Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

It seems there are two kinds of fathers who inspire their children to greatness in professional sports.

The first kind of sports father is a deadbeat dad who left sometime during his child's infancy, only to return when he hears his child is cashing million-dollar paychecks. But we dedicate this week's Kick Out the Sports! to the second kind of sports father — the overbearing brute who puts his 5-year-old child through midnight drills, screams at his child's coaches at the slightest provocation, moves his family so that his child can attend some sporting academy in Florida and most definitely is around when the first million-dollar paycheck is cashed.

Five fathers, in particular, serve today as the embodiment of the monster sports father ideal, the kind of fathers that make you want to track down your deadbeat dad and thank him for not being there. In reverse order of lousiness:

5. James Russell

Women's tennis is rife with belligerent, money-grubbing fathers, as Justine Henin-Hardenne, Mary Pierce, Jennifer Capriati and Jelena Dokic can tell you. But somebody should tell James Russell such notorious stage parental skills should be confined to the kind of tennis court you can't fit in your basement rec room.

Russell is the Ping Pong Ding Dong of Scotland for such acts as announcing in May he would sue Table Tennis Scotland for leaving his 14-year-old daughter Rebecca off the national team. Rebecca holds multiple women's championships in Scotland, but Russell suspects she was left off because of him. Table Tennis Scotland hasn't said as much, but the sporting press in Scotland sure has.

Alasdair Reid of Scotland's Sunday Herald writes Russell "could scarcely have provided more convincing evidence of his suffering from a bout of tennis dad syndrome had he supplied it in the form of a clinical diagnosis from a medical practitioner. Nobody would question his overall concern for his daughter's well-being, but his self-professed pushiness, his contempt for authority and his dismissive remarks about the standards of other coaches were about as conclusive a set of symptoms as it was possible to imagine."

Wait a minute ... the Scottish sporting press covers ping pong?

4. Carl Lindros

Carl Lindros (along with his equally overbearing wife, Bonnie) joins former NFL quarterback Jeff George's parents as Exhibits A and B in how to coddle your preternaturally talented son into an ultimately unsatisfying pro career.

The NHL owners will know the league's lockout is over not when the commissioner's office calls, but when Carl Lindros calls, letting them know whether he'll let Eric play for their team. The Lindroses have "tried to bully their way through life, starting in kids' hockey," Philadelphia Flyers general manager Bob Clarke told the Village Voice in 2001.

In 1989, the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds picked Eric first in the junior-level Ontario Hockey League's draft of 16-year-olds. Carl said he couldn't play there; Eric ended up in Oshawa. In 1991, the Quebec Nordiques picked Eric first in the NHL draft. Carl said he couldn't play there; Eric ended up in Philadelphia. Carl and Bonnie spent much of the time calling the Flyers, demanding (successfully) that they trade certain players and make concessions to Eric. Then Carl said he couldn't play in Philadelphia anymore; Eric ended up with the New York Rangers.

When we last left hockey, at the end of the 2003-2004 season, the New York Rangers told Eric Lindros they would not pick up his $10 million option for the next season, leaving his agent/father Carl in an odd position — for once, a team was dictating where Eric would play. His response: You can't fire us — we quit! The senior Lindros said, without irony, that the underachieving Rangers "were like a peewee hockey team coached by a father." The "father," Glen Sather, is so incompetent he has five Stanley Cup championship rings. For the record, Carl, that's five more than your not-so-golden-anymore boy.

3. Rustam Kamsky

Take the paranoia of Bobby Fischer and add the threat of violence, and you have chess dad Rustam Kamsky. Kamsky was a former boxer who apparently didn't get all the punching out of his system, allegedly having slapped opponents of his son, chess prodigy Gata Kamsky.

But why wouldn't Rustam slap opponents, what with the whole world of chess being against him? Rustam and his son, then 14, defected from the USSR to America in 1989 because Rustam believed Soviet chess authorities had it out for Gata. Not long after arriving in the US, Rustam declared that American chess authorities had it out for his son.

