Steve Christilaw: How, and how not, to parent a star athlete

I have discovered the antidote.

Which antidote, you ask?

Let’s call it the antidote to having experienced too much Ball.

LaVar Ball, to be exact.

To those of you who have never heard of this person, you have my total admiration.

LaVar Ball was briefly a basketball player at Washington State University, where he started for a season under coach Kelvin Sampson. As a starter, he averaged a bunch of points. Well, a small bunch of points. Barely more than a field goal per game (2.3 points per game, to be exact).

The simple fact that he could not shoot did not stand in the way of LaVar Ball boasting that he would have “killed” Michael Jordan in a one-on-one game. To be fair, that’s entirely possible. M.J. could have died of laughter.

Truth be told, a boast like that would never have made it out of the local bar it was made in were it not for the fact that LaVar Ball is the father of Lonzo Ball, the No. 2 pick in the recent NBA draft, taken by the Los Angeles Lakers.

As the parent of a high-profile son, LaVar Ball makes Momma Rose from “Gypsy” look like a shy, retiring wallflower.

During an in-game interview at a UCLA game, with his son on the floor for the Bruins, Daddy Ball predicted that UCLA, with his son playing the point, would definitely win the NCAA Tournament.

He also boasted that his son was already a better player than Golden State’s Stephen Curry. For that matter, he’s already a better player than LeBron James and Russell Westbrook.

Talk about setting the bar high for your kid, right?

LaVar Ball revels in the publicity his boasts get and, not surprisingly, sports talk shows fall all over themselves booking him as a guest for further ranting. Ball has gone shout for shout with Stephen A. Smith on ESPN and even had an odd encounter on “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” in which he got into a heated exchange with reporter Kristine Leahy without ever looking at her.

Once Lonzo Ball was taken by the Los Angeles Lakers, Daddy Ball stepped up his boasting and predicted that his son would “step over” Magic Johnson to become the best guard in the history of the NBA.

LaVar Ball isn’t the first parent to make a cottage industry out of touting his child’s prowess on an athletic field. After a while, they fade into the background and let the kid live or die on the main stage by themselves. Not that they made it easy for them ahead of time or anything.

Over the years I’ve seen smaller-stage versions of LaVar Ball. Most coaches will privately tell you their own personal encounters with stage parents who fervently believe that the cure for all of a program’s ills is to give their son or daughter more playing time.

I have seen such parents literally run a coach out of town. I have witnessed successful programs destroyed from the inside out by a group of such parents. It happens. It’s part of the game – there will always be a parent or two who believe they know best how to run their program.

And then I saw a story over the weekend about Keyshawn Johnson.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. Johnson was an All-American at USC as a wide receiver, and he went on to have an 11-year career in the NFL with the New York Jets and the Dallas Cowboys, to name two of his stops.

He is now a studio analyst with ESPN.

His son, Keyshawn Jr., was a highly touted wide receiver coming out of Calabassas High School in Mission Viejo, California, who signed a national letter of intent to play college football at Nebraska. And he enrolled early and began taking classes in Lincoln in January with the intention of getting a jump-start on his college career by playing spring ball.

Except it hasn’t worked out. Keyshawn Jr. struggled through spring drills, in part due to an appendectomy. And those struggles came to a head recently when he was charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia in his dorm room.

That’s when Keyshawn Sr. showed up in Lincoln, not to rail against an unfair system that targeted his son and lobby for him to start for the Cornhuskers.

Nope.

He took his son out of school and sent him back home to California.

“You’re in college now,” Johnson Sr. said. “You’re an adult. You’re not a kid. You take a look at it from afar and let me know how important it is to you.”

In fact, he took it a step further. In a public statement, he told his son:

“One thing you will not do as my son is you will not embarrass Nebraska, you will not embarrass (coach) Mike Riley and you will not embarrass this family. If you mature and you’re ready to resume your football career and academic goals, then Nebraska will be ready to embrace you.”

In an interview on ESPN, he went further and said he has no interest in riding his son’s coattails.

“I’ve already played,” he said. “I don’t need your money. I already got mine.”

The lesson he’s trying to teach his namesake son is this:

“You just want to get to college to party, but you don’t understand: You’re playing college football. It’s a business. And it’s a serious business,” he said through a newspaper interview. “If you want to become successful – make it to the NFL – you’ve got to embrace it. You’ve got to own it. You don’t make it to the next level by cruising. There’s no cruise control.”

Give it six months’ time, but I am betting that the lesson has been learned.

Wow.

That’s what I call being a parent.