What We Give Our Sons Without Knowing What They Will Carry Forward
By Joe Cozart
In October 1991, my 10-year-old son, Joe Jr., and I went to Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium for something that had never happened before. The Atlanta Braves were playing in the World Series, and for the first time in the history of the city, a World Series game was being played in Atlanta.
We didn’t have tickets.
That really wasn’t the point.
I wanted my son to experience it. I wanted him to be around it, to hear the crowd, to feel what was happening in the city, and to understand that something unusual was taking place around us. So we brought a little black-and-white television to the stadium and found ourselves a place outside. We could watch the game on that little screen while hearing the enormous stadium only a short distance away.
As a father, I thought that was enough. In fact, I thought it was wonderful.
There is something about fatherhood that I understand better now than I did then. We sometimes imagine that the memorable experiences we give our children have to be elaborate, expensive, carefully planned or somehow extraordinary. I don’t think I was thinking about any of that in 1991. I simply knew that Atlanta was experiencing something historic and I wanted my son beside me while it happened.
Then a stranger walked up.
He saw a father and his 10-year-old son sitting outside Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium with a black-and-white television and asked us a simple question.
Would we rather watch the game from inside?
Joe said yes.
The stranger handed us two tickets.
They were five rows behind the Minnesota Twins’ dugout.
Suddenly, the evening that had already been special became something neither of us could possibly have anticipated. We went from watching the first World Series in Atlanta on a tiny television outside the stadium to sitting five rows from the field.
During the game, the stranger came by to make sure we were having a good time. I asked him his name. He wouldn’t tell me. He simply told us to enjoy ourselves and walked away.
The next day, the story appeared in the newspaper.
What I couldn’t have known was that the story would travel farther than that newspaper clipping.
Dr. Robert J. Ackerman eventually discovered it and included the story in his book, Silent Sons: A Book For and About Men. After recounting what happened that night, he wrote something about my son that I have carried with me ever since:
“Joe, Jr., might wonder what kind of man gives World Series tickets to a father and son he doesn’t know. Somewhere in the boy’s heart he knows the answer. It is the kind of man he wants to be.”
For more than three decades, I have thought about those words largely as a description of the stranger. What kind of man gives two World Series tickets to people he doesn’t know and then refuses even to give them his name?
But as the years have passed, I have begun to see another question inside the story.
What kind of man takes his 10-year-old son to the World Series when he doesn’t have tickets?
A father who believes that being there together is enough.
We weren’t standing outside the stadium hoping someone would rescue our evening. There was nothing to rescue. We weren’t disappointed. We weren’t looking for tickets. We weren’t trying to find a way through the gates.
We were already having a wonderful night.
That distinction matters to me now.
The stranger didn’t create the experience between a father and his son. He encountered it. He saw two people who had decided that simply being near something extraordinary together was worthwhile, and for reasons I will never know, he decided to make their evening even more extraordinary.
Perhaps that is one reason the story has stayed with me for thirty-five years. It contains two very different acts of generosity. One was spectacular and immediate: a stranger giving away World Series tickets. The other was much smaller and easier to overlook: a father deciding that an evening sitting outside a baseball stadium with his son was worth having in the first place.
And now I look at the photograph of Joe and me standing together in the lobby of the OA in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
The little boy is no longer ten.
We are two grown men standing beside one another, father and son, more than three decades removed from that sidewalk in Atlanta.
There is even a geographical coincidence in the story that I couldn’t possibly have appreciated then. The team sitting in the dugout five rows in front of us that night was the Minnesota Twins. Today, I live in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and the Twins are the Major League Baseball team closest to my home.
I don’t know whether life actually draws circles like that or whether we simply become better at recognizing them after enough years have passed. But sometimes the seemingly incidental details of our lives acquire meaning only after we discover where the road eventually took us.
There is one more thing I couldn’t have understood in 1991.
Joe was ten years old that night.
Today, he is a father himself.
And his son is seventeen.
That changes the way I read Ackerman’s words.
“It is the kind of man he wants to be.”
For years, I read that sentence as something written about my son.
Today, I read it as something that was handed to him.
Because the real inheritance in this story was never a pair of World Series tickets. It wasn’t baseball. It wasn’t Atlanta. It wasn’t even the extraordinary generosity of a stranger whose name I never learned.
The inheritance was the instinct to create a moment with someone you love without requiring the circumstances to be perfect.
Joe doesn’t need to recreate that October night. He doesn’t need a World Series. He doesn’t need tickets five rows behind a dugout. He certainly doesn’t need to find a black-and-white television.
The event was never the inheritance.
The instinct was.
Go somewhere together. Do something together. Be there. Understand that ordinary circumstances can become extraordinary memories, sometimes for reasons you could never have planned.
There is a photograph from 1991 of a father and his 10-year-old son who went to a World Series without tickets.
There is another photograph, thirty-five years later, of that father and son standing together in Grand Forks.
And somewhere between those two photographs, the boy became a man, the son became a father, and another boy came along.
He is seventeen now.
There are still moments waiting to be created.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.
Books by Joe Cozart are available at: amazon.com/author/joecozart
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Joe Cozart is a writer and consultant based in North Dakota. His work explores the intersection of political performance, cultural clarity, and the architecture of power. He is the creator of the GMJoe™ consulting voice and author of several longform essay series exploring sovereignty, institutional systems, industrial civilization, and the recursive tensions shaping the modern age.