The world lost a great man today ... my dad.

So normally this blog would be mostly about track and field, and especially at this time of the year as we are in the middle of the NCAA Championships.  I wouldn’t normally write about something personal but it’s hard not to when you’ve just lost someone who is probably the most influential person in your life.

As I was leaving the track in Fayetteville, Arkansas, tonight (Saturday, May 31, 9:02pm) I got a phone call from my mom who told me dad had passed away after fighting a battle with several ailments including cancer.  We knew this day was coming as he had been put in Hospice Care recently.  My dad was 83 years old, he had lived a great life.  When I saw the phone ringing I knew what I was about to hear.

Our kids were in the middle of celebrating Ashley Petersen’s dramatic qualifying for the NCAA Championships by winning an 8-women jump-off in the High Jump.  It was definitely the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in that moment.  I’m not one to be real emotional so I didn’t say anything about it (with the exception to one of our coaches) so as not to dampen the euphoric mood of the team as we loaded up the bus and began our trip back to Wichita.

 Ever since I knew this day was coming I’ve mostly tried to not think of myself because, in reality, I am doing fine.  I’m healthy and am able to do anything I need.  I mostly just feel bad for my mom who just lost her husband of 51 years, and is all the way down in Florida dealing with this.  Luckily there is a large support group of friends that live in a community for retired couples there and she has plenty of people to help in this time of grief.  Also she is one of the strongest people I know.

The last time I visited my parents was Christmas and I had a very deep and meaningful conversation with my dad about death.  He knew it was coming and the peace he had during that conversation was remarkable.  Just so everyone knows - he was totally at peace with his life and everything he had accomplished.

I’m sure many of you who are reading this have lost a parent or loved one who has meant so much to you.  Obviously it’s never easy and no one knows how to act because it’s not something we go through very often.  I’ve coached lots of kids over the years that go through loss of loved ones.  Just this year one of my athletes lost his brother in a motorcycle accident.  The older you get the more frequent things like this happen.  I always tell kids that they are going to be ok and to be strong for the ones who are really suffering – like the husbands or wives who are going through the biggest struggles.

I know I will get a lot of those sentiments and I appreciate them.  But mostly I just wanted to share some of the things that my dad did for me throughout my life. Really and truly my parents have made me who I am with the foundation they gave me growing up.

One of the first memories I have as a child was going on long family vacations.  My mom and dad, along with me and my two older brothers would pile into a large vehicle and drive most of the way around the country taking in the sights and visiting places of significance.  I’m confident this is one of the reasons I enjoy traveling to this day.  When I was a kid I was always finding ways to amuse myself while we were on our way to our next adventure.  As I am typing this I am currently on another adventure, riding from Arkansas to Kansas with the Wichita State Track and Field team.  Kids are laughing, watching movies, playing cards, bonding – it’s wonderful!  I’ve been to 46 states and 6 countries – I have a long way to go to catch up to my parents list!

My life has mostly been consumed with sports and my parents got me into them at a very early age.  Our entire family has been involved in racing of different types throughout our lives and the beginnings of that were definitely with my dad.  He used to race hydroplanes before I was born and with his brothers and my grandfather invented a type of boat that was faster and lighter than had ever been made before.  They named the boat “Flying Debris” and it went on to win lots of races and challenge world record speeds during its lifetime.  Racing has always been a big part of the Wise family.

When I was very little I could remember going and watching my brothers race motorcycles.  When I was 5 years old my dad built me a homemade go-kart that I drove around our family farm.  Within the next year we bought a “racing” go-kart and I started playing my first team sport – baseball.

For 12 years my parents drove me around the Midwest racing go-karts.  For a little kid there isn’t anything much better than driving a fast go-kart every weekend and picking up trophies for the effort.  Dad was the mechanic, I was the driver – and it was a special time for the both of us.  There are several guys (and girls) that I raced against that are in Indy Car and Nascar today.

I think my dad really enjoyed the fact I was very into racing.  I couldn’t get enough of it as a kid and we would go to races all over the place.  We’d go to the Indianapolis 500, Eldora Speedway, drag strips, random dirt tracks – anywhere they were racing cars.  I don’t know if my dad realized it but I just wanted to be like him.  We could sit and watch races all day and both of us loved every minute of it.

