CAREY CASEY

Chronicling life as a new father to his beautiful firstborn child – daughter Thea – Chris Kerr’s goal is to provide all men experiencing fatherhood for the first time with some invaluable tips and tricks as they are learned – the hard way. Acknowledging he needs help too(!), Chris has called on a group of dads he calls, ‘The Father Hood’ to ask them for their tips and wisdom. In this edition, Chris sits down with the legendary Carey Casey founder of Championship Fathering and author of the excellent book with the same name. Carey has been a tireless advocate for dads, children and families for decades, including sitting on the White House Task Force on Fatherhood and Healthy Families under Barak Obama. Carey was also the CEO of the National Center for Fathering, a non-profit organisation established in 1990 to encourage and equip men in their role as fathers and father-figures. Carey has been married for 45 years to his wife, the wonderful Melanie, and has four children and six grandchildren. This article was originally published by Sorted Men's Magazine. A special thanks to Steve Legg for giving us permission to publish here.

“Please go to sleep now Thea. I am meeting Carey Casey tomorrow and I need to be at my best”. If she had known who Carey was, she would have obliged. Alas it didn’t work and so I showed up to the interview exhausted and barely functioning. Within five minutes of meeting him though, I was full of energy and inspired. He’s that kind of character. Humble, oozing kindness and compassion and just a force of nature for those God has placed in his care: Dads. Here’s Part 1 of my discussion with him:

Pastor Carey, thank you for giving up your time to talk to us today. In your book, Championship Fathering, you share lots of stories about your own father. What made him such a great dad?

So, I am going to start by saying this to your readers: There are no perfect dads. So, you can just relax (laughs)!

My dad was a good dad. He becomes greater as the years go by. For example, he raises me more now from the grave than when he was here, and that tells you something. I hear his voice when I am sitting on planes, when I sit in my study, when I prepare for talks. He had such a great impact on me when he was alive, that his principles live on in me to this day.

That is the case because he was present. He spent time with me. I lost count of how many times my father said, “Boys, let’s go for a drive.” It took me a while to catch on to what he was up to but it wasn’t really about the drive! Pop was creating a captive audience in the car, where he could teach us on something he’d been thinking about. There would never be a big announcement or anything, and he wouldn’t even change the tone of his voice. He’d just say things like, “You know boys, it would break my heart if I ever heard that you hurt a young lady in any way”.

These conversations impacted me in a huge way, and so even though he is no longer with us, and I miss him greatly, he is still shaping my life. That’s great fathering.

Could you give us an example of how your dad impacted your life?

Have you ever seen the film Remember the Titans starring Denzel Washington? It’s based on a true story, and in real life, I was on the team that lost to the Titans in the State Championship game. I was 16 at the time, and after this I would go on to play all-state-all-American, a really prestigious level of football. I ended up playing for Coach Boon, who was portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film, in the All-Star Game.

I would never have made it there if it wasn’t for my dad. There was one point during High School were I nearly quit altogether. I had developed a bit of attitude and one day my coach got in my face about something. The coach was a white man, and all my African American buddies were telling me to quit the team. We all thought that the way he was treating me must mean he was racist.

I agreed, so I went home spitting venom and shared my plan to quit with my father. Dad listened until I had got it all out of my system and then he shook his head and said: “Son, you are a great player but you are a Sophomore. Your coach is checking out your character. That man is a good coach. He’s going to win games with or without you. He doesn’t need you. You need that team more than he needs you”.

He then said, “If you are going to lead the orchestra, you are going to have to turn your back on the crowd”.

So, I went back, and guess what he was right. Pop saw the big picture and because of that, I stayed on the team, I improved and he gave me more playing time. Eventually, I got a scholarship and played in college – where I met my bride!

A present dad, who invests in his son, can literally change his trajectory in one conversation.

Your Dad also helped you through some tough times as well right?

Yeah, he did. My dream was to play the National Football League (NFL) and I was on the fast track to getting there. I was told I was going to be a great player who would end up in the Hall of Fame. And then all of a sudden, I injured my knee and doctors were telling me I would never play again.

So, I was lying down in my dorm room at University and I called my Dad, crying down the phone. And I said, “Dad, I’m sorry”. I was apologising for my injury because in my mind, I am Carey Casey the American football player, and that’s my identity. My dad turns around and says, “Son, I always wanted you to play Baseball”.

And then he laughed! I was thinking, ‘Dad, what are you saying?!’ This is a serious moment! But he said, “Son, Daddy loves you whether you play football or not. Your mother and I love you.”

Then I got a letter from my Pastor who tells me that God is in control of my life, whether I play ball or not. The most important people in my life gave me the most important message. I was loved by them, and by God.

Nowadays, my friends – many of whom are in the Hall of Fame – tell me that they trust God, and that they love their families because they saw how I functioned in a time of crisis.

