Good News From Two Tough Dads (and Their Daughters)

Something changed this week in how men in their proudest moments spotlight their families

This week, at their proudest moments, these dads made it just as much about the love they hold for their kids.

Happy Sunday, everyone. Are you ready for some good news?

If there’s a teenage boy in your life, there’s a good chance his phone is full of guys telling him what a man is supposed to be. Some bro with a podcast and a rented sports car is explaining that real men are tough and that to show emotion is to be weak. You should see the things they say about women and families. Plenty of young men are buying it, and a lot of them are lonelier and angrier because of it.

I’ve got a little boy at home and think about this a lot.

So, for our good news, I want to tell you about two huge moments this past week where undeniably tough dudes showed us that love only makes a man stronger.

Last Saturday in Detroit, Justin Verlander took the mound at Comerica Park for the final start of a 21-year career. If you don’t follow baseball, Verlander is one of the fiercest competitors the game has ever seen. He’s won three Cy Young Awards and two World Series rings and is undoubtedly a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

In the sixth inning, his manager, A.J. Hinch, came out to take the ball and formally end one of the most illustrious careers in modern baseball. Except Hinch wasn’t the first one to make it to the pitcher’s mound first. Out came Verlander’s seven-year-old daughter, Genevieve, running joyfully across the infield in a jersey with her dad’s name on the back.

The best batters in the world never phased Verlander. But in the face of his daughter coming to walk him off the field for the last time, Verlander could not hold it together.

He said later he was crying so hard he had to make sure Genevieve knew they were happy tears, because she’d never seen her dad cry like that. Then he walked off the field for the last time holding her hand.

But it’s what Verlander said at his press conference afterward that drives the moment home. “I’ve been a baseball player since I was 5 years old,” he said. “There’s just a level of commitment it takes to be great at something. And I hope she understands.” He said his family means the world to him, and that he’s grateful for the chance “to make up for lost time” now.

You don’t hear that very often. A guy at the very top of his profession, with a whole stadium on its feet for him, putting his family front and center and admitting the thing everyone is cheering for came at a cost that he sometimes questions. In his proudest moment, Verlander wasn’t basking in his own glory. He was telling everyone watching, especially the young boys, about what really matters in life.

Two nights later, in Chicago, a very different kind of career had its moment.

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Case Keenum is not going to the Hall of Fame. He went undrafted out of college and has spent fourteen years bouncing around the National Football League as a backup. Before Monday, he hadn’t started a game in 1,009 days and was the Bears’ third-string quarterback.

Then neither quarterback ahead of him on the depth chart could play. So at 38 years old, Keenum walked out under the bright Monday Night Football lights against a Philadelphia team that hadn’t lost yet and beat them 27 to 7.

He’s now won games as a starter for seven different teams, tied for the most in NFL history. It’s a great record. It also means that for more than a decade, teams kept deciding he wasn’t quite the guy and he kept showing up anyway.

The one thing that never changed through all those moves was at home. He married Kimberly, the girl he met as a teenager in Abilene, Texas, when he asked her out for a snow cone. She used to quiz him on his playbook in the mornings. They raised a family in one city after another.

So when the best night of his career came, he didn’t collect the praise alone.

That’s his five-year-old, Cadence, on his lap on the SportsCenter set, telling the whole country she’d rather watch her dad’s game tomorrow than cartoons. “I’m going to remember this night forever,” he said. I bet she will too.

Athletes have always had their families around for the big moments. Every Super Bowl ends with somebody’s kids running around in the confetti. But for most of that history, the family was the audience. They were there to watch Dad’s moment.

This week felt like the focus shifted in a small but important way. A Hall of Famer’s little girl walked him off the field during his last goodbye. A quarterback took his daughter with him onto national television after one of his career’s biggest moments. These milestones weren’t something the kids watched from the stands. They were put front and center as part of the very fabric of the moment.

Those two aren’t flukes, either. They’re part of something that’s been happening slowly and then all at once over decades. American dads now spend about three times as much time with their kids as they did in 1965. And after decades of heading the wrong way, the share of kids growing up without a father at home has been falling since 2010.

Fathers are showing up more and in deeper ways than ever before. That’s what’s going right. And it’s where you come in.

The young men in your life are going to learn what a man is from somebody. If it isn’t the people in the room with them, it’ll be whoever’s loudest on the internet. Those guys have a microphone. You have something better. You’re actually there.

So be there. Whoever you are in a young man’s life, whether that’s dad, grandpa, mom, coach, or the neighbor who taught him to throw a spiral, let him see what Verlander showed a full stadium on Saturday.

Tell him you’re proud of him, often. And when there’s a big moment in your life, be sure he knows that he, and the rest of the family, are what really matters most. Because, one day, he will do the same thing for his family.

A lot is going wrong in America right now. This is something going very right, and every one of us gets a say in whether it keeps going.

— Adam