BELIEVER’S TICKET: Today, thousands of tickets reside on cell phones with a QR code waiting to be used for admittance to college football playoff games like tonight’s Orange Bowl or tomorrow’s Cotton Bowl. There was a day however, when tickets were tangible, some printed, some handwritten in triplicate. This day, January 9th, in 1974, was such a day for one of the handwritten, triplicate persuasion. That morning, a father woke his 11 year old, sports crazed son about 4:30 & showed him a ticket. A ticket to inform that son, me, that I would be absent from Mrs. Farrow’s sixth grade classroom. My dad would use the perks of being an airline employee & we would be flying to Canton, Ohio to visit The Pro Football Hall of Fame. A day canonized in my memory book. My first airline flight, the artifacts, the history, the bronze busts of the men whose feats, whose grit & faith built the status of professional football from coal town Sunday afternoon distraction to spectacle & a meal before flying home at York Steakhouse. I recall those things but not as much as I recall a walk, a detour my dad & I took before that steak dinner. We headed over to the now renovated, renamed, & looking nothing like it did that winter day, Fawcett Stadium, the place we saw on TV each July as some NFL greats & some rookie wannabe greats kicked off the preseason with the Hall of Fame game. We walked with snow making its staccato crunch under our feet, stopping under the scoreboard in the far left corner of the photo. There, he encouraged me that if I wanted to be on that field, in that hall, I could be with work & the same belief in myself that he had in me, the belief I’d be great. Funny, it was the same talk he gave as a baseball season ended in failure, but it led to the next season ending with an All City honor. The same words when I faced a rehab for an exploded left leg while chasing the football dream. The same talk when rehab didn’t work out & he told me there was more than being a ballplayer ahead, like being a good friend,  husband, & father. He found the time before my wedding to Miss Julie & his grandson’s delivery days to remind me I’d do great in those roles. And then, those times in the elevation & dissipation of life when the shrapnel of being alive or my poor life decisions knocked me flat, same words, same belief. When the bleachers were standing room only with doubters, he was at the ticket window, purchasing a front row box seat on the believers side. He was the founding & sometimes only member of my fan club ’cause sometimes,  boys let their mommas or themselves down. In the year he passed, he gave me the same belief as I stood in the ashes of a recently smoldered living room. In the last six years alone, I’ve been privileged to be a father of a college grad, a father-in-law twice, & called Papa by two beautiful little girls. I wish my dad was here to meet them, to give them or my boys or me a talk, to pray for us, to tell us we’ll be great, to tell us he believes. He’s not, but if he was, I know which ticket line he’d be in…