I don't get this drum-beating, poetry-reading, primal-screaming and bestseller-making movement to get in touch with the capital-M manhood our fathers neglected to teach us. I don't! I suffered my share of formative traumas—my parents divorced before I could ride the bumper cars—but I still managed to learn the finer details of sports, hunting, wars, and women in the alternate weekends I hung out at my father's apartment. On Saturday mornings, we'd go hunting for the big game. At dawn we'd roll into the kitchenette and prepare enough salami subs and Cheez-Whiz cracker sandwiches to last our day's adventures. We pack it up, on plastic serving trays, and haul it into the living room, where Dad would teach me the most common of male rituals.

We'd watch football.

Without his guidance, I would have been lost. I would have been lured by Keith Jackson's southern drawl into thinking the wishbone offenses of the Big Eight were the game's greatest innovations. Instead, I learned the real warriors played for the independents, Notre Dame and Penn State, who didn't have cellar dwellers to beat up on every other week. I learned that true men don't take every other Saturday off. Defense was key, as were special teams—subtleties that would have been overlooked without a mentor. With Lou Holtz' Fighting Irish in the background, I'd watch my father and learn the body language of contemporary manhood: crossed feet resting on the coffee table, chest hidden by protruding belly, body still as a pillow, eyes fixed in an anxious gaze at the tube. For a restless boy this was not an easy stance to adopt, and I was fairly poor at it then, but twenty years later my early training is visible in my ease around the set.

Our days were full. In the early afternoons, Curt Gowdy would guide us down our heartland rivers in search of cutthroat trout, and a half hour later he'd take us by jeep to the Yaak Valley of northern Montana, where we'd wait in the rain, under reeds, for the great migration of Canadian Geese to take the fire of my twelve-gauge. I've never baited a hook, but I can nevertheless recite the three major differences between lures meant for the murky autumn backflow of the Mississippi delta and those meant for the clearer downstream currents of spring. So can most of the friends my age, when we gather over a barbecue and start singing old sitcom theme songs. America had a common culture back then—only four channels. Those were the good old days, I suppose, when the world was simple and the ways of being a boy were few.

With the day ending, we'd still be glued there, our eyes half-open to the black-and-white rebroadcasts of the great war films. I learned trench warfare and fighter plane formations. With Dad's help, I learned to decipher German codes and assemble Russian artillery. I learned history. I remembered dates, I remembered names, and at school the following week I'd impress the gym teacher, Mrs. Superfisky, with my tactical strategies for supreme command of tetherball.

In seventh grade my mother took me with her to a condominium complex in Tuscon, but those are formative years for a young man. I made her feel guilty for taking me away from my only role model by asking who she thought would win the Heisman and what bait she thought I could use on fresh water catfish. In the fall of my fourteenth year I moved back to the Bay Area to live with my father, who by then had moved up a bit in the world. He'd bought a house in the Berkeley flatlands, and he'd traded up his RCA to a Japanese 25 inch with push button controls. Channels Eleven and Thirteen were programming full schedules, and with a special antenae Dad could receive Ted Turner's network when the weather was clear.

But the good old days never really returned. Rather than having new adventures to share, we often bickered over whether to watch Tarzan or Hulk Hogan. The choices brought out subtle differences between us, differences we didn't know we'd had. It got worse with cable. We each needed our own television. He let me put the Sony down in the basement rec room, buying himself a remote-controlled Zenith with stereo sound which he set up on the dresser in his bedroom. I didn't see him much anymore. Occasionally I'd bump into him at the microwave, or down at the video store. Every now and then a crisis would bring us back together, like when Pac Bell was digging up the street and cut cable to the neighborhood, but the crises never lasted and soon we were back to our separate worlds. I was one kind of man and he was another. I can't imagine what it's like to grow up now, with public access, VHF and satellite dishes. All those divisive choices!

When I was in college, I'd think back on the early days and realize that I probably never really knew my Dad. What did he watch after my bedtime? What were the late-night influences on his life?