No Father's Son

[redsox907]

Introduction

Some talk about football in ways of destiny. "Ever since I picked up a football, I knew what my calling was." Others use it as a tool to escape their circumstances, whether it be a broken home or poverty. While football became both for me, it wasn't always that way. When I was young, football was something we did for fun, that my friends cared about and I participated in. Not because I loved it, or really liked it more than a way to spend the afternoon, but because I didn't want to be left out. Didn't want to go home where the only escape from my reality was inside my head. To the home that I knew felt off, but wouldn't understand why until years later.

When I got older, it was a means to an end. I wanted to fly, and in my mind, the easiest way to get there was an athletic scholarship. I dove into it wholeheartedly—not for a love of the game, but for a love of what it could deliver me to.

But in the end, maybe football was a part of my destiny.

Eventually, it became my way to prove that I was a better man than my father. To prove I was worthy of the opportunities I had made for myself, regardless of the ones he had taken from me. But more than that, it was my way to connect, to share my story with others. To show them that regardless of their past, they can make their own path.

I read a book in 7th grade, a rather unremarkable work of literature titled "The Goblins of Eros." But during our "nomad years," during the nine-hour drive from Jamestown, North Dakota, to our final destination in Havre, Montana, I needed something to do. I'd checked it out from the library before we left, knowing I couldn't return it but planning to mail it back someday. I couldn't tell you why the book caught my attention. I was neither fascinated with goblins nor the idea of Eros, the Greek god of love. But a quote in the book stuck with me in a way I didn't understand at the time and honestly wouldn't understand until much later in life:

"We are born with our father's names. We are not responsible for their failures. We are responsible for what they made us believe in. That is our only obligation. And it is even then a choice which we may sometimes be wise to ignore."

The failure I perceived at the time was in fact a small tip of the proverbial iceberg of my father's failures. But at the young age of fifteen, I was unable to see beyond the scope of my current discontent. As I sat in my mother's Jeep Grand Cherokee gliding down I-94, the only thing I could focus on was how I, in my skewed view of the world, had kickstarted this whole predicament, and how much I despised my mother for not only ripping me out of the only home I'd ever known, but also leaving my father behind. But most of all, I was focused on how the man who was never around was suddenly gone more than I ever thought possible, without ever saying goodbye.

Years later, when I was at my lowest, I found words that finally made sense of what I'd been running from. "Born a Crime," an autobiography by Trevor Noah, was published in 2016 and with it a quote that I've repeated more times than I can count:

"You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices."

That quote became an inspiration for me in a year of personal redemption. But it also awakened distant memories of the quote from "The Goblins of Eros", words I'd buried under years of self-pity. Suddenly, the understanding that had escaped me at fifteen was finally staring me in the face.

Two different books, two different times in my life, but the same truth:

A name doesn't make you. The absence of a father doesn't make you. What you do with what you're given whether it's a name, an opportunity, or a burden, that becomes your legacy. Not what came before you, but what you leave behind.

But before we get to the arduous trek that brought me from Las Cruces, New Mexico, into what felt like the end of the world as I knew it in Havre, Montana, we must understand how the chain of events unfolded.

Las Cruces, New Mexico
April 10th, 1992
Armando James Leon is born.

[redsox907]

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: The Spaceship
Chapter Two: Unraveling
Chapter Three, Part One: The Departure

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Ya'll may post now

This is going to be my CFB chise after Coastal is wrapped up, but we've got some story to tell until we get to the point of playing games. So going to update intermittently until Coastal is officially done. Giving the whole writing thing a shot, so we'll see how it goes.

[Soapy]

WELCOME TO THE CLUB!

[djp73]

Intrigued. Following.

[Caesar]

New contender in the ring. Soapy getting run off the block?!

[Captain Canada]

Yes sir

[The JZA]