Side note: I'm amazed, stunned, baffled, bewildered, perplexed, and gobsmacked by how much I now like Austin Rivers.
I thought it was very touching seeing Doc there watching his son. Choked me up a bit. Not exactly sure why. Maybe I feel a sort of connection with it. Dad always focused on work when I was a kid. Then end up working for my dad. Then, in the Rivers story, son leaves working for his dad, finds a place where he fits in, and dad is happy for him and comes to support him. Oh, boy, I just made it worse. *grabs tissues* I still like to imagine in that pic that Doc is our secret second head coach in the stands and is whispering instructions to D'Antoni through his son.
At Doc Rivers' last playoff press conference, he said he planned to spend sometime on vacation and naturally to follow the Rockets playoff games.
Austin has been such a positive for the Rockets this season and postseason. He has more than adequately proved he is legit, beyond being on his Dad’s coached team. He was a top 3 recruit out of high school, and a high draft pick. He’s been integral in the Rockets wins.
"We have a saying in my country: the coyote of the desert likes to eat the heart of the young and the blood drips down to his children for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and only the ribs will be broken..." - Tino, from Anchorman
I had a similar experience with my father. He was a professor who became a department chair in his 30’s, loved his job (so my sister and I spent our lives trying to find a job we loved - a curse), and when he wasn’t at the university, he was at home reading a wide variety of sources in his field, and that was if he wasn’t out of town doing consulting, or taking /giving a seminar. He was loved dearly by us, of course, but just wasn’t around nearly enough. After he passed away, my sister and I talked about it a lot. Still miss him. *grabs tissue*
I work for/with mine now. Been that way for 12 years. His small engineering business has always been foremost in his mind. That's how it always was in my life the whole way through. He's a good person, but it's hard to call him "dad" in the sense that someone's actually been a fatherly figure to me. When I was a kid, he was my baseball coach. Got treated with more expectations and less leniency than anybody else on the team, so there wouldn't be this impression of favoritism. So, he was my coach back then, mostly. We stopped taking him on family vacations, because he'd always "have" to change his plans at the last minute and come late or leave early to go meet some prospective customer or deal with some sort of work thing. He, my older sister, and I are all chemical engineers. My sister absolutely refused to join the family business. I think that was a smart move. I did a little work for it over the years and found I was pretty good at mechanical things. Ended up working for him right out of college, because I was finishing up my last course at home and he offered me a chance to make some money while I finished it off. And I really liked the material, so I stayed. And a part of me thought that this might finally be a shot to get to know my dad. He's a very clever engineer, especially conceptually, but he's never been a good businessman. He's always driven by his ideas, and as he hired more people, I found them spending a lot more time with him than me. That was mostly because I could handle myself, and they needed constant help and still never amounted to anything. I resented how much time he spent with his "actual children." The company continues to struggle, and I'm burned out. I've lived at home off and on over these years. I live there right now. I go to work every day and he's at home every night, but I might not speak to him for days at a time. My entire life I've either had a boss or a distant figure doing his own thing for his own compulsive reasons. And I wish I'd just had a dad.
I hated Rivers, even as a Duke fan, all the way back to his Duke days. I am in the same boat as you. I love Rivers now. Even if he leaves this summer, he's earned my respect for the rest of his career.
