

Vance gave the eulogy at my father’s funeral, saying that his biggest fear was of failure. I wonder, if my father had been alive, what would he have said of Vance? For sure, he would have thanked him for making work FUN.

My condolences to Vance’s family and friends. May he Rest In Peace.

 

I was doing a reading and book club at a library when someone asked, “have you had a lot of therapy, because you seem really normal?”

It’s a loaded question and I hesitated to answer. For many, therapy is life and soul saving. For most of my life, therapy was not an option, a combination of my father’s view that it’s for crazy and weak people and that the cost is prohibitive. For me, therapy was synonymous with shame.

There was a time in high school when my brother got in trouble with the police for breaking into a police compound to steal car radios. The police said he was the look out, but knowing my brother, I think he just happened to be hanging out with his idiot friends who were the master minds of the attempted stealing. I don’t know for sure. The details were never openly discussed the night he came home from jail or in the weeks that followed. My father said my brother could leave home and change his name or stay, but home would be like prison. I suggested to my father that we should go to a family counselor. I mean, wasn’t this clearly one more of my brother’s cries for help? My father grimaced in disgust at my suggestion. I was disappointed, for my brother’s sake, but also for mine as by that point our family dynamics were killing me too. I just coped in different ways from my brother.

As counseling wasn’t an option, I turned to books for my answers. I still maintain that reading is one of the best ways of understanding and healing from childhood trauma. I journaled a lot, until my step mother started reading my private thoughts, no matter where I hid my diary. In college, when my father first told me not to come home again, I turned to a priest. He certainly helped me be strong and to choose love over hate, but he didn’t have the expertise in diagnosing our family dysfunction. I resumed writing in my journal, to unleash my anger, my pain, and to understand. When I look back on decades of journals, I see where I have progressed and where I have not.

Becoming a mother resurfaced a number of my own childhood traumas and fears that I would repeat my father’s failures with my own children. I sensed I needed help. The final straw was the prospect of our moving back to DC, my father’s town. I was working on my MBA at the time so I went to the student health center. Free therapy! But you get what you pay for. This therapist, who was probably a student himself, thought my coping techniques must be fine. I was an A student, a reliable mother, so I must be doing okay, right? No matter that I was dying inside. No matter that as my logic went, if my father and sister were happier without me, maybe my children and husband would be better off without me too. We had a few sessions, then I gave up. I tried a therapist who was covered by my husband’s insurance plan, all the time fearing the repercussions of this; a friend told me never to use insurance lest a future employer use it against me. (Is this a valid fear? I’d really like to know.) She was slightly better than the campus therapist, but it irked me that she ate lunch while I talked. With a baby, a toddler, and school schedule, the time invested with this therapist didn’t seem worth the scheduling effort. As life would have it, we didn’t move to DC and moved to Michigan instead, my immediate crisis averted.

So it was only when my father died on Christmas Eve, suddenly and unexpectedly, that I knew books alone could not save me from that degree of trauma. I asked friends – discreetly – for recommendations. The most recommended therapist did not take insurance. So this is the other issue with therapy: who can afford it? I gave her a budget of six sessions. She was awesome. She helped me heal, changed my thinking, and diagnosed my father as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I have since devoured four books on the topic. It’s not that my work was done in six sessions (that I did up to eight); it’s that she pointed me in the right direction.

I do think therapy can be wonderful with a good therapist and with hard work. But how does one know who are the good therapists? It can be dangerous to pick at wounds without a clear way to close them back up again. I have had some therapist friends of mine comment on patients who don’t want to do the hard work. Should someone really be in therapy for years? Maybe. Extreme mental illness, of course. But when therapy is a superficial crutch, I liken it to going to the doctor for a heart issue; he or she tells you to cut back on butter and to exercise more. You don’t. But you keep going back to hear the same advice, over and over again.

So I wish people used more than just therapy in their journeys to understand and heal. Reading and writing are gifts we all have. They’re affordable, too. I didn’t have the idyllic childhood that makes me “normal.” Instead, I’ve been blessed to have others in my life that have shown me what normal is. Ironically, it’s my father that gave me an unrelenting determination, the difference in that I’ve directed on continuing to heal.

Regards,

Cindi

The beach always soothes my soul. This one in Barbados.

 

The George Michael Sports Machine went off the air ten years ago this March, after a nearly 30-year run. George Michael’s legacy lives on via the many ESPN sportscasters he mentored, including Lindsay Czarniak and Michael Wilbon. He also had a recent cameo appearance in the hit spy show The Americans, which takes place in Washington DC in the 1980s when the The Sports Machine first launched. Michael’s interviews inspired several movies including The Rookie and Tin Cup.

But few know the personal story of George Michael himself, his rise to fame and the impact that fame had on his family. My father did not trust journalists, particularly after one harsh article in The Washington Post just as he was transitioning from disc jockey to sportscaster. He created a public persona and only revealed the parts of his personal life that helped boost that image. To an extent, all famous people have to do this, and yet, I think people would have found his true back story so much more inspiring.

