It’s hard for me not to get choked up when I hear the Daddy stories of this World Cup. If you are new to writing memoirs, there are terrific father-themed ones. Abusive daddies. Absentee daddies. Delusional daddies. I have the blessing of maybe covering all three in the book I’m working on about my own father.

Erling Haaland, I learned, is a player for Norway who’s built like a machine. But like me, he has a traceable human father. Unlike me, he has a father who raised him and passed along his sport. I so wish I had become a fan of The Beautiful Game when I was young, especially under the guidance of my dad, who truly loved footie. They called him “Skip” in Jamaica and I imagine his modest, lithe body, with shoulders swinging and legs crossing over, skipping to a dub beat as he struck the ball over and around opponents.

I can’t tell you much about soccer, but I know there are standout strikers like Haaland. His combination of power, stature, speed, and cunning betray his boyishness, his elation at tossing rivals down like rag dolls, at chewing up patches of grass in his cleats, at mauling the net with goal after goal. When I see him, I know there must’ve been Norse boatmen who had bones like steel and crashed the shores ready to take your land and your women. A bunch of beasts.

With star athletes, the types of fathers who create incredible sons in the sport are often a perilous roulette ranging between failed obsessive and gold-digging latecomer. There’s the story of Jalen Rose in the NBA, for instance, who knew nothing of his father except that he had played NBA ball. Then Good Ole Pop showed up shortly before his son’s biggest college year. Karl Malone, too, was an NBAer of real esteem who did not appear in his daughter’s life until her debut in the WNBA, it was reported. He dragged with him a torrid reputation of leering at teammates’ wives and that nasty statutory rape the league somehow whitewashed with stories of his Republicanism and love for fishing. I hated Karl Malone when he played, but I especially hated his character even before discovering how terrible of a father he’d been.

Watch Haaland in his next match, and as my brother explained, you’ll note a careful assassin. He conserves movement, like Messi would even though he’s a much younger player. He strikes exactly when his team needs to score, not more or less. He also converts his chances at a higher rate. A young man sharking around, plotting on the weakness of the defender so he knows exactly how to catch him off guard, suggests a well-taught player. His father was a notable midfielder who played for Manchester City — the same team where his son now builds a legend with the namesake.

I suppose it’s not unusual for a pro athlete to create and groom another pro athlete. That part’s become so common that the NBA is a sport now composed of the fairer-skinned sons of NBA players past. It’s also not uncommon for a father to pass on his love of a sport to a son.

We are all common somehow, as men are in their diversions. However brief, my father and I had conversations about sports. It was like me translating to him why I admired the roundball greats I did, and holding up my cultural lens to them. I didn’t get much from him about soccer, like who his greats were. He’d taught me some basics when I was 10, but ultimately felt I was too fat and groused at my unseemly motions with the ball. I’d been training my hands and flicking a jumpshot. I wasn’t sure what to do with this thing I could trip over.

For a year or two, I’d kick the hexagonal ball around my room but always left the house with a basketball. Dribbling that orange rock just got way more cred in New York than that other game where short maybe-Mexican dudes would take over any stretch of green longer than 60 strides. But inscribed on my curiosity for soccer was the gnawing sense that it was my father’s game, not mine to have, not for one who runs like I do, who sees asphalt where there are fields and concrete where there’s grass.

So I hit up my brother during the World Cup, in this, the first year after our dad died. The first year of the World Cup after our father is gone raises questions. So I ask him. I ask him questions because I know he’s studied it for so long. He was a goalie, played for the national squad in Jamaica, loves it like his children. I ask him what he thinks of Harry Kane, the English striker who looks, to me, like a proper gentleman from the Royal Court, a blue-eyed conquerer. I ask what’s happened to Brazil’s dominance, forestalled by the expansion of a global game, brain-drained of its stars in pro European leagues.

Occasionally, a little WhatsApp text from me reads: Haaland.

Just one word.

Or, the other day: “Whoa!” When Cape Verde nearly pulled off the unlikely upset against Argentina. I don’t know the particulars, only the heft of the game.

We may beat the colonizers (we won’t). We may see an underdog Mexico dethrone a European power (also no). The U.S. could take the big leap (nah).

It’s the first time I wish I could speak to my father uninterrupted. Free of the delusions that haunted him. Free of my resentments. Just me, him, the world, and some fans.