When I saw my mother’s number come up on my phone last Monday shortly after 8 a.m., I knew why she was calling. I had been expecting the call for a few weeks.
My father, Bill Costello, had died.
It is funny what you think about when you lose someone. For me, among many thoughts, I started to think about the U.S. Open being in New York this week and how for most of my life I would either have watched the weekend golf with him or at least discussed it.
Sports were our bond.
My father was not one to say “I love you” all the time. Instead, our love was expressed in games of catch, shooting hoops, going to games or debating sports.
I tweeted something this week after he passed about our shared love of sports. It resonated with people more than I expected. But I guess it should not surprise me. For so many of us, sports bring us together and are the way many of us communicate with our dads.
My father would have been 85 on Thursday. He had a tough childhood, losing his mother when he was 10 then being abandoned by his father. Aunts and uncles in The Bronx raised him. He never spoke about the tough times when he was growing up.
We talked about baseball.
He grew up in the golden age of New York baseball. He would tell me about doubleheaders, paying a quarter to go to games and how he would make trips to all three ballparks at the time — Yankee Stadium, the Polo Ground and Ebbets Field.
I learned about all of the great players of the era and the teams he cherished. He was never really a fan of one team, but he loved the game and he passed that on to me. I was the only kid at Jefferson Township Middle School in 1988 who knew that Carl Furillo was the right fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers and was nicknamed “The Reading Rifle.”
As a sportswriter, I have interviewed hundreds of athletes. Talking to today’s stars never really fazes me, but talking to Willie Mays or Bobby Thomson or Yogi Berra always gave me pause, because I thought about my dad. I’m not sure he could ever really wrap his head around the fact that I was getting paid to talk to his heroes.
Brian Costello with his parents during his football playing daysCostello familyAs I got older, he began to take me to games, and not just baseball. My first football game was Jets-Colts in 1984 at Giants Stadium. It has to be one of the worst games ever played. The Colts won, 9-5, in a game that featured four field goals and a safety. The Jets had 143 total yards. It was a miserable game, but we stayed until the end. Years later, I became the Jets beat writer for The Post, something that gave my father so much pride.
In the mid-80s, I fell in love with the Mets. My father would take me to Shea Stadium a few times a year, even though he loathed the trip from Jersey to Queens. Along the way, my vocabulary always expanded by a few four-letter words. I was surprised years later to learn that the proper name was just the Triboro Bridge and the not the god damn Triboro Bridge. But he dealt with traffic, the cost of parking and my desire to always stay through the ninth inning, because that is what dads do.
On Sunday, I will be thinking of my dad as I watch the U.S. Open. He loved to watch golf, and I would always join him for the majors. The U.S. Open always felt special when it fell on Father’s Day, like it does this year.
My father suffered from dementia over the past few years, so it has been a while since we were able to watch sports together or have a conversation about sports. It was one of the most difficult aspects of his illness for me, and it is what I will most about my father now that he is gone.
I will be watching the final round with my own son on Sunday, and I’ll be sure to tell him a few stories about his grandfather. My dad would have liked that.
