There’s one at every game and he’s usually sitting right next to me. He’s the guy that shouts his opinions. At the UT vs. Arkansas football game, he was a short balding man. He made up for his size with a display of his hefty lungs. “You could grab a woman out of the stands and she’d punt better than that!” was followed by, “We’ve already lifted our skirts and showed ‘em our panties, why not just give ‘em the ball?” He might as well have yelled, “I’m a misogynist pig!”

My dad is that guy. He once got kicked out of my brother’s tee-ball game for shouting at the ump. He shook his glasses from the side-line and asked the ump if he’d like to borrow them. Spittle flew from his lips. His face resembled a tomato, deep red and round. The team and fans were shocked when my father was eventually ejected and sent to sit in the car waiting for my brother to finish. That was his last game as the team’s assistant coach.

Even when my dad is talking “normally,” he’s yelling. I don’t know if he has a hard time hearing himself or if he just thinks everyone else does. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which comments he’s saying to himself, and which ones he wants Section 128 of the Charlotte Coliseum to hear.

I’ll give you an example. We used to have very good season tickets to the Charlotte Hornets in their early days. The seats were about 8 rows up from the court in row H of Section 128. We could see the glisten of sweat on the players’ faces. We could hear their shoes squeaking and the sound of their balls bouncing off the rim. If they found something funny, we could hear them laugh. My father took advantage of this. If we could hear them, surely they could hear us too.

It was the last time Michael Jordan was playing basketball in Charlotte (or so we thought at the time). Rumors of his retirement were everywhere. He played for the Bulls and one of his teammates was the media-hyped Dennis Rodman, sporting a glaring dye job on his short-cropped hair. It was alternating colors of black and red in a zig-zag pattern. True, it was atrocious, but it did match his uniform.

In the 3rd quarter, the Hornets were down by at least ten. My father blamed it on the refs and their unfair preference for the Bulls. He yelled that Jordan was “getting away with murder.” Jordan was the “invisible man.” People turned around and glared. I cowered in my seat towards the stranger on the other side of me. No one yells at Michael Jordan in North Carolina, regardless of which team he plays for.

I guess he got enough dirty looks and moved on to Dennis Rodman. After all, nobody liked Rodman, right? Dad claimed Rodman was “a dirty player” and “a showboat.” To further disguise my relation to him, I started a conversation with my neighbor on which she preferred – coffee or hot chocolate. I had no idea what was to come.

During a quick timeout by the Hornets, my father stood up and yelled to the Bulls bench, “Go home zebra head! Go back to Chicago with the other dirty zebra heads!” My dad laughed. He thought he was witty, despite the fact that zebras are neither red and black nor zig-zagged, and Rodman couldn’t have known Dad was talking to him. He was nonplussed when Rodman didn’t turn around.

He tried for a while longer then looked at me in wonderment and said, “Hmm..I guess he can’t hear me.”