Lazerus: Fathers, sons and an unbreakable bond built on the absurdity of sports

The first time my dad died, I spent three hours on a plane staring out the window, barely able to function, barely able to exist. Didn’t fidget. Didn’t read. Didn’t do a crossword puzzle. I just stared at the clouds. I assume I blinked a few times, but I can’t say for sure.

The plane’s Wi-Fi was out, and the last I had heard, Dad’s massive heart attack and subsequent quintuple-bypass surgery were essentially unsurvivable. I was supposed to be flying to Florida that morning with my wife and daughters to spend spring break with my parents in a rented house on Siesta Key.

Instead, I was flying solo to “handle my father’s affairs,” whatever that means.

As I stared into the void, all I could think about was ways to sum up the most important man in the universe, Steve Lazerus, the man who — for better or worse — made me the way I am.

It’s a curse of journalists, particularly sportswriters, that we think in ledes and narratives and kickers. We can’t watch a baseball game from the couch without involuntarily conjuring a whole story, can’t sit through a movie without mentally drawing up a full review. And it turns out we — or, at least, I — can’t process the death of a parent without turning it into a full-blown obituary.

Hell, I’m doing it again right now, the second time my dad died. This time, it stuck. This time, there was no marvel of modern medicine, no team of doctors able to save him, no futuristic machine to keep his heart pumping and his kidneys functioning, no 26 days of sedation in the ICU, no long and grueling rehab, no harrowing flight back to New Jersey in a medical plane, no loss of 100 pounds, no extraordinary bounce back, no three glorious years of life and love and grandparenting and “Lindor!” texts and opportunities to bluntly say the things we had always felt but had never put into words.

My dad cried when I told him how much I loved him, how important he was to me, how it felt to see him tied to all those tubes and machines. I cried when he told me how profound the depth of his love for my mom was, how he had never truly understood, until then, her strength and the ferocity of her love. I wouldn’t trade these last three years for anything in the world. They were the greatest gift our family will ever receive.

However, he’s gone now. Suddenly and still too soon. I’m once again on a plane, to do … I don’t know, whatever you do when your dad dies. To call credit card companies, health insurance companies and a hundred other companies and hear them tell you how sorry they are for your loss, and also ask you to please send them 14 forms of documentation by tomorrow.

And to sit with my mom and cry and laugh and tell stories and wonder what we do now, who I’ll call when I smell something weird in the basement or can’t figure out why a light won’t turn on or a million other things I’ve never needed to know because I could always call my dad.

And I’m once again staggering blindly, trying to put such a monumental human into words. I want to be profound. I want to be poetic.

However, all I can think about are the stupid things. Stupid sports things, mostly. The way he would say, “Hey, it’s the Pro Football Hall of Fame” every single time we drove past one of those salt sheds that look like half a football. (I do this to my kids to this day.) The way he yelped, “GET OUTTA HERE!” every time a New York Mets batter hit the ball in the air. (I do this one, too.) The way he said, “Uh-oh!” every time the New York Islanders’ opponent entered the zone. The way he would say, “Sounds like a skin disease” every time Jiggs McDonald said the name “Darius Kasparaitis.” The way he always said he was going to get a cardboard cutout of me to sit next to him on the couch when I left for college, because we watched just about every single Islanders game together for my entire childhood. And those were the brutally bad years. The Mike Milbury years. God, he hated Mike Milbury. God, it made me laugh. The way he cheered me on in Little League, and the way he called my mom — my devoted Little League coach for a decade — “Charlie O’Brien” after the Mets catcher, for the way her 1980s perm poofed out the sides of her hat.

My dad’s the reason I spend most of my time at work making dumb puns on the internet instead of, you know, working. My dad’s the reason I loved sports growing up, a 10-year-old unironically wearing a powder-blue T-shirt that said “SPORTS NUT” on it, with a cartoon peanut holding a baseball bat and a tennis racket and kicking a football. My dad’s the reason I memorized all of Mickey Mantle’s World Series stats as, clearly, the world’s coolest 8-year-old.

My mom is everything to me, and molded me and shaped me and drove me and always believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. However, it was my dad who instilled in me my unhealthy love of sports, and, through his incessant dad jokes, the love of language that made a 12-year-old dream of one day becoming a real, live sports columnist.

And my dad got to see that happen. He got to see me realize my dream. How cool is that? He’s certainly the only person on Earth who read just about every word I ever wrote, whether it was about the U.S. Open of polo, the Peters Township, Pa., high school hockey team, the Lake Central, Ind., high school baseball team, the Valparaiso University men’s basketball team, the Chicago Blackhawks, the NHL and sporting world as a whole.

Every “great story today!” text I got from him meant the world. I’ll forever be grateful for that. For him. That he won’t read these words, or any of the ones that follow, cuts me to my core, to my very soul.

Now? I don’t know what to do now. I don’t mean what to do at the funeral home or the bank or who to call and in what order to do things — though I sure don’t know any of that. I mean, I don’t know what to do. How to function. How to exist as a 45-year-old kid without a dad.

Oh, but he’s still there. In my brilliant jokes that make everyone’s eyes roll. In the way I shower my kids with love, affection and spectacular puns. I hear his voice and his humor and his personality just about every time I open my mouth, and, man, thank goodness for that.

Those heavy conversations we had over the last three years were life-affirming and sustaining, but it’s those dumb little jokes and throwaway comments that will linger in my mind. That was my dad at his daddest, working in inanity the way other artists worked in oil and clay, a true master.

Hell, the last three texts I sent to my dad — the last three texts I’ll ever send to my dad — are about as stupid as they get.

One was a GIF of Pop Fisher, the fictional manager of the New York Knights in “The Natural,” complaining about how much he hates losing to the Pirates. One was about how the Mets were 3-12 since they didn’t let Grimace throw out the first pitch on his birthday as they did the year before. And one was mocking position player Travis Jankowski’s 42-mph fastball in mop-up duty.

They’re not profound. They’re not direct, heartfelt expressions of love and appreciation. They’re not just an endless string of thank-yous for everything he did for me. Because, you know what? I got to spend the last three years doing that. Three years we almost didn’t get. I’m so unbearably sad right now, my heart and my soul and my sense of self torn to shreds. However, I’m also incredibly fortunate to have had those three years. Too many aren’t so lucky.

So yeah, my last three texts to my dad, the last things I ever said to him, were stupid. They were sophomoric. They were meaningless and histrionic and they were about the freaking New York Mets.

They were perfect.

(Photos courtesy of the Lazerus family)

Mark Lazerus is a senior NHL writer for The Athletic based out of Chicago. He has covered the Blackhawks and the league at large for 13 seasons for The Athletic and the Chicago Sun-Times. He has been named one of the top three columnists in the country twice in the past three years by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkLazerus