Like most father and sons, my dad and I like to talk about sports. A lot. Almost every night for the past four years, my Pops — as I call him — and I have a chat about the sports world. Tuesday night around 10 p.m., it was a quick conversation about how LeBron James’ teammates are quite the group of dogs. Monday night around 12:30 a.m., it was about Randy Winn’s eighth-inning at-bat in the Yankees’ 5-4 loss earlier that night.

A good amount of the time, though, we talk about something involving sports that has nothing to do with whether Antawn Jamison will ever make a meaningful basket this postseason. Instead, it’s about ledes and nut grafs. About how to craft a story and to use better verbs. What a writer should look for in trying to explain the flow of a basketball game (look for the runs).

The reason for all this talk about writing? I’ve been lucky enough to be the son of a sports writer.

Most kids grow up wanting to be like their fathers, and I was no different. I’ll admit, though, given a chance to be a professional athlete, I would’ve taken that in a heartbeat. I wasn’t exactly blessed with athletic abilities, so I had to devise a Plan B. What seemed cooler as an 8-year-old than my dad’s job of being able to go to sports games for a living?
 
Though my Pops told me to get a real job and to make some money (like my brother Tim, the engineer), I still followed him into the trenches. And it’s been the best thing that could’ve happened to me. I’ve found something that I truly love to do that involves my first true love in sports. Want to see a kid at a candy store? You should’ve seen my smile the first time I sat in the Yankee Stadium press box around 8:30 a.m. on July 2, 2009.

And I don’t think I would be half the writer I am today without my dad. From my first high school story for my school paper to the last story I wrote for The Daily Orange, my father was there for any questions I had. Does this lede work? What’s a better way to word what I’m trying to say? How does the story flow?  When I’m stuck in that writer’s purgatory deciding how to move forward with a story, one simple call can help me get past any bump there might be. My dad is not one to ask, but he’s always willing to listen.

The beauty of this relationship between writer and writer, though, is that there has never been any pressure imposed on me by Dad. It could be easy for him to pressure me into being a better writer then he was. To push me nonstop every day. To insist on editing all my pieces. But this isn’t the case. He lets me be my own writer, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

He still challenges me, but I’ve learned many times through trial by fire on my own. In my earliest stories, he would never change the ordering of the paragraphs or the meaning of the story. How else would I learn? I’ve failed many times in the process, and learned through each one of the failures. I saw my mistakes and learned what I did wrong and what I needed to improve on. My many D.O. editors — each of whom has also played a huge role in my development as a writer and I thank for all their hard work — can attest to this.

Having my father in the industry has also pushed me. I know people expect more out of me because I am the son of a writer. It’s like having a professional athlete as your father. People expect you to follow in the footsteps and have a leg up on the competition.  So that’s always been the little extra motivation I need to spend extra time on a story, to do that one extra interview. Yes, I place lots of pressure on myself to write good stories just so I can be a great writer, but I also know the outside expectations of being the son of a writer that I want to meet. I’m a competitive person at heart, and I love a good challenge. It’s no different with writing.

It’s been a long ride to this point, filled with many journalistic highs and lows. After all, not many journalists can say they’ve received an e-mail saying they wrote the worst article in the history of journalism. That’s right, folks, in the history of journalism. But I’ve always had my dad there for me, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. Being the son of a sports writer ain’t too shabby.

Matt Ehalt was a staff writer at The Daily Orange, where his column will no longer appear. He can now be reached at matthew.ehalt@gmail.com.

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Published on May 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm