Your earliest sports memories

[San Juan Sun]

Disclaimer: this is a triple dad idea.

Ready... go!

[TripletDaddy]

it was your idea, not mine.

my earliest sports memory was spelunking.

[MarkGrace]

My first year playing baseball was 3rd grade, so I guess it would be that. Blew my arm out by 6th grade.

[Blueintheface]

Watching my mom, dad, and regional GA standing around a radio listening to Jim McMahon orchestrate the comeback. My mom jumped up on the bed. I was hooked.

[Maximus]

Crying because the jazz lost in the finals

[Sizzle]

My first year playing baseball was 3rd grade, so I guess it would be that. Blew my arm out by 6th grade.

You must have a horrible father, pushing you towards little league greatness if that is the case!

[Omaha 680]

Steve Young doing his highstep dance in the endzone after scoring the winning TD against Mizzou.

[Surfah]

Watching my dad play volleyball and lift weights. I remember watching him play all the time. Towards the end of his college career he got into competitive bodybuilding and I used to watch him lift and work on his posedown routine. Most of my childhood pictures are of me in my underoos holding a pose.

[MarkGrace]

You must have a horrible father, pushing you towards little league greatness if that is the case!

Yeah I'll have to ask him about that. He didn't push me, but I also think he didn't know how to say no to my coaches when they wanted me to go again. By 4th grade I was our league ace, by 5th grade I was already having arm problems because they'd run so many innings on me with regular season plus AS tournament stuff. By 6th grade I was regularly spending time at Primary Children's getting tests done and considering surgery. I was shutdown in 6th grade from pitching and just played first base until about halfway through my soph year, when I picked up pitching again. But it had a long-term impact, as I created some bad muscle memory in my mechanics trying to protect my arm as a kid that was hard to shake. I also saw a physical therapist the morning after every start in HS.

[Paperback Writer]

Watching the Los Angeles Rams play on TV with my Dad. I was pronounced too sick by my Mom to play outside in the snow with my older siblings. It was the mid-1960s and I was pre-school age. My Dad soon discovered that I was less disruptive if he engaged me in the game on TV and told me that I was related to #74 Merlin Olsen and that he went to college with him. I intrepreted "distant cousin" to mean "first cousin" and wanted to know when we could visit him in Utah with the rest of my many cousins. Although I thought the name Merlin was cool, I liked the name Deacon even more. So I asked my Dad if I was also related to #75 Deacon Jones. That made my Dad laugh and he told that story as a joke for many years every time the topic of football was discussed.

Not long ago, I called Dad who has taken up genealogy as one of his many hobbies in retirement. My kids needed names to use for an upcoming youth temple trip. I knew that would trigger at least a 10-minute one-sided conversation by my Dad on his latest genealogy adventures. At the end of his discourse, I asked him how the Deacon Jones genealogical line was coming. There was a short pause before my Dad broke out in laughter.

[byu71]

Somehow my Dad convinced an 8 year old team to take me at 6 to play. I think the coach was nervous if I was in the infield a hard hit ball might kill me, so out to centerfield I went.

I can vividly remember the first ball hit to me went sailing over my head.

[HBCoug]

Laughing because the Jazz lost in the Finals.

[SandYFan]

Playing right field in t-ball. Filling my glove with grass because nothing ever happened out there. I was pretty awful, even for a 5-year-old.

Going to a BYU football game when I was 7 and being bored out my skull. This attitude changed a lot by the time I was 12.

[wapiti]

Crying when BYU lost to AFA in the opener of the expanded Cougar Stadium.

[falafel]

Laughing because the Jazz lost in the Finals.

Man, here I thought you were older than 20.