Carey, you not only played American Football at a high-level but you have also served as a chaplain for the Summer Olympic Games, the Dallas Cowboys, and the Kansa City Chiefs. What have sports taught you about being a good dad?

I have been really blessed to see first-hand what high performing sports teams do and let me tell you this: the champions are the teams and the individuals who practice and perform their fundamentals better and longer than anyone else. A lot happens in sports that cannot be controlled, but you can control how to do the basics, and that makes all the difference. The same goes for fathering.

Championship Fathering is mostly about time and doing the basics. You start doing the fundamentals, and you keep doing them. There are three fundamentals and they are ‘loving’, ‘coaching’ and ‘modelling’.

If we keep practicing and performing these fundamentals, then wow! But we have to keep practicing and doing these fundamentals because the requirements will change over time. For example, loving, coaching and modelling a two-year-old is very different to loving, coaching and modelling for a teenager!

You deal with the fundamentals in greater detail in your amazing book, ‘Championship Fathering’ but could you talk me through the first of them – ‘loving’?

If we men are honest, we will say that we have more questions than answers when it comes to love. And that’s ok because whether we are ‘loving’ as a husband or a father, it can be tough to figure out how to love properly.

Jesus’s great commandment (Mark 12:29-31) is the key to grasping the ‘loving’ part of the Championship Fathering fundamentals. Let me sum up the principle this way Christopher: Love isn’t nearly as much as about how you feel as it is about what you do for the other person and how you make them him or her feel. That’s an important thing to grasp as a husband and a father because you set the tone for the culture in your household.

A friend of mine said loving is a responsible and deliberate beneficial action on behalf of another, and you can’t go far wrong with that – in thought, action, decision. I’ll give you an example. If your kid is at a pre-school age, pick up your phone when you are at work and call them to say, ‘I miss you’, What you are doing there is letting them know that, even when you aren’t there with them physically, you are still thinking about them. It builds a strong foundation for them.

I just want to stop on the ‘loving’ fundamental for a second as it is so important. In your book you have a whole chapter on loving the child’s mother. Why is that so important to our children?

Let me say it this way Christopher. I always wanted to be married and to have children. I married my bride Melanie when I was 21. I have been privileged and honoured to be married for 45 years. Where did the time go!

My mother used to say, “Boy, if you didn’t marry Melanie, you wouldn’t be anything!”. I agree with her! And that’s definitely true of parenting – there are no championship fathers without the mother.

So, if we truly want to love our kids, we start by loving their mother. And many men start off strongly in this regard. They ask their partner to marry them because they loved them. They vowed to love them in our wedding ceremony. And rightly so, because as a husband, one of my number one jobs is to love my wife. But we can’t stop there. We need to love intentionally and consistently, for the rest of our lives.

That’s really important. Our research shows that there is an overwhelming need in children to see their father love their mother and vice-versa. So, can I give all the dads reading a challenge? Tonight, I want you to go home, walk through the door plant a big kiss on your bride in front of your kids.

Now, expect to hear, ‘Ohhhh Dad, nooooo. What are you doing?’ but don’t let that intimidate you. Your kids need to see that you have a genuine passion and deep love in your marriage. The evidence of this unbreakable bond between you both will be a wall of security around your kids, and that’s wonderful.

Amazing, thanks Carey. Your next fundamental is ‘coaching’. What is coaching, and how can dads apply it to their kids?

Do you know Christopher, I played under a lot of coaches in my time. All of them had a different personality and style, and they left an impression on me. But I can now see that they were all assistant coaches to Pop, working under his supervision. He was the one coaching me through life, often interpreting how what my coach said in a sporting context, applied to life.

Coaching isn’t preaching. It does include discipline and correction of course, but it’s so much more than that. It’s about sharing from our own experiences and practicing the principles. It’s also about taking into account each child’s unique gifts, challenges, interests and more. Remember in part one I spoke about my journeys with Dad in the car – those were great coaching moments!

Now, once again, coaching looks different at every stage of your kid’s life. At pre-school, you will need to bend down and get to their level and your coaching will be more directive. When your son or daughter is a teenager, your coaching style will be more interactive and conversational. For example, I used to take my kids for a walk in the park and we would talk about life.

Coaching is an art form, and it can make a big difference in your kid’s life. As is the case in American Football, a good coach works with his players so that when they are in the game situation, and the coach is on the side line, those players can make good decisions under pressure without him.

Thanks Carey. Your final fundamental is ‘modelling’. What do you mean by that?

Our kids are watching us and taking cues from us even before they can tell us what they see. What we do and say in front of them can shape their lives, and so the question you have to answer as a dad is: ‘What kind of model will I be?’

Now, that’s an important question because it will impact your son or daughter in a big way. For example, the things you model to your daughter will help her decide who she marries one day. If you are a good man, there’s a high chance she will judge other men by the standards you set.

