On the only Sunday without NFL football since September, I became a dad. Thanks to the NFL not listening to my griping about the extra week before the Super Bowl, Fox Clay Travis entered the football-free world at 4:04 CT -- just about time the Super Bowl festivities would have been kicking off all over the country. Yep, he's already planning his life events around important sporting events.
We named him Fox Clay after his great-grandfathers, the same two men I was named after. Only I didn't want to make him a "junior," so we took my maternal grandfather's last name. As a result, Fox is also named after a Tennessee football player and his blood is already running orange, too. Or maybe that's just the jaundice.
Plus, Fox now has three first and last names, which gives him a leg up should he ever decide to run for political office in the South. We don't trust any political candidate unless they have three potential first and three potential last names. I know because this is what helped make me such a serious candidate for mayor of Owensboro, Ky.
Becoming a new father explains why I didn't file a Monday column. The five people who e-mailed me complaining about a lack of a Monday column really feel like jerks now. But really it's my fault because I never mentioned in the column that we were expecting. During this time I focused the column on any number of less important life details because I didn't want to jinx anything. But now that Fox has arrived, I feel comfortable letting you guys know. So here goes.
We found out my wife was pregnant the first week of June. Since this time I've been seriously contemplating whether any of the sperm I've ever produced has the potential to be professional athlete sperm. Granted this seems a bit far-fetched given my 40 time, but from what I remember there are an average of 40 million sperm in each ejaculate.
(Some of you guys with advanced degrees are giggling right now, I know this. I could probably finish the column by typing ejaculate, ejaculate, ejaculate and several of you would think this was the funniest column I'd ever written. If I threw in a joke about descending testes right now, every man would lose it. Conversely every woman reading this last paragraph has not smiled even once. That's because women don't think the words ejaculate and testes are remotely funny. They're very mature. Testes.)
Anyway, 40 million sperm is an infinite variety. Granted the vast majority of those sperm are probably relatively similar when it comes to genetics. (If it seems like I have any scientific idea about genetics, I've got you fooled. I don't. I subscribe to the ancient Greek theory if you sit around and think about anything for a very long time you can figure out the answer. Even if you have no basis for your answer.)
So from a genetic perspective it's likely my kid will have a great beard, will run a slow 40 time, will out-kick his coverage when it comes to women, and will be obsessed with the Civil War at a young age. But what about the outliers? Are any of the sperm I produced capable of yielding a 7-foot-tall athletic center, or a thinking-man's quarterback who can throw the ball more than 45 yards in the air, or any superhuman athletic variety thereof?
It would seem to be possible, right? That somewhere, somehow, however unlikely, there is a pro-athlete sperm residing in all of us. Wouldn't sheer numbers dictate this to be the case? Granted, as a white guy I probably have a better statistical chance of producing a serial killer than a kid who runs a 4.2 40, but still, I can dream right? And I'm going to keep right on dreaming. Just as soon as I get a chance to sleep. In six months.
Until then, here's a short roster of things I learned about the birthing process, broken down DDT-style:
1. Your wife won't think it's funny when the birthing nurse arrives, says "When do you want the epidural?" and you respond, "She's going natural. Like baseball in the 1950s."
2. My wife chooses to have the Buick Open on the television over the NBA during her labor. She's laying back with her legs up in the air, working the remote on the birthing bed, cursing the fact that it's Sunday afternoon and there's nothing on television. She finally narrows her selections down to the NBA or the Buick Open. Then she says, "The NBA's too stressful. We're going to watch golf. It's much more relaxing."
3. I've known we're having a boy since late August. But my wife wanted to be surprised about the sex. We compromised. I got to know the sex but I wasn't allowed to tell a single person, lest my wife find out and kill me. So I've been lying to people about not knowing for the past five months. Including all the birth nurses. Who, of course, are thrilled that it's going to be a surprise. So, I have to enter into a complicated rationale about why I'm completely up in the air about the sex of the baby. The nurses love my uncertainty. My wife rolls her eyes.
