Ryan O’Leary: Assessing a debt I can never repay

I wouldn’t be here without my dad.

That’s obviously true in a very literal biological sense. But it’s also true in every other interpretable way. I would not be residing in Indiana right now, I would not be getting paid to watch sporting events and I certainly would not be living the absolutely charmed life that I’ve been so fortunate to live had it not been for Dan O’Leary.

Back in the spring of 1981, I started collecting baseball cards. I vacuumed up every ‘81 Topps pack I could afford — and at 25 cents a pop, that was a surprisingly decent amount since I was starting to generate some tooth fairy income and most of my relatives were a sucker for the smile of a 6-year-old.

I immediately started soaking up the stats on the backs of those cards. I became obsessed with baseball and with sports in general. Clearly, I haven’t really stopped. I wound up making a living of it.

My dad wasn’t nearly as emotionally invested in sports as I was, but he was emotionally invested in me. So he and my mom did what great parents do — they went all in. They encouraged my love and helped it grow.

When I showed an early affinity for the Oakland A’s (I liked the color green, okay?), I got an A’s jersey for Christmas — and hell if I didn’t rock that thing just about every other day for two years. I was wearing it when I played baseball against my adult relatives during a family cookout in upstate New York in the summer of 1982. I was still wearing it the following summer when we visited the Baseball Hall of Fame for the first time.

(And I was also wearing it when Santa gifted me a Fisher-Price printing press — talk about foreshadowing.)

That A’s jersey was the dominant item in my wardrobe for nearly two years. But my love of sports was actually being nurtured well before that piece of polyester ever got pulled over my head.

The year before Larry Bird came to the Celtics, my dad went in on a set of season tickets — and since he beat the bandwagon there, we had prime seats at the old Boston Garden while I grew up. Two rows behind the players’ wives in Loge 16, dead across the arena from Red Auerbach’s seat. The first basketball game I ever got to attend was Bird’s Celtics against Dr. J’s 76ers in 1981. I was nearly flattened by a passing Darryl Dawkins in the hallway underneath the stands; I was awestruck, and I was a basketball fan for life.

In the years that followed, I got to see most of the greats of my childhood play in person. Magic. Kareem. Jordan. Jerry Sichting. I later got to take the Garden floor myself when my high school team made it to the state semifinals in 1991. My parents knew I almost certainly wasn’t going to play in the game, but they were there to support me anyway.

That support has never wavered.

In November of 2016, just a few months after I started here at the Daily Journal, Center Grove’s football team made it to the Class 6A semistate. My dad was here visiting, and he came and sat with me in the press box at Ben Davis. He didn’t know or care about either team, but he loved being there nonetheless, because he always loved seeing his children in their element.

He fully threw himself into his kids’ passions, whether he shared them or not — because his kids were his real passion.

I’ve tried like hell to take that example and run with it.

My dad worked endlessly, both as a teacher and heading up his own landscaping business, but he still managed to find time to play with us when he could. He’d play two-on-one football against my younger brother Sean and I, and I’m not sure which he enjoyed more — letting us win when we were little, or getting steamrolled by us as we got a bit older. He raced us in the swimming pool he helped install in our back yard. He also played basketball games against me, and even though it generally grew to be a one-sided “rivalry” once I got to a certain age, he’d somehow manage to pull the same fluky hook shot out of his back pocket every so often — and then run back toward the house in mic-drop mode, arms raised triumphantly and singing the Notre Dame fight song.

(Man, that ticked me off like you wouldn’t believe.)

Fittingly, some of my happiest memories with my dad came in South Bend. He grew up as an Irish Catholic in East Boston, and Notre Dame was and still is the dream for so many there. We were lucky enough to live that dream together. We attended numerous games there side by side — and he was in the stands for several others while I watched from the press box above (including the Boston College game in 1992, when they filmed the game scenes from “Rudy”). Part of me hates that we’ll never see another game there together — but the other part of me knows he wouldn’t like this newest version of Notre Dame Stadium anyway.

My dad might have been a casual sports fan in general, but he was never casual about the Fighting Irish. And the guys who lived with me in Carroll Hall weren’t casual about him, either, as I’ve been happily reminded these last few days. Subway alumnus or not, my dad remains an icon within my inner campus circle. He commanded a level of love and respect everywhere he went that I will never, ever be able to.

When parents do their jobs well, there’s no possible way for their children to repay them. I’ve been sitting here drowning in tears while writing this column — and I’ll be drowning in debt to Dan O’Leary for as long as I live.

You got me here, Dad, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Thank you. Again and again.

Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].