As a very young child my dad would put me on his lap and let me hold the steering wheel as we went down the freeway.  When I got to about 12 years old my dad would let me drive while he sat in the passenger’s seat.  It was a different time back then.  I can’t imagine much of that going on today.  I can also remember when I got a little older – maybe 14 – on Friday nights when we would drive to a late go-kart race, my dad – tired from work – would fall asleep while I drove to the race.  I thought of it as my warmup for the race that night.  I didn’t think much of it then but the amount of trust he had in me at such a young age is an amazing feeling now.  There is a song Alan Jackson sang called “Daddy Let Me Drive” and always get goosebumps when I hear that song thinking about my dad.

Baseball was the other sport I played as a very young child and my dad was always around.  He didn’t necessarily coach but he was always at practice and spent endless evenings tossing a baseball back and forth in our front yard.  We all know the energy a young person has and I was no different as a kid, and my dad would always go out and play even though I knew he was tired from working at the phone company all day.  It reminds me of the movie “Field of Dreams” when Kevin Costner gets to play catch with his dad at the end of the movie.  That part always makes me think of my dad.

Basketball was the next sport I developed a major passion for.  I played for 8 years and thought that would be the sport I would go onto play in college.  Basketball is a big deal where I am from and I wanted to be the best I could be.  Every kid where I grew up had a basketball goal at their farm and we were no different.  But my dad had a large garage where he would work on cars, my go-kart, or other random projects that he enjoyed.  The other half of that large garage had an indoor basketball court in it that was big enough to shoot 3-pointers.  There were so many nights in m childhood where I was playing basketball by myself on one side of the garage while my dad was tinkering on the other side.

My dad was never a guy who showed anger or had a temper but he was a strong person who knew how to keep me in line when I needed it.  I remember in the fifth grade when I was on an independent basketball team and I was also a manager for the junior high and I decided on my own to skip practice so I could go to the junior high game.  I was probably more interested in looking at the junior high girls than basketball and my dad came to the game, picked me up and proceeded to explain what being committed to a team meant.  I arrived to practice late, got chewed out by the coach, and that was that – lesson learned.  I’m so glad I didn’t miss the whole practice and to this day that single incident helped me know how to never be bigger than the team – even if I was the best player.

The one team sport my dad got into in terms of coaching was soccer.  Organized soccer came to our community when I was a fifth grader and of course I wanted to play.  I played for four years and my dad coached me about half of the time and then I assisted him for another year when I was done playing.  I think soccer was a game my dad could easily enjoy because, more than most every sport, soccer is a team game and the glory goes to the team and not an individual who is garnering lots of stats.

Speaking of stats, if you know me very well you know I’m a numbers and stat geek.  When I was very young I would sit at my dad’s feet while he read the newspaper.  Once he was done with the sports page I would start looking at it and what drew me in were the baseball box scores and stats.  As a little kid I could figure batting averages and shooting percentages with ease and I’m certain that is the reason I was considered a sort of math phenom as a kid.  I was just trying to be like my dad.

He would keep our stats during basketball and baseball games.  Then when we bought a family video camera and every sporting event I ever did got put on tape – I would come home and stat the games myself.  One of the coolest things he ever did was when our high school basketball games would be on the radio is hook up the video camera so the play by play would record along with the game.  This was back in the early 1990’s and technology was not near as advanced as today.  I could go home after the game and it seemed like watching the game on TV!  Very cool.

My dad was very creative.  He was someone that enjoyed writing detailed journals about his passions and keeping track of important accomplishments through writing or video.  He had a small artistic side to him where I can remember dabbling with music from time to time.  People always tell me I’m a creative thinker in my job.  I write a blog to journal my track and field journeys.  I learned how to play guitar a few years ago.  Just trying to be like my dad.

Of course the sport I eventually fell in love with, and is still earning me paychecks today, was track and field.  My dad, who was born in 1930, also did track and field.  His best event was the pole vault and I actually have a picture from the late 1940’s of him clearing 10 feet with a straight bamboo pole.  I carried it around in my wallet for most of my track and field career.  My brother Jimmy also pole vaulted and my dad built him a homemade pole vault pit on our farm.  I wasn’t as much of a daredevil as my brother and luckily I was very fast as a kid so I just stuck with running and long jumping.  So my dad, with help from my mom, built a set of wooden starting blocks and a long jump pit full of sawdust from a local Amish farm.  I had everything I ever needed to start a track and field career!

