Dad’s love of sports influenced writer’s career path

I remember the last real conversation I had with my father.

“When I’m gone,” he told me, “the Bucs are your team.”

Normally, it would be difficult to recall much of any single back-and-forth with Don McInnis. He’d come at you with so many questions, and facts of his own, that things invariably got muddled. It was the curious mind of a scientist at work. That might be a disservice to scientists; he could be eccentric even by their standards, with obscure nicknames and references for everyone and everything.

But this was different. Every word came deliberately as he lay bedridden at Queen’s. Even if my sisters or my mom didn’t realize it yet, his time was short, and he knew it. So better make ’em count, in the form of his beloved baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“You got it, Dad,” I said. He followed up by trying to bequeath me his woeful Washington Redskins. I told him not to press his luck.

That was scarcely two weeks ago.

Today my dad would’ve turned 66. He died of cancer on June 8, just two months after the diagnosis that stunned us all.

Everyone thought he had more time. Maybe it was because of his never-quit, always-positive outlook, right to the very end. The biggest champion of underdogs I knew deserved more rounds to go toe-to-toe against the vicious terminal disease. That was only fair, right?

He was a competitive guy at heart. When I was a kid, he volunteered to coach at least half of my AYSO and Kailua Basketball Association teams.

Meanwhile, he’d never let us kids win at anything against him. Ping-pong, H-O-R-S-E, Frisbee. But he’d give us plenty of chances, too. I’d like to think he was rooting for us at the same time he was kicking our behinds.

Plenty of sportswriters have been influenced to join the profession because of their fathers. These future scribes would idolize athletes and attend all manner of sporting events as a kid. Not me. Besides an affinity for basketball, I was more keen to go into the next room and play Nintendo while “Monday Night Football” made its weekly splash. I didn’t understand why he made it such a big deal.

I just knew I liked to write. The sports-as-a-career part came later; Dad got me through attrition.

He was born in Honolulu but grew up all over the world as the son of a U.S. diplomat. As such, he had no natural pro teams to root for, a dilemma I’d realize some years after he returned to the islands to work as a fruit fly specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, just before I was born.

He was good at his job, becoming a go-to resource for other countries looking to protect their crops. He’d be on overseas trips a lot. But home or away, he followed everything sports-related in his free time. If there were a real “ESPN 8 — The Ocho,” he’d watch it.

I have few childhood memories that don’t include a TV on in the background, with some event like a U.S. Soccer World Cup qualifier on the tube. Or even an Under-17 World Cup qualifier. He’d hold court near the front door and make booming proclamations, giving play-by-play to unwitting passing drivers.

If he had no dog in the fight — a common occurrence — he’d watch anyway. An alum of both the University of Virginia and N.C. State, he embraced underdogs as a choice, hated the University of North Carolina and all things baby blue as a rule.

Dad was a natural athlete in his youth, especially in baseball. He fired a perfect game as a 12-year-old living in Guatemala City. That’s where he listened on the radio to the 1960 World Series and Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off shot against the Yankees when he was 9, entrenching him as a Pirates fan for life, for better or for worse. (It was usually the latter.)

He stuck with the Bucs through all 20 post-Bonds consecutive losing seasons from the early ’90s to 2013. I’d needle him about it growing up, not appreciating baseball or the loyalty and principle of it. Thankfully, I came around.

Things turned through a mutual love of basketball. I latched onto the San Antonio Spurs in intermediate school, mostly because of David Robinson. Dad started pulling for the Spurs too, and in 2015 we went up to Sacramento for a weekend to see Duncan, Ginobili, Parker, Leonard and Popovich in person for the first and last time.

My final impressions of him as a sports enthusiast were as a basketball fan. As a retiree he got season tickets for UH men’s hoops for the 2014-15 season, despite my objections. (I thought the team would fall apart in the wake of an NCAA investigation, the loss of its best player and the firing of its coach. I was wrong.) When I’d cover the Rainbow Warriors courtside these last few years, I had but to look up and to the left to see my parents in the stands.

I didn’t look nearly often enough.

In his last few days, Dad was going in and out of responsiveness and, for once, couldn’t talk much. But he could still squeeze your hand harder than you’d believe.

We tried to make him as comfortable as possible. I brought a tablet and put on a game in his hospital room. In true Pirates fashion, they coughed up a late lead to Baltimore in a 6-5, 10th-inning loss, followed the next day by a 9-6 loss to the O’s in 11 after they led 6-1 in the eighth. It was like they were trying to put him out of his misery.

Dad came home for his final 24 hours. We adorned the place with Pirates yellow-and-black streamers and balloons. There was a game on TV. He smiled.

I almost waited too long to tell him, but I told him. I think he heard me.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if not for you.”

Happy birthday, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.

And let’s go Bucs.