It's O.K. to Be ScaredFatherly advice to a seven-year-old who's afraid to come to Atlantaby Rick Reilly
I know you're only seven and you're scared, and Mom says you're not sure you want to come here to see the last week of the Olympics, so I just want to talk to you a minute, O.K.? Don't feel bad about being scared. People a lot bigger than you are scared. Have you ever heard of the basketball player Karl Malone? Hours after the bomb exploded, he sent his family home. He said he was scared for them. I know three grown-ups who gave away the rest of their Olympic tickets, got on airplanes and went home. Maybe they were being smart—I don't know. Maybe I should tell you and your mom and your brothers to stay home too. After all, I spent half the day on the streets on Saturday because there was a bomb scare at my hotel.
Law-enforcement and military personnel have blanketed the city.
photograph by
You ask me so many questions about the bomb, I know you're worried about it. Was the bomb lit? How did it get in the knapsack? Are there bombs in everybody's knapsack? How many more bombs are there? I don't know. I don't think there are more bombs, but I don't know. You know how you love policemen? Well, there are so many policemen here that you'll go crazy, and if any bombs are left, I think they'll find them, but I can't say 100% for sure.
But I want you to come down even if you're a little scared. Because being scared is like a little bug that gets inside you, and once you let it inside, it just gets bigger and bigger until you're not sure who's bigger, you or the bug. It goes with you no matter how old you get. The bug will have you backing away from the plate when your brothers pitch to you and refusing to get on planes even when you really want to go somewhere.
Remember how you could never go to sleep without your blankie, and then we forgot it when we went camping and how hard it was for you to sleep that first night? But remember how it was better the next night? And by the end you had forgotten all about the blankie? Scared is like that. The more you stand up to it, the smaller it gets.
If you come down here, I'll show you a bunch of big girls who were little girls like you and who were scared too, once upon a
time. There's a diver here, Mary Ellen Clark, who was afraid of heights, but she faced right up to it and now is doing triple somersaults off platforms 30 feet high. Did you see the woman who won the 100-meter race the other night? Gail Devers. She has Graves' disease, which once got so bad, doctors almost had to cut off her feet to save her life. She was afraid she would never walk again, much less run, and now she's the fastest woman in the world. Did you see Monica Seles playing tennis in front of everybody the day after the bomb? She has had a lot of scared inside her because of what one of these nuts did to her once—she wouldn't even go outside for a while—but there she was, not scared and playing great.
A lot of dads like me are having to think about this. Two nights before the bomb went off, President Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, was trading pins with other kids right in that very same park. I'd never seen her smile the way she was smiling when she was here. She went home, but I'll bet she wants to come back. I wonder if President Clinton will let her come back.
I hope you come because I miss you, and besides, I think you're going to have to get used to the kind of country you're going to grow up in. Between that airplane that blew up and this bomb in Atlanta and hearing about the Oklahoma City bombing trial every day, you know more at seven about terrorism than I knew at 27. If you spend all your time worrying about what bad stuff could happen to you, nothing much good ever will.
I know that coming here will take trust. Trust means you are not sure of something—maybe even a little scared—but you believe people when they say it's going to be all right.
Remember when you were little and would scream like crazy whenever Mom or I left the room? And we had to keep telling you over and over that we were never going to leave you, that we would always love you and be your parents forever? And after a while you stopped crying because you saw that no matter where we went, we always came back? That's trust.
This takes trust. And courage. So come on down. You can bring your blankie. Come to think of it, bring mine, too.
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SI Olympic Dailies
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