My parents were the driving force behind raising money to build a track at my high school.  I never had a track to practice on and they wanted the future Eastern High School tracksters to be able to reach their potential and have somewhere to train every day that wasn’t a grass field or parking lot.  The amount of volunteer hours they put into that effort was incredible and hopefully we can do something to help the community realize how significant they were to the project.

Like a lot of parents, mine went to every sporting event I was ever in as a kid.  And when I moved onto college and starting traveling all around the country they would still make it to many meets.  I would often feel bad that they would drive hours and hours to only watch me run a 21 second 200 meter race.  But I think they would usually make it an adventure and maybe see places around our country they hadn’t been to or hadn’t been to in a long time.

My dad tried his best to keep up on the teams I’ve coached in the past 16 years.  He seemed especially interested in our teams at Wichita State and most every phone call we had ended up talking about our team or some of the kids that I coach.  I had a particularly frustrating situation this year with some athletes in my group and I used my dad as an example of being unselfish in tough situations for them.  It was just over a month ago and he wasn’t able to walk anymore.  The first thing that was said when we started talking that day was he asked how my sprinters were doing.  In a time of significant health issues he was still being unselfish and asking how I was doing.  The situation eventually worked itself out and we ended up winning a championship because of our teamwork and unselfishness in the end.  I give a part of the credit to my dad and him giving me an avenue for communicating some motivation to my team.

There are so many stories and good memories I can recall about my dad that could be used as examples of what kind of person he was.  Here are two short ones that I think of often.

The first one was in 1997.  I grew up on a farm in a very rural part of Southern Ohio and I was pretty insulated from much of the world until I went to college.  I was always a pretty open minded person but not until I got to Kent State did my eyes open up to what the world really had to offer.  Like most guys that age I was consumed with two things: sports and girls.  And in 1997 I started dating a girl from Jamaica – yes she was black!  It seems pretty crazy to me now, but at that point of my life – and coming from where I came from – that was a very big deal.  Small town, star athlete, lots of gossip!  I remember bringing up who I was dating on my Christmas visit to my parents to see what kind of reaction I’d get.  By the end of the conversation my dad had already gotten out an atlas and was asking where she lived.  By the end of the night he was flying to Jamaica on his computer flight simulator.  I always had total support for anything I did.

The second story goes back to when I was a freshman in high school.  I got accused of cheating on a test by one of my teachers – and to this day I promise I wasn’t cheating – and I was going to have to have Saturday school for kids that get in trouble.  I also had a track meet that day that now I would have to miss.  Growing up I never questioned an authority figure so even though I knew I hadn’t cheated I was still in trouble and I knew when I got home and told my parents I would be in more trouble.  After telling them my side of the story my dad said I needed to take their punishment and sometimes things like this happen in life that we can’t control.  He wasn’t happy with it but he believed what I said.  So that Saturday I went to the school to put in my time and when my dad picked me up he asked what I had learned.  I told him I needed to make sure not to put myself in situations that could be interpreted like that ever again and that it really sucked to go to Saturday school.  He seemed to be satisfied with this and pulled out a bag of clothes and my track spikes.  He hustled me over to the meet and even though I missed the beginning I was able to run the last few events and put the whole thing behind me by the end of the day.

To this day whenever any of my athletes do something to get in trouble I try to listen to them and their side of the story first.  I want them to know I believe in them, just like my dad did for me.  I’m sure athletes have lied to me from time to time – as I’m sure I told a few fibs to my parents – but the belief my dad always had in me gave me a level of confidence that I could accomplish just about anything I wanted in life but still knowing he was there to keep me in line if need be.  And I try very hard to pass that on to anyone I work with on a daily basis.  I’m not as good at it as my dad but he gave me a great example to learn from and follow.

If you’ve made it this far in this blog then you probably know me or my dad very well.  I don’t know many people that ever met my dad and didn’t think of him in the highest of terms.  I’ve got so many terrific memories of my dad and the great life he lived so I am doing fine with all this.  If you feel the need to reach out to someone please reach out to my mom who is now without her husband of 51 years and is living alone for the first time in 72 years.  We will not be having any kind of public service – that’s not the way my dad wanted it.  He will have his ashes spread out into the Gulf of Mexico from a sail boat.

Something like that sounds pretty good to me.  Thank you dad for another understated example on how to live our lives so well.