In a post the morning after the Super Bowl I showed you this photo along with this comment: "The camera lingering on a teary-eyed Drew Brees holding his infant son while the colored confetti floated in the background was about the best thing I've seen on TV in a long, long time. Beautiful and compelling."Not surprisingly, I wasn't the only one touched.
‘Don’t you live for that moment right there?”
That was former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason’s take on the final scene of Super Bowl XLIV: The Most Valuable Player, Saints quarterback Drew Brees, was holding his young son in his arms while his wife, young Baylen’s mother, looked on with a face full of joy — a loving family sharing a momentous personal, cultural, and historic moment.
It’s an image America needed. “Given that about one in four American boys are living apart from their dads at any one point in time, it is great to see a Super Bowl champion with his wife and son, and to see that this win is all the bigger for him for being shared with his son,” Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, tells me...
“The physical familiarity got my attention because it suggested the father actually knows his son, and the son his father, and that only happens from real time spent together,” Marquardt explained, “when mom and dad are sharing a home and a life. Even a busy football-hero dad is able to snuggle with and be there for his young son because they’re one family.”
“Even in a football stadium of screaming fans the toddler boy didn’t look anxious. He knew he was safe. He was with dad.”
Be sure to read the rest of Kathryn Jean Lopez' terrific column over at National Review. It's provocative and really well done.
