For generations, bonding between sons and fathers has revolved, for many, around sports.
The rite of passage for boys followed a predictable formula: Dad pitched the ball, or swatted it across a field with a bat. Dad threw perfect spirals. Dad dribbled and sunk balls through baskets. Dad taught; son watched and learned. Dad knew the rules of the games, the important strategies and the proper techniques.
The most popular sports were team pursuits such as baseball and basketball — games fathers played, understood and eagerly taught their sons.
But the mushrooming passion among boys for so-called action sports, such as skateboarding and snowboarding, is changing the way fathers and sons connect. In many cases, the roles now have reversed.
“The boys teach their fathers the rules of the sports and the intricacies of what is happening,” said John Robertson, a psychologist who is the president of The Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity, an arm of the American Psychological Association.
In private practice, Robertson said, he encounters “fathers who are quite interested [in their sons’ action sports], but they do feel more like spectators rather than unofficial coaches, because they don’t know” all about the sport.
The old standbys, such as baseball and football, have not vanished. Fathers and sons still toss balls back and forth, head to stadiums for games and get together for 8 a.m. tee times at the local golf course. Flocks of kids sign up for Little League and toil to make their high school basketball teams.
What is changing, experts say, is the passion with which many adolescent boys now embrace new and different sports, and the way this pursuit transforms relationships based on sports that dads and sons have enjoyed for generations.
The subject is ripe for academic mining, said Judy Van Raalte, president of the Exercise and Sport Psychology division of the American Psychology Association.
“As a person involved with the field, I would say there is a difference in that relationship” between fathers and sons over sports, she said. “That relationship is changing. These changes are ahead of the research.”
Lee Ripley, 34, leaned against a wall at Denver Skatepark during a recent weekday afternoon, watching his son Justin, 10, use in-line skates to whisk himself up the walls of a big concrete bowl.
“Here all I can do is be supportive because I wasn’t into [in-line skating],” the former Navy submariner said. “He’s pretty much got to go out and do it.”
Justin also plays baseball and soccer, two sports Ripley understands.
“I enjoy [baseball and soccer] more because I understand the games better,” he said. “I come out here, and all I can do is pretty much watch.”
Like Ripley, many dads use action sports to connect with their sons.
Aurora, Colo., resident Justin Barnett, 14, said he loves that his dad gets involved with his skate-boarding. But his dad does not ride, Justin said. Instead, he watches videos.
“He learns stuff,” he said, “and then teaches me.”
That’s not the same as the old father-and-son game of catch, in which Dad learned his stuff long ago from his own father, who learned it from his father.
Now, said Glenn Good, who studies male issues at the University of Missouri, it’s important “for Dad to go to the skatepark and watch a few videos, for the kid to be dragged to the [pro basketball] game. It’s part of the give-and-take of a healthy family relationship.
“In the `Father Knows Best’ generation, until recently, the fathers decide what the family does and what the kids will do. Now it’s a kind of `do your own thing.’ Everybody defines their own passion. But the pressure is on for adult males to be more flexible and less autocratic. The pressure is tremendous.”
Teams still rule
To be sure, team sports are not going away anytime soon, said Gregg Bennett, a professor of sports management at the University of Florida who researches action sports.
“My [6-year-old] son plays the traditional sports, and I think he does because I’m into them,” he said. “I think most kids gravitate toward what their parents are into, at least initially.”
All of that could change, however, when Generation Y — the kids of Baby Boomers, born between 1979 and 1994 and who occupy the heart of the action-sports craze — become parents.
Generation Y, Bennett said, “is into it, and the young kids are really, really into it. They’re accepting of it; it’s mainstream.”
As Generation Y ages, the profile of action sports in popular culture will shift.
Bennett also said that just as action sports increasingly captivate the attention of boys, studies show that “there is a decrease in baseball participation and interest among young consumers.”
The strongest area of growth in the sporting goods industry is in action sports, said Mike May, spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association. The sports represent at least 10 percent to 15 percent of the sporting goods industry today.
For now, most people who buy action-sports gear are boys between ages 6 and 17. It is the boy, not the father, who now “takes the lead and demonstrates how to do things with the fathers,” May said.
That may change, he said, as today’s teens become dads.
Dads do watch action sports sometimes, said C.J. Olivares, vice president of Fox Cable Network’s 24-hour action sports network, Fuel, which launched last year.
“We get a lot of e-mails that talk about dads and their sons watching Fuel together,” he said. The bulk of the network’s viewers, though, are teenage boys.
The rise of action sports is no fluke, according to studies and experts. Skateboarding phenomenon Tony Hawk ranks in popularity only behind former National Basketball Association star Michael Jordan and Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick among boys between ages 12 and 19, according to a 2004 study released by Teenage Research Unlimited.
Tony the Tiger even rides a skateboard now in his cereal commercials.
Kids routinely tune in to cable TV programs that celebrate their chosen action sports, and they obsess over videos that serve as visual catalogs of tricks and style.
Big group of consumers
Olivares said there are about 15 million skateboarders in the U.S. and about 50 million people who engage in some sort of action sport. They represent a big slice of Generation Y — an enormous demographic bulge in the population — and are “a really powerful group of viewers and consumers … and they are not being served.”
“It used to be soccer moms. Now you have skate moms,” said Bennett of the University of Florida. “Parents take their kids to skate parks and drop them off.”
The popularity of the sports — in which direct competition is reviled, creativity is championed and camaraderie is strong — may stem from the growth of highly structured team sports with “very competitive, overbearing adults running the games,” Bennett said.
Play, for many kids, used to mean running around the neighborhood unsupervised, with friends. That part of adolescence has been chipped away.
The popularity of action sports, said Ellen Staurowsky, a professor at Ithaca College in New York and president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, highlights “children’s need to just play and express themselves in ways that are not regulated by a sport governing body, or by adult fans who expect them to play like pros instead of children.”
