tupview: father’s day

By Mike Tupa
June 16, 2025
BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT

Father’s Day.

Blessed are the sons and daughters that can honor their family’s patriarch with few conflicting feelings, with genuine respect and uncluttered love.

I know there are many of you in this category — perhaps most children.

I’m not one of you.

Yet, I am.

Not by experience. But by heart. By observation.

I’ve seen or known too many great fathers to deny what a special calling this is — what a wonderful burden of love, what a glorious sacrifice.

There is nothing so noble as a good father, a man who put his children above his greatest pleasures, his greatest opportunities, his greatest goals, even his sleep and health.

Yes, he has to make a living. Yes, he is good at what he does. Yes, he is respected by his peers. Yes, he is a captain among his fellow passengers at work or in other phases of life. 

But yet nothing is more important to him than his wife and children. Nothing is as dear as the simple kiss of one of his children, nothing is more heartbreaking than when they are hurting physically or emotionally.

I have known or known of many such men. Their children called them blessed long after their hair has turned gray, long after they are laid in the ground.

The community of Bartlesville said good-bye recently to what I believe was such a father and grandfather in Tug Baughn.

My own great-grandfather and grandfather were such men, as well.

I still recall a simple experience decades ago, shortly after my own father had deserted us and abrogated his responsibility in every way — emotionally, physically and financially. It was hard on me — but even harder on my little sister. I think girls take the rejection of a dad even harder than boys do.

Around this time, the group of girls she went to church with had a daddy-daughter date night — something especially traumatic for a girl in my sister’s situation. She was a wonderful little girl that had a tender heart and a very fragile psyche in the circumstances compared to the other girls in that 10 to 11 age group.

But our great-grandpa stepped up to soften the pain and embarrassment for her. He volunteered to be her escort for the daddy-daughter date. He showed up in his best suit, armed with a corsage for my sister and helped turn it into a special night for her.

As the years have gone past, I have loved him more and more for that gesture at such a vulnerable time in her life.

As for my own dad, I’ve always looked beyond his poor choices to love him for who he was and the good things he meant to me.

He never slapped or spanked me during my childhood, but he developed in me a sense of wanting to do the right thing because I never, never wanted to disappoint him. In my youth, before he left, I thought he was the greatest man in the world and the prototype of what a true male should be.

Even though dad wasn’t a member of my church and didn’t live some of its rules, he always tried to encourage my sister and I to live by its teachings and not to follow his example. He possessed a wonderful sense of humor and displayed a kindness to both of us that tied us to him throughout the rest of our lives.

Our mom refused to hate him or let us hate him. Quite the opposite. She wanted us to love him and the good traits that he possessed. She always tried to separate the bad choices he had made from the good man that he essentially was.

I can’t explain it. 

I’m reminded of a scene from the movie Carousel regarding the main character Billy Bigelow, a confused man that had good impulses but let his passions rule his closest relationships.

With the permission of heaven, he comes back to try to straighten out his confused teen-age daughter, who is at the crossroads of choosing the right or wrong path.

While visiting with her — she doesn’t know who he really is — he gets frustrated while trying to make a point and slaps her.

She runs away to her mother. When they return to the spot, Billy is gone.

The girl asks her mother is it possible for someone to slap you and for it not to hurt. Her mother, who senses the presence  of her husband, tells her daughter that yes, it’s possible for someone to hit you and it not hurt at all.

In some ways, that’s how I feel about my dad — no matter what he did I always knew that deep down he loved us — and that was enough.

I still recall him at the funeral of our mom, who he hadn’t laid eyes on for more than 20 years (although they had begun talking on the phone for the previous several years). After her graveside service, he leaned against a tree and sobbed.

Certain moments come to mind — when I was 10 and my sister was nine and our dad drove us around to see the Christmas house lights in the established part of Eureka, Calif., our dad driving us around the twisty mountain roads of Northern California with only one hand on the steering wheel and us feeling completely safe; the special  Saturday our dad and mom played games with us all day as if the rest of the world didn’t exist;  our dad’s Texas-Czech accent, cowboy hats and cowboy boots; the day our dad brought home two pet baby ducks.

I still recalled back to when I was 18 and I hadn’t seen him in nearly five years and he called me one day to ask me to go on a truck delivery with him that weekend.  For three or four days I had had a chance to get to know my dad as an adult. There was nothing dramatic about the whole thing.

Just a son getting reacquainted with his dad and the little moments of memories that have lasted more than 50 years.

In 1997 I met my dad at the Cotton Bowl — the first and only ballgame we attended together. I was 41 years old. He died less than four years later.

I yearned all my life to be a dad myself, to have children to play catch with and with whom to pass on family stories and to go on long cross-country drives with and maybe to help coach in youth sports and to try to guide through the rocky shoals of maturity to successful choices and lives.

But fate and destiny decreed that not to be the case and I am grateful for the many alternative opportunities and blessings God has given me.

I hope all of you that are fathers, that have fathers or that will be fathers appreciate this wonderful blessing.

Even if you haven’t experienced it in the ideal sense, I hope you appreciate the institution of fatherhood and embrace all that it has meant in your life and all that you hope it means.