Today's Father of the Day has to be Gary Garcia, father of now-former South Carolina quarterback Stephen Garcia.
The younger Garcia, who was a fifth-year starting quarterback for the Gamecocks, was kicked off the team this week. He'd had a very volatile relationship with both Gamecocks' fans and the South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier, a man who has always been notoriously hard on quarterbacks (possibly because none of his ever seemed to be as good as he was and he couldn't figure out why).
Garcia had a troubled career at South Carolina, both on the field (where he could be brilliant one game and abysmal the next, never quite able to settle into either role) and off (where he'd been suspended for a variety of issues, including allegedly failing drug tests).
Garcia was finally benched after yet another horrible performance in an SEC game (completing just nine of 23 passes with two interceptions in a come-from-ahead loss to Auburn). The story is that, after being benched for Connor Shaw, he apparently failed a drug test.
However, Garcia texted a reporter who follows the team to say he was "shocked and completely flabbergasted to be honest” by his ouster.
Most people would have said they expected it, that he'd been given more than enough chances as it was, and were ready to turn their backs on Garcia - although, let's be honest: fans turned on Garcia more for his frustrating interceptions and inconsistent play than anything he may or may not have done off the field.
Garcia's father?
First, what would you do in this case if it were your son? What would your public response be?
I've seen Little League dads blow up when their son was pulled from a game, much less the father of a starting quarterback in the SEC.
Yet Gary Garcia said of his son: “He kind of made his own bed, and this is the culmination of some of those earlier mistakes. ... This has got to be the worst two weeks of his life, but it’s not going to be the worst two weeks in his life going forward, I can tell you that. You deal with trials and tribulations, and you learn from it. Hopefully, he continues to learn and grow. We’ll let the dust settle for a couple of weeks and then look at what his options are.”
Here, to me, is the key phrase: "it's not going to be the worst two weeks of his life going forward, I can tell you that."
For most of us, losing the position of starting quarterback on the college team would seem like the worst thing that could happen.
And yet the father recognized this was only a game, that his son had a long life ahead of him, and the father hoped the son would recognize the consequences for his action and learn from them.
As much as some of us think college football is the be-all, end-all of life, the truth is, there has to be more for these kids. Having spent half my life around college football, I do know kids who made their years as a college football player the high point of their lives, and everything after was either looking back, or trying to keep those days alive by capitalizing on whatever fame they'd been able to cling to from that experience.
Garcia's father knew - and certainly hoped - that Stephen's life would go on and Stephen would have a chance to accomplish so much more. And he, Gary Garcia, hoped that Stephen wouldn't become one of those people whose reaction to stress or disappointment was to hurry off to find a bottle of Jack or a dime bag of pot to dull the pain.
Lord knows there are enough "adults'' out there who do.
It won't be easy for Stephen. Chances are very good that he will never be the center of attention that he has been for the last few years, that nothing he ever does again will garner the kind of public adoration - and truthfully, even the scorn simply reflected the adoration - he has had.
Once you've had that, it's easy to feel like you're not measuring up when later successes are done in the relative obscurity within which most of us live.
The lesson I pray my kids learn is that they do not measure their own worth or measure their success by the attention they receive or the reaction of the people around them.
I pray they learn it, because Lord knows their old man struggles - and he wasn't even a starting quarterback in the SEC.
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