Dig this column the late Ron Fimrite once wrote about his old man for Sports Illustrated. A friend e-mailed me about it, said he was 14 when he read it and it made such an impression he tore it out of the magazine and kept it in his wallet:

Then, inevitably, we drifted apart. No, that’s not it; our split was a lot more like atomic fission. The shrinks say this is perfectly normal, that the son must metaphorically slay the father in order to live his own life. But as close as we had been, our breakup was pretty painful for both of us. Suddenly, Trux and I couldn’t agree on anything. His politics seemed to me to have moved overnight from New Deal liberalism to somewhere to the right of Calvin Coolidge. The very man who had put food in my mouth during the Great Depression now looked to me like some sort of Babbitt. For his part, I was headed straight for hell in a handbasket. I didn’t know the meaning of a dollar, and I insisted upon living in San Francisco, a city that, he felt, made Sodom and Gomorrah look like Peoria and Waukegan. The bay that separates Oakland and San Francisco might as well have been an ocean. We had even lost our shared interest in sports. He was an Athletics fan; I was for the Giants. He loved Al Davis’s Oakland Raiders; I was a 49ers man. We didn’t like the same movies. He wouldn’t read the books I sent him, most of which cruelly portrayed the American businessman as either misguided or pathetic. I turned down his suggestions that I “grow up” and buy a house in the suburbs. It was not a good time for Trux and me.