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For some of my favorite blogs, check out Brendan's List.

HubCap: Put yourself in Mom's shoes
Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com   on 10/5/2006

Here's a dilemma for you. It is 1996. Say you're my dad, Monster Joe, and your son, Brendan, is spending about two hours a day, five days a week, at basketball practice. He has been doing this since he was in seventh grade.

Brendan is okay at basketball, but not great. His high school has a good basketball team. Brendan does not start on the basketball team, and likely will never start on the basketball team, unless about 14 other players simultaneously die or become otherwise incapacitated. Still, Brendan goes out for basketball his senior year and wastes a valuable two hourseach day at basketball practice.

As a father, would you:

a) encourage your son to do his best, even though you know his efforts are futile

b) somehow break the ankles of the 14 players ahead of your son on the depth chart

c) tell him to quit basketball and concentrate on:

1) track, a sport where he actually might see some success
2) reading, since he has yet to discover Ernest Hemingway
3) getting a job, so he can earn some money for college.

This is the conversation I had with my father a few years ago halfway up a mountain near Missoula, Mont., after I had the benefit of a few years to look back on my high school athletic "career." Although in hindsight, I knew I was going to go on and keep sucking at basketball, and my father didn't have the benefit of such information at the time, I still believe I am right. He should have told me that my basketball career was going nowhere. To this day, he maintains that as a father, he really couldn't do that.*

Do parents ever know if they're really doing the right thing? That's the idea behind Karin Malchow's latest blog, " Family logic problems." Karin's always got something to make us laugh, and this blog is no different. Well, actually it is, because this one is a little more like playing a game, and it has a picture of Spock ( Leonard Nimoy, not the doctor) accompanying it.

I won't ruin it for you, but click here and see how you react to her two-question quiz.

*Perhaps some of the blame in this situation should be shouldered by my high school basketball coach, Scott Hoagland, who maybe should have just leveled with me and said, "Leonard, you suck. You should be a writer, not a basketball player. Turn in your uniform, et cetera."
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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Submitted By: Robert White
posted on 10/7/2006 @ 2:45:58 PM
Rated Blog Entry
I can't help you because as a kid I sucked at everything and knew it. That's why, by choice, I've spent my life by myself in a cubicle, typing. It probably has something to do with Karma, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Submitted By: William Boucher
posted on 10/5/2006 @ 4:10:12 PM
Rated Blog Entry
But you built lots of character. That's worth something.
Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
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