By Neal Wooten
You might recognize this from Proverbs. It means a person who is good at something makes another person get better at it. I have always been a little above average in strength, coordination, and possibly even smarts. But I have to admit to one truth — my dad was better than me at, well… everything.
You did not want to play checkers with this man. I never won one game against him in my entire life. When you see those old timers sitting around the small stores and city parks playing checkers, trust me, it’s not just a game. It’s a calculated strategic event. Dad always told me to look four moves ahead, but I never knew what my next move was going to be.
And forget throwing horseshoes. Like most people, I tried to make the shoe flip one time in the air and hopefully land near the stake. Dad held the horseshoe on the side and made it rotate 360 degrees instead of flipping it. And if it landed anywhere near the stake, even behind it, it slid right around it. I once watched him win ten games in a row as he threw a ringer every single time.
In my senior year in high school, I was the fastest lineman on the football team, running the 40 in under five seconds. Had God seen fit to bless me with normal-length legs instead of these sawed-off things, there’s no telling how fast I could have been. Yet my pop, who was 47 at the time and horribly out of shape, could smoke me. In fact, Dad could run backward with me running forward and still outrun me.
Between the ages of 18 and 25, I racked up dozens of arm wrestling and powerlifting trophies. I hit the gym religiously. But my old man, who had never set foot in a gym in his life, could toss me around like a rag doll and beat me at arm wrestling easily.
To make matters worse, it wasn’t just physical things he excelled at. I was on the math team in high school and won some first-place trophies. Dad, however, who never made it past elementary school, was even sharper. He could do advanced mathematics in his head faster than most people could do it on a calculator.
I’ve read that to get better at something, you need to compete with those who are better than you. Well, that sums up my entire childhood. If anything good came out of my childhood at all, it was having a father so dang good at everything. I’m sure that’s why I did do well in certain areas and events, just from the competition.
