Opening Shot – Explaining life through football

Parents pas their values to their children through sports

By John Hughes

In the past few months I think I’ve come to a deeper understanding of the role that sport plays in communicating big themes like culture, identity and values between generations.

When I was growing up my father managed under 10 and 12 teams which I rarely featured on. Later on as I improved and started to secure a regular starting place I would have been managed by an uncle and my parents would have come and watched the odd game.

I would never have had too much to say after a game, but I would always have been listening very carefully, super-sensitive to praise and criticism.

There would have been more chat between myself and the oul fella when we watched Armagh games and those conversations are still probably the most meaningful exchanges we have.

Lately I’ve found myself talking more to my own eldest daughter about her football and it struck me that we were having similar sorts of conversations to those I would have with my own father.

She is twice the footballer I ever was, and has begun to take the game very seriously. We speak about the game now in a deeper way than when she was just learning her skills and playing with her mates.

Recently she had a big match against Glenties. It was a game she badly wanted to win and we spoke a lot about it in the run up to the big day. I advised as best I could and she teased out the various permutations that might arise and how she might handle them.

The striking thing for me was how those conversations covered themes much bigger than mere game at hand. A lot of the substance was about character.

When I was young and heard my own performance being discussed I implicitly took it as a judgement on my character. When myself and my father and uncles discussed players after an Armagh game we were really speaking about character. We were using the medium of a discussion about sport to share and express our views on character, the personal qualities we valued and the ones we didn’t.

Courage, bravery, commitment – those were probably the most prized qualities we looked for in players. Watching Armagh in the 80s, those were qualities one didn’t always see and so perhaps one valued them all the more for that.

As I spoke to my daughter about the Glenties game I urged her to get to the ball first, to be in front of her player, get forward if possible, to dictate as much as wearing a number six jersey will allow.

It was only thinking about it afterwards that I realised what I was really talking about was my own views on the importance of courage. I was really saying that courage was something I valued very highly. In other words all I was doing was communicating a lesson that had come down to me through the generations.

I’m sure that every parent emphasises different things to their children in these situations, but what impressed me was the power of sport in playing that role of passing values from one generation to the next almost by osmosis.

Cultural values and identity aren’t things that fathers and sons, mothers and daughters often sit down and talk to each other about. And when they hit the teenage years they might not even be talking much at all.

In allowing parents and children to talk obliquely about these massive subjects, the seemingly innocuous medium of sport serves a much profounder purpose than we sometimes realise.