“DADDY’S LITTLE GOALIE”

Excerpt from Robert Strauss’ “Daddy’s Little Goalie: A Father, His Daughters & Sports,” reprinted by
permission from the publisher, Andrews McMeel:

Thus, sports became our choice venue of togetherness, if not from convenience then from a mutual desire to
cleave to a schedule, something the modern two-worker, suburban, climbing family has a penchant for. Both
Sylvia and Ella, from their earliest sporting days in the beginning years of grammar school and despite differing
personalities, were amenable to it, too.
Most parents blessed with more than one kid are baffled that two kids in the same house, with the same
parents and most of the time eating the same things and wearing the same clothing, can be as different as, say,
Aquaman and Bullwinkle J. Moose. Ella and her sister Sylvia, three and a half years younger, are such a pair.
Ella looks like my side of the family, and Sylvia appears to have sprung from my wife as her Mini-Me. Ella
learned early on to suck up and sweet talk to get her way. Sylvia just does whatever she wants, and damn the
consequences. Ella grew to all of five-feetzero, so hustling and running everywhere was essential. Sylvia passed
her in height by the time she was six and decided that running was an option to be avoided whenever possible.
Each time she looked at a sport, Sylvia found the path of least leg movement. As soon as the position was
open, she became the soccer goalie, for instance. She saw the extra arc on the basketball court and asked me
what it was for.
“You get three points if you throw it in from there,” I said, and then added the line that swayed her: “No need
to go any further.” She was the first girl of her cadre to develop a three-point shot and rarely ever again drove
to the hoop. She became a goalie in lacrosse as well, even though that meant getting pelted by hard rubber
balls at close range. It did mean no running.
A few years later, when Sue and I went to Calvin Coolidge’s birthplace in Vermont — I am both an inveterate
traveler and a presidential trivia nut — we bought a T-shirt with a Coolidge quote on it for Sylvia. It read, “I do
not choose to run,”
Coolidge’s response to those who implored him to go for a new term in 1928. Though not yet in her teens at
the time we gave it to her, Sylvia got the joke and threw the shirt back at us immediately.
Still, I had to give Sylvia her props. I play a lot of basketball, and the three-point line is about the outside of my
range. When she started lofting threes as early as third grade, she shot a bit from the chest but otherwise with
good form and a wristbent follow-through. Even though she wasn’t a starter, her first travel team coach, Tom
Betley, developed an in-bound play just for her. He would take the much-faster Emily Carson out of the game for
a moment and have Sylvia throw in the ball. The two tallest girls would form a double-pick at the foul line, and
Sylvia would lumber around behind them. She’d get the ball back and—kaboom—make her three about 60
percent of the time. The next out-of-bounds time stoppage, Emily would be back in, but Sylvia had her role.
From early on, then, the girls had their after-schools, their weekends, and an earnest amount of time in
between filled with the wonder of the field, the diamond, the court, and the pool. I was left to figure out how to
be the dad who give sage advice, as I had to Ella after the first Haddon Heights game we saw together, and
revel in the idea that girls could not only be beautiful and smart but also hit home runs and swish threepointers.