I should warn you. You never know what your kids might imitate about you. Sometimes it’s pretty funny! My pop was a blessing but he wasn’t perfect. When I was a teenager, there were times I questioned his fashion sense. He used to wear his pants hitched up to his belly button. He looked like El Nerdo! used to say to him, “Pop, it ain’t working. You gotta sag those pants a little bit.” He would just smile and go about his business.

I’m here to tell you, the shoes I wear and the way I dress today are just like Pop. Now I am El Nerdo!

But joking aside, it is important to understand our kids tendency to imitate us. Model well.

Carey, you have a real passion for helping kids who have no involvement from their fathers. Could you tell us what challenges they face?

The United States, where I live, leads the world in fatherless homes. Almost half of the school-aged kids in America live in a home without their father present. In fact, 25 million kids will go to bed in America tonight without their biological father living below the same roof as them.

These kids face a whole host of challenges, and the consequences go beyond that to our culture as a whole. Let me give you an example about the individual pain these kids and the adults they become can face – because believe me I still speak to 60, 70, 80 year old men who are hurting today because their Dad was present in there life. They didn’t hear him say, “I love you son”.

Kids without dads are far more likely to be living in poverty, drop out of school, live a life of crime and, for the girls, they are more likely to become pregnant as a teenager. If you think we are facing challenges today with poverty and crime, just wait to see what the future will look like for your kids and grandkids if we don’t do something about this fatherlessness crisis.

That’s so true Carey. I recently wrote a special report in Sorted Men’s Magazine and the data around kids who have no relationship with their dad is harrowing – not just for the individual but for their community also.

That’s right, Christopher. Whenever I see a societal crisis I ask, “How would responsible fathering have made a difference in this situation?” I usually find a father-angle straight away. Take for example mass shootings that happen in schools. You will see a glaring point of similarity – the perpetrator had no dad. He was absent from their life. The same goes for your average gang member and so on. A present father is really important.

Many new fathers reading the New Dad Diaries will be doing so because they didn’t have a relationship with their father and so they don’t have anyone to model or speak to about how to be a great dad. What would you say to them?

So, whenever I do a Championship Fathering workshop I ask the men in the room a question: What handoff did you get?

So, just like in an Olympic relay, the handoff is important. You can be the fastest runner on the track but if you receive a bad handoff from your teammate you can lose the race. Well, we have already seen that is true for kids who don’t have present dads. But just by a dad being there, the statistics I spoke about early get reversed.

So, really the fact that your readers who are new dads have chosen to be a present father means their kids are already winning in life. Then the next step is learning what you didn’t learn from your dad, and we spoke about loving, coaching and modelling in the last part of this interview. That’s a great place to start!

Now, there are things you will be able to do, that normal people couldn’t because of your history. Your hunger to be what your dad couldn’t be for you is a real indication of that.

The scale of absent fathers is already enormous, and it is growing quickly even here in the UK. Where’s the hope in reversing the current trend?

My dad was in Washington DC the day Martin Luthor King gave the “I have a dream” speech. Did you know that the “I have a dream” speech was almost never given?

The night before he was due to give a speech, Dr King’s colleagues were working with him to craft his speech. And they said, whatever you say, do not talk about that damn dream! Now, he had been sharing that dream for two years in different settings. But they told him – don’t talk about that dream. They told him to tell the people we need housing and jobs and so forth.

And so, that’s what Dr King started to do. He was giving this polysyllabic speech, scripted for him by others when all of a sudden a gospel singer called Mahalia Jackson called out to him and said, “Martin, tell them about the dream!”

So, he put his prepared speech down and started telling 250,000 people about his dream, and this particular line really hit people emotionally: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’

So, one of the greatest speeches that was ever given, was almost not given! But notice what he said Christopher. He was being a father that day, when he said up, that my four little children will live in it. Everybody could identify with that. Yeah. You can never erase, or scratch from the record, where he talked about housing, education, economics but the bit that spoke to the world was when he was speaking as a father.

My hope comes from God the Father first. It’s His will for Dad’s to be present in their kids lives and He can reach in and change the story. But I also take hope from the fact that, as the way Dr Kings speech was received demonstrates, men are moved by being a father. In some cases, we just have to reconnect people to that.

Final question Carey, if you could give one message about the fatherless crisis to the dads reading this, what would it be?

I would say this, Christopher. As you seek to become an effective father yourself, you may discover that your kids aren’t the only ones who need you. Many children don’t have a dad involved in their lives. Championship fathering means being a father to your own children first – and then extending that love to others.

There are many ways to do this. You can volunteer in your churches youth ministry or coach a sports team or you can make an effort with your kids friends and the kid’s in your neighbourhood.

A huge thank you to Carey and his wife Melanie who set it all up for their valuable time!