This is my first Father’s Day without my dad. 

It’s been two months since he passed at the age of 99 after a brief illness. Today would normally be a day I’d drive down to have lunch with my parents. 

We’d probably be talking about the Knicks championship and parade last week or the U.S. soccer team’s victory in a recent World Cup game. 

My dad loved to watch sports. His favorite was hockey, but we watched a lot of baseball when I was younger and more recently football. He would watch almost anything. 

He knew a lot about the players and famous games, many of which he saw in person or heard on the radio. Some of the many legendary games he saw and told me about included: 

–Joe DiMaggio during his famous 56-game hitting streak

–Jackie Robinson while he was playing in the minor leagues

–The 1940 NFL Championship when the Chicago Bears beat the Washington Redskins 73-0

–The 1962 game when rookie Roger Staubach led Navy past Cornell 47-0 

He wasn’t passionate about any particular team. He would usually root for the hometown Yankees in baseball or Giants in football, but he wasn’t bothered or worked up if someone else won, as long as it was a good game. 

The sport he probably watched the least was the one he excelled in the most: diving and swimming. He was on the state championship swimming and diving team at Columbia High School and continued to swim and dive competitively at Cornell.

As an adult he swam laps in the summer after work and rode bikes and water skied, but the sport he came back to most consistently was skiing. 

He was a founding member of the Short Hills Ski Club and my parents went skiing on their honeymoon. 

One of the things he was most proud of was that he skied after turning 90. It was a long-time goal and he made sure mom took a photo to note the occasion. He said it would be his last time. 

After that, he gave me his skis. 

I used them for a few years before I passed them on to my son. 

The picture of dad holding his skis in March 2017 is one of my favorite photos. 

It captures so much about him from his passion for sport to his zest for life.