Here are five things you may not have known about my father, George Michael, some of which are in my memoir, The Sportscaster’s Daughter, some are not:

1. He Failed Before He Succeeded

My father was a rock ‘n roll disc jockey in New York before he became Washington, DC’s most revered sportscaster. At the height of his disc jockey career, he was rated the top disc jockey in the country by Billboard magazine. In November, 1979, he was fired from WABC. Ironically, it was on his first wedding anniversary to my stepmother, and the surprise party I had planned for them that night was not as festive as I had hoped. My father tried to hold back tears that night as he said, “I’ll never make this kind of money again.” When you are at the top in the biggest media market in the country, the only place to go is down. This was the same year he was being considered as a host for the Olympics, the Miracle on Ice game my father did not get to announce. At one point, his best prospects looked to be announcing the Islanders hockey games in winter and the Mets in spring, an even tougher travel schedule than he already had. Fortunately, he started as the sports director at WRC-TV in DC that April, five months after getting fired from WABC.

It was a difficult year for our family, but clearly, my father reached new heights in his career. I have always told my children to dream big dreams, and to work them from every angle, because that’s exactly what my father did.  His first sports rejection came shortly after he graduated college when he did not get his dream job of announcing Cardinal’s baseball games, his beloved hometown team. So ultimately, it took him another 20 years to achieve his next dream job.

2. His Aunt Was a Pioneer in TV

My dad was a pioneer in sports broadcasting, creating his show in 1980 with video highlights from around the country. Sports highlights are the norm today, with people streaming content from phones and TVs. But in the 1980s, few people had cable or satellite dishes. The video highlights from sports teams around the country were one-of-a-kind. Some say he inspired ESPN Sports Center, and for sure, many reporters trained under my father. But he was not the only pioneer in our family. His Aunt Alice had her own cooking show on ABC in the 1960s, known to viewers as Nancy Craig.

3. He Didn’t Grow Up Poor

After my father died, a reporter asked me a lot of questions that I had never before contemplated:  did he really grow up poor? Did he or didn’t he play soccer in college? These were some of the stories that he apparently had told as part of his public image. As a child, I had never heard him talk about growing up poor. As for soccer, I remember going to some of his neighborhood games when I was a child, and even recall his last game, when he injured his leg and was carted off in an ambulance. But all that was before his college days. After my father died, I journeyed to St. Louis to find out the truth. I visited his childhood home, that, by today’s standards, I would describe as middle class or even upper middle class.  He didn’t grow up rich, but he most certainly didn’t grow up poor. As for his soccer, it seems he played some in high school, but never in college.

I wonder why he needed to paint this image of having grown up “on the wrong side of the tracks.” For sure, he was the first in his family to go to college, and to me, that is enough of a success story. His father was a butcher and owned a small grocery story, passing on a work ethic that influenced my father and me.

4. He Never Healed Family Rifts

My grandfather, Pop, had four wives. I have heard that my grandmother —my father’s mother—was a cold-hearted woman and a perfectionist. Dad was the baby of the family and his mother’s favorite. When my father was five year’s old, Pop disowned  his oldest daughter, my father’s half-sister, for getting pregnant out of wedlock. Although Pop and his daughter reconciled before his death, my father never spoke to that sister again nor had any contact with her.

When my father died, he hadn’t spoken to me in nearly twenty years, repeating a painful family pattern. Our first estrangement began when I was in college, when in a burst of anger my father told me never to come home again. We reconciled for a period, but my father stopped speaking to me again when I moved to Switzerland, to marry my high school sweetheart, a man my father adored. I still can’t say for sure why this hurt him to the point that he refused to talk to me. He never explained things, and here, I can only speculate that it goes back to his own traumatic childhood. I also think his rising fame made his narcissism worse. It was “his way or the highway.”

5. He Was the First to Interview Priscilla Presley After Elvis Died

This past Christmas was a strange one, with George Michael the pop star dying unexpectedly Christmas day, seven years after my father died unexpectedly Christmas Eve. It was hard to read tributes to a different George Michael at a time of year I mourn my father’s loss more intensely.  There are several tributes planned for the pop singer, and it reminds me of the tributes my father did for Elvis.  He did a makeshift tribute the day Elvis died that people can still hear online (musicradio77wabc.com). My father knew the details of Elvis’s career like no other disc jockey or fan. But my father wanted the human side of Elvis, the back story, and for that, he needed Priscilla Presley. Initially, she had refused to talk to the press. I still recall my father’s phone call to her in 1977. I was in the kitchen, probably coloring or writing poems as I did in those days, as he said to Priscilla, “You owe it to your daughter. She’ll want to know about her father.”  On the one year anniversary of Elvis’s death, my father’s multi-hour tribute aired around the country, with dozens of interviews from Elvis’s friends, co-workers, and Priscilla. People in the industry thought such a long radio tribute would never succeed, but it did, kind of like the syndicated Sports Machine that had also been met with skepticism. Priscilla, like so many sports celebrities after, trusted my father. He was exceptional in his ability to reveal their human side and unearth their stories. I wish somebody could have done the same for my father.

Cindi Michael is the author of The Sportscaster’s Daughter, selected by Redbook Magazine as one of the best books of 2016.