The postponement and recommencement of the NFL football season is a time for American reflection. For me, the football season reminds me of my father, who knew no childhood, and how the 49ers were a constant thread of communication in our lives. I remember my trip with him to Candlestick Park in 1971 when I was 9 years old, seeing the expanse of emerald grass, smelling the steaming hotdogs, feeling a chill from the wind and the thrill of my first pro football game. I remember watching quarterback John Brodie and secretly believing that he would ask me to suit up. And Dad spared no expense that afternoon, buying a $5 jersey that awed my classmates.

What made that day so special was that such days were rare. Dad was in the Air Force, so it seemed like he was always at work?and sometimes work was in Thailand, Vietnam or Guam. When he wasn’t working, he was at church for worship or Bible study, with meetings in between. He left home before breakfast and came home late. We seldom ate together, and when we did, Dad would talk about things military or religious, since these concerns were the center of his universe. By the time I was 14, some of my teachers were more of a father to me than he was.

It’s ironic that a sport became a cherished shared experience because my father never had time for games or play. He was the oldest son of Puerto Rican immigrants who slaved in the garment factories of New York during the Depression. Harsh economic facts and stern Catholic beliefs made life a serious business. He wanted to be a teacher or a priest, but his father–who died young and passed his responsibilities on to my father?took my dad out of school on the morning of his 14th birthday in 1942 so that he could start working. When he was 16, he lied about his age to join the military.

I could never get him to remember a single childhood game. Looking back, I realize that in some strangely reversed way, I was my father’s instructor in childhood. Over the years I tutored Dad. I taught him to toss a baseball, but he always threw it like a lead weight. One summer I tried to teach him to swim and failed. Though he loved football, Dad never got the hang of throwing a tight spiral.

That is not to say that my father didn’t try to teach me. He tried to pass on his beliefs, that the Church was everything, that America’s role in the world was to counter godless communism. More than anything, he hoped his ambitions for me would fulfill dreams taken from him. I never got the hang of it, and when my parents divorced three weeks after my 16th birthday, I refused to live with him. When he encouraged me to go to college and get the education he never had, I chose to work.

Still, that first day at Candlestick started something that lasted all our days together.

When I was 10, he talked about the 49ers when he came in late from a trip to Texas and found me frightfully ill with pneumonia. And I talked the Niners to him when it was my duty to say “cancer,” when we had to discuss his failing heart and the time for letting go. Through all of our years together and apart, we always marked time by the beginning of the football season, the playoffs, the Super Bowl.

Six seasons have passed since I last spoke to my dad. I realize now that when we could not talk about religion or politics or our painful past or diverging futures, we could always talk about football. When he could not understand the immaturity of a teenager and when I could not adopt his ways as my own, we still shared the 49ers.

It was more than a game to us.

John Ortiz is assistant news editor of The State Hornet.