Football Bonds

June 16, 2006 — -- The Green boys, T.J. and Derek, both have baseball games scheduled for this weekend. And as his father did with him and older brother Troy during their various athletic pursuits as youngsters, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Trent Green won't miss a single pitch.

What he will miss is being able to spend Father's Day with his dad, Jim Green, who died last October of a heart attack at only 58 years of age, and with no health problems of which his family was aware.

"It's going to be emotional, sure, and it already has been as we get closer [to Father's Day]," Trent Green said Friday afternoon, heading into a weekend where he will typically immerse himself in the type of family activities that were such an important component of his own upbringing. "I think about him every day, and I know I will on Sunday, but I also know I'm blessed to have had the time I did with him and to have had my mom and my [siblings] and all. But I'm sure that, even with the boys' baseball games and all the other things going on, it will be hard."

Many men, in sneaking a wistful peek over their shoulders at their boyhood, think their dad was the absolute greatest guy in the world. Less than eight months removed from his father's passing, Green has more reason than most to stare hard into the mental rearview mirror and some justification for feeling that the reflection therein is even bigger than it appears.

Because that's the kind of impact Jim Green clearly had on his youngest son.

As complicated as the male bonding process is presented as being, it is characteristically less complex than analysts suggest. In the case of Jim and Trent Green, it can be reduced to a simple equation: Jim Green loved football and his son. Trent Green loved his dad and, even though he was a little leery the first time his father signed him up to play tackle football in the seventh grade, he came to share Jim Green's passion for the sport that has enabled him to earn a nice livelihood and helped to make him one of the most embraced athletes in Kansas City history, on and off the field.