Sports360AZI’m a husband and a father. These two blessed positions I have, I don’t take lightly.
I would lay down my life for my wife and our two sons with no hesitation if it meant their lives would be spared and they could go on living.
It really irritates me when I watch the news, or see something on the Internet or social media about a deadbeat “dad” abusing his spouse or partner and/or their kids (I put it in quotes, because any man that does that really isn’t a man or a dad now is he?)
We all know that as beautiful as this world is that we live in, there’s an underbelly to it, with a lot of sick and seedy people who love to do wrong, even to the people who are closest to them.
The reason why I wrote this is because I saw that Suns center Jermaine O’Neal is going to miss the team’s next three games in order to be with his daughter, Asjia, who is 13 and is having open heart surgery on Wednesday.
Those three games could be stretched depending on how she does post-operation.
As soon as I saw that, my heart leaped, and I thought to myself, “That’s a real man, that’s a real father.”
I bet there wasn’t one person in the Suns locker room that thought, in a selfish manner, ‘Why is he leaving us to be with his family? Doesn’t he know we’re his family too?’
I’m sure they told him to go and wished him and his family all the blessings that God could give them.
I know that there’s millions of fathers that would’ve done the very same thing that O’Neal did: put his family first.
You can count me among those millions.
There’s 82 games in an NBA season. The world won’t end for O’Neal if he misses some games.
You only have one family, and they should mean more to you than anything in the world.
You should drop everything and run to your family when they need you, which again I’m sure most of us fathers would do.
On this, there should be no debate.
