Menlo Park author writes of her famous father: Y.A. Tittle
Giants & Heroes: A Daughter's Memories of Y.A. Tittle, by Dianne Tittle de Laet; Steerforth Press; 261 pp.; $25
by Don Kazak
When I was a boy, for a few years I collected football cards in addition to baseball cards. Back then, a newly unwrapped pack of cards could include a Mickey Mantle or a Willie Mays during the summer, or a Johnny Unitas, Jim Brown or Y.A. Tittle during the fall. At a certain age, sports heroes are larger than life to little boys, and apparently to little girls, too, especially if one of them is your father.
Dianne Tittle de Laet of Menlo Park has written a memoir of growing up as daughter to the most famous quarterback of the time in pro football.
Y.A. Tittle played for the San Francisco 49ers during the 1950s until he was supplanted by a young John Brodie and traded away as excess baggage to the New York Giants.
When he arrived in New York, he was resented by his new teammates, who also feuded with one another. Tittle stepped in and literally rallied the team around him, leading it to three straight division championships, and he won the league's most valuable player award all three years.
While Tittle was a star player, the teams he played on came up short of winning any championships. That meant he was criticized here (they lived in Atherton) by the time he was traded to New York, and that his family had to put up with threats and ugliness.
Tittle's family stopped going to games at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco after young Dianne heard a man shouting, over and over again, something at her father. At the time, she thought the man was saying "sun on the beach."
Tittle has worked as an insurance agent in Palo Alto since his retirement from football.
"Giants & Heroes" is unusual as a sports memoir, or as a book about a star athlete. To say the book is about football is akin to saying the novel "Bang the Drum Slowly" by Mark Harris is about baseball. Both books are people dealing with adversity and caring for one another.
Dianne Tittle de Laet does a remarkable thing in "Giants & Heroes" by remembering her own childhood and recreating it in words, reliving the feelings she had as a young girl.
The result is more impressionistic than journalistic, with the spirit of the young girl who, in her dreams, would rush down to the field and rescue her father, jumping off the pages.
This isn't as much a sports biography, although the biographical facts are there for the reading, as much as it is a recreation of a shared father-daughter experience, from the daughter's perspective.
De Laet reaches back to the Greeks and the original Olympic games for a repeating theme through the book. She read Greek mythology as a girl, which is an appropriate metaphor for professional sports. She also discovered later that Greek poets would write victory songs for triumphant Olympic athletes, especially verse from a Greek writer named Pindar:
"We are things of a day.
"The dream of a shadow is man, no more.
"But when a brightness comes and God gives it,
"there is a shining of light on men and life is sweet . . . "
It may be perhaps fitting that the most famous photograph of the famous quarterback, one of the most classic sports photos of all time, is of him sitting on the field without his helmet, bloodied and dazed. There is blood running down his face and he is gasping for air after just having his ribs broken.
It turns out, according to his daughter, that the famous quarterback who broke many records always played as if he might lose his job, without ever having a sense of being invincible.
It also turns out that the famous quarterback was afraid of many things in life, including heights and driving too fast, but felt absolutely no physical fear on the football field despite the painful injuries he suffered over the years.
There is a sense of perseverance in "Giants & Heroes" because Tittle's career, which had so many high points, also included disappointment and criticism. The home life was sometimes stormy, too, as Dianne de Laet writes of the frequent arguments between her mother and father and how the arguments were part of the family dynamic (her parents are still married).
There is also a sense of how unfair the expectations are that we place on sports heroes and, although not written directly here, of the cost of attempting to live up to the expectations.
Y.A. Tittle talks about courage:
"Once I was at a sports banquet in Seattle. The guy on my right was the first person to have climbed Mount Everest, and the guy on my left had just broken the world's speedboat record (his neck was in a brace).
"During the course of the luncheon, both of these men mentioned how courageous they thought I was to go out there for 17 years and face five or six rushing linemen averaging 250 pounds apiece, who all aimed to tear my head off.
"I looked over at them and thought, what is courage? You wouldn't get me driving over the speed limit or standing on the roof of my own house. Those linemen coming my way? I didn't even see them."
Dianne Tittle de Laet had an unusual childhood, to say the least. And she recounts it in what is an extraordinary book, capturing something elusive and sharing it with the rest of us.
She writes:
"Childhood then marked the least innocent days of my life. Those were the days when I believed that all cheerleaders should be put to death for acting like ballerinas at a bullfight. To me the game was a once-a-week opportunity to cross the lines. I could freely play any part of a person or a thing. Like a dream, I could be a pass, a fumble, the rain and the torn green grass all at once. I could be the air. It was fun to tumble in that tidal wave of hope."
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