You have heard me say and read me saying that parents are often the worst enemies of their own children.
We have two wonderful (or awful depending on how you look at it) examples of how true that statement truly is.
The first is the story of the NFL Draft—the fall of Colorado QB Shedeur Sanders.
Sanders fell from a top 10 overall pick to the 5th round for very few things that had to do with football.
It started shortly after the college football season ended when Deion Sanders, Shedeur Sanders’s dad and his head coach at Colorado, went public with comments that made it clear that not everyone was welcome to draft his son.
Deion said live on the radio with Dan Patrick that he had a “do not draft me” list.
“There's teams I didn't want to play for,” Sanders claimed. “So why would I want my kids … come on, man, I'm a dad. I'm a real dad that has a lot of information about the NFL.”
As the days drifted away from the draft, we’ve heard more and more teams that were totally turned off by their interactions with the player.
He was described as “disengaged” and “aloof”, and there have been media members in the college football universe that reported that he didn’t show up for their pregame TV production meeting interviews that the quarterback of a Division I football team is expected to be at and fully participate in.
Now, is that all his fault? It is not.
If dad is in the public speaking openly with the brashness that “Coach Prime” has been, you can imagine what the conversations at home are like. Son got the message that he was elite, and he believed in what his dad was telling him—and who can blame him for that?
And, in the same vein, who can blame an NFL team’s front office from saying “No thank you” when it came time to turning in their card and turning their future over to this kid?
Football teams are not looking for more people who are likely to cause discourse and dysfunction. There are plenty of people to do that already.
No one wants to add that kind of person from the start without some sort of guarantee that he would help their team, which there is serious doubt about with him.
And so, 143 players were chosen ahead of him. He ended up with the Browns, who seemed like a sensical destination for him about 135 players earlier. But the Browns took another quarterback ahead of him.
Of course, there were cries of collusion and racism over Sander’s free fall through two days of picking players.
The truth is, Papa Prime is truly to blame for his son’s situation.
In reality, he probably cost his boy about $40 million to start his pro career.
We have another instance of parents behaving badly that hits closer to home.
The Pacers dominated Milwaukee in their first round NBA Playoff series last week.
The Bucks were playing without star guard Damian Lillard, who played very little in the five games of the series and had no impact on the series because of injuries.
It was helpful to the Pacers, for sure, but that was a first-round matchup that had “classic” written all over it. We didn’t get that.
The Pacers were down six points in the final minute of Game 5, and were facing the prospect of having to go back to Wisconsin for Game 6. The Bucks turned the ball over twice and Indiana turned them into one of the most memorable come-from-behind wins in franchise history.
The game winning shot came on a drive to the basket with less than two seconds remaining by Tyrese Halliburton. The Bucks had no timeouts left, and their desperation heave at the buzzer was wide to the left.
Soon after the echo of the buzzer was drowned out by the roar of the Indy faithful at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, Halliburton’s dad runs onto the playing surface waving a towel with his son’s picture on it.
John Halliburton ran to a spot about 10 feet from Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and waived the towel at him.
Giannis is a superhuman basketball player, and in this moment showed superhuman patience and restraint. His season had just ended in the first round in a series where the trainers played as much of a role as the coaches did and some person who he doesn’t know is now taunting him in front of everyone.
I do not condone violence, but I think we would all have understood if Giannis would have lost his cool and at least physically confronted the man standing in front of him.
To his great credit, he did not.
A few minutes later, he and Mr. Halliburton were literally in the same space. Nose to nose. Giannis was doing the talking.
First of all, where on earth was the fieldhouse security staff?
By all reports, Halliburton’s dad is a sweet man who is known and loved by the Pacers and fieldhouse personnel.
So what? He has no more business being there than I would have.
Tyrese sees the video later and seeks out Giannis to apologize for his dad, then does the same publicly.
The punishment is that John Halliburton is not allowed at Pacers games for what the league describes as “the foreseeable future.”
Parents, think about these things when it’s your child. Don’t make it so they have to apologize for you.