Most of my childhood friends from our predominantly white New Jersey suburb have a story about how their love of sports began — usually involving their fathers. Shaun’s played catch with him for hours in the backyard and took him to baseball card shows, hence Shaun’s love of baseball. Matt’s brought him up watching Knicks games in the basement, so Matt loved basketball.

Not me, though. I had to find another way in. My father, Shyamal Kanti Deb, emigrated from India to the United States in 1975 and never cared for sports. He never understood any of it. I began watching games on television, usually by myself or with my older brother, Sattik. Or sometimes at a friend’s house with their dad. My earliest sports memory is being wowed by a rookie basketball player in 1996 named Antoine Walker, who played for the Boston Celtics. Something clicked, and I became a lifelong Celtics fan at age 8.

As I found my way into sports fandom, resentment for my father grew. I was jealous of the Shauns and the Matts of the world. Several of my classmates had fathers who were coaches of whatever team sport they were playing. It felt like every other kid had bonded with their father over a shared passion for athletics, and I hadn’t found a way to bond with my father at all. Clearly, it was serious: I was jealous of Matt getting to watch the Knicks with his father.

An electrical engineer by trade, Shyamal’s idea of a fun night was memorizing the periodic table, which would make perfect sense if you could see him hunched over the kitchen table in his thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He has always been an academic, wowed by calculus and physics, rather than dunks and home runs. The idea of playing catch with me was foreign to him. Shyamal didn’t know the basic rules of, well, any sport, except maybe soccer, which he played some growing up, and cricket, which is as essential to living life in India as oxygen. Like many South Asian parents of his generation living in the United States, his focus was on survival and trying to get to the next day. On behalf of their children, it was on professional and scholastic pursuits. Anything else was a distraction.