Philly Sports Is My Blended Family’s Love Language

Philly sports are a family affair. / Photographs courtesy of Larry Smith

On a September night in 2023, the 13-year-old in my house had a question: “Is this the Super Bowl?” My son and I were doing what Philadelphia sports fans do when our team is playing: inhaling pretzels and popcorn and beer and soda and cheering and screaming like it was the most important event of our lives. It was actually game two of the 17-game football season, but to the 13-year-old (called Bean), who at the time didn’t know a Philadelphia Eagle from a Philly cheesesteak, the world my son and I inhabited during a Thursday night football game was a strange, new universe.

Four months earlier, Bean, their older sister, Leela, 15, my son, 12, and my partner, Melanie, had entered that universe together as a blended family. The kids weren’t exactly strangers — Melanie and I had been dating for a few years. But still: one day you’re living in the only house you’ve ever known, and the next your mom’s boyfriend is standing in sweatpants and a Phillies T-shirt, making coffee in a kitchen you still barely know your way around.

There’s so much a blended family has to navigate: the known (the boy among the three step-siblings needs to keep the toilet seat down; the other two have to realize that if you scream “GET OUT,” the boy may not understand that this is the way siblings show their love) and the unknown (each kid wants their broccoli prepared a different way; there are 162 games in a baseball season, and on most nights, someone in the house will be listening to one).

On my first date with Melanie, she shared, without prompting or apology, essential information about herself: direct sunlight (must avoid), gluten (abstains), and the amount of attention she requires (abundant). It didn’t occur to me to reciprocate with disclosures about my own quirks, including the importance of sports in my life. For me, my son, and all the Smiths in my life, the throughline of sports wasn’t worth explaining. Sports just was.

It began in 1914, when my grandfather’s boat docked at Pier 53, aka the Washington Avenue Immigration Station. While his father sold eggs door-to-door in Queen Village, my grandfather soon found his own hustle, “watching” people’s cars so no one broke into them outside Shibe Park, where the A’s then played. But Morris Smith soon became our family’s first Phillies fan. The most recent is my son.

Lukas was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Columbus, Ohio, and now Oakland, California. He has never been even remotely tempted by the Yankees, the Blue Jackets, the Niners, or the Warriors. For better or worse, he was born with Philly sports in his blood. His first Eagles game was also Carson Wentz’s first: September 11, 2016, when the Eagles beat down the Cleveland Browns, 29–10, offering the false hope that, in the years to come, my child would talk about Wentz the way I talked about Randall Cunningham and Donovan McNabb — only, hopefully, with a few Super Bowl rings to show for it.

The following year, my late-January birthday boy had an Eagles cake, and his wish as he blew out the candles was for his dad to take him to the Super Bowl in Minnesota. I had once convinced my own father, who had shared Eagles season tickets for 25 years but was way too practical to spend the money on a Super Bowl, to spring for tickets to take me and his son-in-law to Jacksonville for the 2005 game. But the best I could do for Lukas was to say, “It will be even better to be with your grandparents and cousins in New Jersey.” But my heart wanted to be on the couch I grew up on, watching sports with the people I loved.

Lukas’s first Eagles game

When my son and I landed in Philly the night before the 2017 Super Bowl and met my folks for dinner, the Eagles’ fight song seemed to be coming out of every booth in South Philly. In the Bay Area, where I was eating dinner in Pacific Heights the night before Super Bowl LIV, you could easily have had no idea the 49ers were playing the next day. Which isn’t to say San Francisco isn’t a good sports town. It’s just not Philly.

Sports as the love language of so many men may be a cliché, but for the men in my family it was elemental. When I left for college, I didn’t go very far — I went to Penn and regularly joined my folks at games (and I arrived with hot pastrami hoagies from West Philly’s legendary Koch’s Deli). When I moved to the West Coast after college, my parents took it differently: Mom called a lot, and Dad sent me the Sunday sports section from the Philadelphia Inquirer (along with selected columns from the Daily News), with tiny Post-it notes offering no-frills commentary: “Good Jayson Stark column this week.”

Sports was also the love language of the women in my family. Not all the women, but the most important one: my mom. My parents grew up blocks from each other in Burlington, New Jersey. In their 1948 second-grade class, Lou teased Carol by pulling her pigtails. By middle school, my mom held my dad’s attention by recounting the stats of the entire Phillies starting lineup. They were married for 60 years. And ever since my dad died three years ago, my mom and I have talked after most Phillies games.

Melanie and I started dating in the one stretch when sports was rarely in the conversation in my family. It was early 2020: the Eagles had been bounced from the playoffs in January (ouch!), the Sixers and Flyers stunk, and pitchers and catchers wouldn’t report to spring training until February. Then COVID called off almost all sports except cornhole.

At the height of the pandemic, sports seemed both irrelevant and off the table. There was no need to stash an earbud in my ear to catch the last inning of a close game at the dinner table, text my two buddies from second grade about the latest trade rumors, or play Monday Morning Quarterback with my dad.