In Gata's 1996 world championship match against Anatoly Karpov, Rustam's wild-eyed accusations of visiting grandmasters feeding Karpov a computer's analysis of the match got officials at the Elista, Russia, locale to shut down the adjacent computer. As if that wasn't overbearing enough, Rustam announced during the match that he was looking for a wife for young Gata. "My plan is: we find a clever, modest, stay-at-home girl from a good family 13 or 14 years old," Rustam told an interviewer. "The nationality does not matter. We make a contact with the parents, take her with us to the USA where she, along with Gata, will study at the university. A clever child from Russia is able to study in an American university."

Alas, after losing to Karpov, Gata Kamsky effectively dropped out of the chess world for eight years, only participating in a 1999 tournament before coming back to competitive play in 2004. (He got married, but not to Rustam's pseudo-mail-order bride.) Gata's return to the top of America's chess rankings brought great cheers, but not as great as the cheers for his father not returning with him.

Where did he go? No one seems to know. But he's still on this list because he could strike again at any time. And his legacy of paranoia lives on, particularly in Azerbajani hotshot Teimour Radjabov. Speaking of Garry Kasparov, one of the world's greatest-ever chess players and a source of Rustam's venom, Radjabov was quoted as saying: "Kasparov has always wanted to remove competition as early as possible. Rustam Kamsky, the father of Gata Kamsky, told me about that in early childhood."

2. Marc O'Hair

Marc O'Hair, like many people, believes the children are our future. Marc O'Hair, unlike a lot of people, does not believe this metaphorically, in the teach-them-well- and-let-them- lead-the-way, show-them-all- the-beauty-they- possess-inside kind of ideal.

O'Hair spent a lot of money trying to turn his son Sean into a champion pro golfer, even selling his shutter business for $2.75 million for cash to invest in the boy he lovingly referred to on "60 Minutes II" as "pretty good labor," and he's not shy about demanding a tidy profit on his investment. "I told him, `I can't blow this kind of money without a return," O'Hair told GolfWorld in January. "When you make it, there has to be payback someday.'"

To emphasize the point, O'Hair twice made Sean sign contracts turning over 10 percent of his earnings to dear old dad, the sweet, nurturing fellow who would make Sean run one mile for every shot over par in a tournament.

Amazingly, this did not motivate Sean to become the next Tiger Woods. Sean was a flop on minor-league pro tours, only turning his life and career around after meeting a former college golfer and cutting off contact with his father after he married her in December 2002. Sean is a million-dollar rookie on the PGA Tour this year, finishing as high as second.

Meanwhile, his father has yet to collect his 10 percent of Sean's winnings. Not only that, Marc O'Hair is collecting zero percent of his son's love. Now there's a lousy return on investment.

1. Marv Marinovich

Marv Maronvich's son Todd has long been a living example of why you only try to play Frankenstein with a dead body instead of your own offspring. (Let's not forget that even the monster killed Dr. Frankenstein in the end.)

Marinovich, a former NFL offensive lineman and a current fitness guru, famously declared he would make a robo-quarterback out of Todd. As part of this plan, Marv let his son eat only items on Marv's strict, all-natural menu and didn't let him participate in everyday kid stuff, like watching cartoons. All seemed well until Todd got busted in college for marijuana possession (hey, pot is natural, right?).

Todd was drafted in the first round by Marv's old team, the Raiders, but young Todd's career unraveled into a drug-fueled failure, and when we last left the 35-year-old Todd, he was being sentenced to 12 months worth of treatment after being arrested on charges of drug possession and violating probation from an earlier sentence for, you guessed it, drug possession. Holy passive-aggressive rebellion, Batman!

Todd Marinovich's saga has been enough to make Marv the poster dad for overbearing sports fathers. Even worse, Marv Marinovich hasn't learned his lesson.

Since Todd, Marv has gotten a new wife (someone else to support his oddball scheme) and a new child (someone upon which to propagate his oddball scheme). Meet Mikhail Marinovich, Marv's planned robo-linebacker.

Todd, while you're at rehab, you might want to save a seat for your stepbrother.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.