Melanie had no idea what she’d signed up for — sports-wise, at least — until long after we’d all been vaccinated. As the pandemic continued, our relationship became more real and more complicated. We were both ending our marriages, and neither expected to fall in love with someone else anytime soon. And when we did? It took a long time to unravel our lives and begin the one we wanted to create together. While we waited (and waited), the three words that had come to define the last decade or so of Philly sports became my guiding light: Trust the process.

By then, you couldn’t walk through Philly without seeing the phrase screen-printed on a T-shirt or debated on local sports radio. I know, I know — we are all tired of trusting the process. We also know that “the Process” was a term long-exiled, data-obsessed Sixers GM Sam Hinkie coined while trying to rebuild a terrible team. Team executives made it clear that this “process” would take a while and would involve two steps backward for every step forward.

Now I was telling Melanie that it would all work out; I just didn’t know when. I was asking her to trust the process, which, as any Philly sports fan knows, is not easy.

My dad also had a hard time trusting the process, whether it meant waiting for a basketball team to win a championship or for a table at his favorite Italian restaurant in South Philly (Villa di Roma). He was, to put it generously, an impatient and easily frustrated man. In many ways, we didn’t have much in common, and he never felt the pull to run the standard “dad” playbook. He never took me fishing or camping. We never had a beer together. But he instilled in me a love of family and hard work — and sports.

The author and his dad get ready for an Eagles game in 2005.

Sports was our wholly unoriginal, unexceptional, beautifully simple bond. I once wrote a story for ESPN Magazine about Philly fans, and my favorite interview was with my brother-in-law, a local boy who summed it up this way: “The Eagles could be scrimmaging each other while the Super Bowl was going on, and more people in Philly would watch the scrimmage.”

That was my dad.

That kind of devotion is hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up inside it. To most of the world outside the tri-state area, what we had may not have seemed like much. But our phone calls the morning after Eagles games were enough. To put it another way: My older sister cried during the first prayer at the first Rosh Hashanah after my dad died. I cried the first time I heard Merrill Reese’s voice at the start of the first Eagles game my father wouldn’t be hearing.

I’m grateful Melanie had a chance to see how my dad and I were, not just at the end of his life, when I would come home from his hospital bedside in New Jersey. We watched baseball games together three nights in a row, something we hadn’t had a chance to do since I was in high school. There was one Monday, maybe a year or so into my relationship with Melanie, when she was driving and my dad called to do a deep dive on Sunday’s game. When we finished chatting about questionable calls by the refs and incredible scrambles by our QB, I hung up — and saw that she was crying. “I’m sorry,” she said, in that sweet way she has of somehow sniffling and laughing at the same time. “I just love that you have such a comfortable, easy way of talking to your dad.”

Melanie also sees how close my son and I are. She knows that spending hours throwing a football or playing hoops means hours spent talking about school, friends, our different takes on whether it’s okay to listen to Kanye, and anything else on his ever-expansive teenage mind. She understands I would drive my kid to see the Phillies play the A’s in a minor league stadium in Sacramento, 70 miles and two hours away. And then there was the total, indescribable exuberance that filled every cell of my body on the way back from the game (Phils 9, A’s 6, in 11 innings, 3 hours and 45 minutes) when my then-14-year-old called in to WIP and opened with, “The game was electric …”

Watching the Super Bowl in 2018

While the bond I had with my father was built, in no small part, on sports, a bond built on sports extending between me and my son wasn’t something I’d ever imagined in the early days of our blended family. For the first few years of cohabiting, we had few takers to join us in watching games. But recently there’s been an unexpected sports story in our house: Leela has become a hockey fan. She had never shown any interest in sports — unless you count RuPaul’s Drag Race as a sport — until she did. Within weeks, she went from being one of the millions of people who watched each episode of Heated Rivalry to naming every player on the San Jose Sharks and posting Instagram Stories about the NHL’s salary cap.

Hockey was never a big part of my family’s sports lexicon when I was growing up. Now, my bonus-daughter has got me excited about boys in skates. She has reminded me that it’s the only sport where fighting is just part of the game. I love telling her about the Broad Street Bullies, how at her age I interviewed a legend named Bobby Clarke for my high school newspaper, and that I cried when Pelle Lindbergh died in a car crash.

And so away all five of us will go to a San Jose Sharks–Philadelphia Flyers game this New Year’s Day. We will inhale pretzels and popcorn and beer and soda and cheer and scream — for different teams, me wearing a Jawn tee and Leela in a Michael Misa jersey — like it’s the most important game of our lives. Someone will win and someone will lose. Some of us will care a lot about that outcome, and some will care very little. The kids will battle over what music to play as we ride home together in a minivan with 200,000 miles on it that wasn’t in my life just a few years ago. Melanie will be driving since my heart rate will be elevated after yelling my head off during the game. I’ll be next to her in the passenger seat, most likely sniffling and laughing at the same time. And if anyone asks what’s wrong, I will tell them: absolutely nothing at all.

None of this — the hockey game, the minivan, the blended family, the Phillie Phanatic Father’s Day card from a kid who once thought Thursday Night Football was the Super Bowl, LeBron in a Sixers jersey — was the plan. But here we are. We trusted the process.

And sometimes the process works.

Larry Smith is a writer, editor, and creator of the Six-Word Memoir Project.