Jumbotron
A 1997 Flashback That Taught Me Men My Age Struggle with Talking With Their Kids About Life Topics Against a Backdrop of...Minor League Baseball?
Thank you for the support as I launch Formerly Problematic. I knew I had a reader base for this, and I think my work with and has really helped get the word out.
As mentioned, we are going to get gritty and I think there are stories about me and about life that need to be told as I find a way to understand why the hell people my age, mostly men are so damn messed up, and also find peace in how I have lived my life.
Funny that I write that last sentence, because one of the subjects I reference in this piece died yesterday, and I am heartbroken for my friend James over the loss of his dad.
What’s funny is this column was long since written in my head, and the fact that he passed while I was one day out from writing it was a coincidence I couldn’t fathom. I am thinking about my friend and his sisters over the loss of the patriarch of the Chavez family. RIP to Jimmy Chavez.
But that man liked to laugh, and for the most part, this column is funny, so I am going to honor him by continuing with this.
I have never told this story before. I haven’t really forgotten about it, nor repressed it. But it is a story that now at 42 years old, I understand the context of a lot better, because to be honest, I am as old, if not older than my dad during the moment this event happened.
Let’s get to it.
Jumbotron
Before I start, Jumbotron was a brand name coined by Sony in the 80s…. You know they had Trinitron TVs as well. America genericized the “BIG VIDEO SCREEN” at event venues as Jumbotrons as they did with calling all bandages band-aids, and in New Mexico calling all sodas, “Cokes.”
Ok, moving on. I am trying to be quicker in telling stories.
One thing a lot of men over 40 struggle with—especially in Hispanic culture, and even more so in a place like New Mexico where economic depression and unstable home lives have long shaped repressive mindsets—is being open about sex and so-called “taboo” topics, like homosexuality, racism, and things like that.
I was raised most of the time at my grandma’s house, despite having both parents around busy working. My grandparents were born in 1937 and 1940, back when in NM dirt floors and no running water was still a major thing. Along with that was the “we don’t talk about those things” topics you never could broach with them, so you were on your own.
Most of my adult development came through TV, the internet, and dumbass friends—none of whom were exactly qualified life coaches, but they were what I had. Still, I was smart enough to know that would screw me up, so I tried hard to overcorrect on the things that stunt a lot of people.
I can tell you I am unafraid to talk about anything. Working with mostly women will cure you of that. Being the “sensitive” one who likes to talk when you have female friends gets you deep into some crazy chats and you learn a lot through them as well.
But I can tell you my parents did not help me deal with difficult topics like sex and relationships, especially the latter in any rational way, because they were bitterly divorced 33 years ago.
I am not really resentful of that, because I figured it out, but some people just don’t.
I see the repressive/taboo thinking bleeding into the next generation. My wife and I always talk about a story with one of my nieces, who just turned 9 yesterday. She was maybe 5 or 6 years old when this happened.
We were in our kitchen and unsolicited, my wife and I kissed. It was a small peck. One of many throughout the day with many “I Love Yous” because it is important to hear that stuff as often as possible.
My niece fucking flipped out. It was like she saw a damn alien.
“Why are you kissing?”
She had never seen an outward show of affection before. The funny thing is I tell my nieces and nephews “I Love You” every chance I get because I never heard shit like that growing up, and I feel if they know it’s ok to be emotional, then they will be better for it.
My wife explained to my niece that it’s perfectly normal.
A conversation about that moment with my mom led to a, “I don’t fucking kiss Lupe in front of them,” which is her husband. My mom raises her grandkids and she asserted that PDA is not part of the interactions at home. I mean, it’s fine, some people are not built like that, but the look on my niece’s face told me how mind blowing it is to see affection when they aren’t around it but for movies and TV.
(note: My mom said that in her own funny, honest way. She’s not a grouch or anything. Nevertheless it is true.)
My dad? Never really talked to him about anything except sports and occasionally the news. No birds and the bees talk. No real relationship talk, except how fucked my parents’ relationship ended (my mom was the same way), no help with girls, no help with understanding how weird and crazy your 20s, 30s, and 40s will be. Nada.
Never mind the talk about anything remotely sexual or about the opposite sex in any way.
This is where I always envied my friend James and his dad, or my father-in-law and his son. They are father-son, but inherently so close, they are basically brothers and friends as well, and those types of relationships lend themselves to more honest talk about women, life, and all the things that impact ones life.
I never had that. I maybe used to be mad that I didn’t have that, but I figured it out.
My first relationships with women were hard, because I didn’t have guidance from anyone, including friends, who were not really in the dating scene yet.
My marriage came from one of my first real serious relationships, and I think…no, I know, that I came at it right. I found the person I want to love forever, and will if given the opportunity. But I can tell you that work on making it good was all from me and me alone.
But to be a kid raised by parents who grew up repressed on what they talked about with their parents, my grandparents, even more bottled up, it’s amazing I am the way that I am now.
If you are familiar with “King of the Hill,” Think of my parents and grandparents like Hank Hill talking to Bobby about something he perceives as possibly “gay” that Bobby likes to do or say.
That’s how I was raised. You don’t talk about these things.
I take it that a lot of my “peers” in writing that are my age from this area had an existence not unlike this. Again, middle-aged writers are weirdos.
Awkward with awkward families who didn’t talk about sex or relationships, or when Uncle has an alcohol problem, they look the other way and never address it.
Those writers then go to school where they never interact with anyone outside of their bubble and that’s why they end up in these weird relationships of convenience with women they never wanted to be with…they were just THERE and got lucky that this person was kind of attractive and liked the same nerdy shit they did.
Anyhoo, in the last few years, I have tried to figure out why I was so wild and angry and yes, even a bit promiscuous with so many women in the mid-2000s.
Why did I make so many mistakes? Well, the lack of having “help” learning about life is one part of it, but it was just in my nature to not be repressed, because I knew that it would be totally destructive to me later in life.
BUT THE MORAL OF ALL THIS IS: Middle-Aged Men… You need to be more open with your lives if you have kids.
Porn and YouTube and Crazy Men like Andrew Tate are shaping your son’s view of women, objectifying them and treating them bad.
If you have daughters, you need to be uncomfy and talk about how fucked up you may have been when you were younger, how guys REALLY are, and more importantly, how not to fall for young guys raised by Xtube and influencer who boast about how they treat women. You shielding your kids from everything is going to warp them.
But about a year ago, I was thinking about a lot of things from teenage years, and I came upon a moment in time that the repression in my dad, at least in front of me and my brother, slipped for one moment.
It was 1997 and we were at an Albuquerque Dukes baseball game.
The Dukes were the longtime AAA affiliate of the L.A. Dodgers, and during this 5-6 year stretch up to 1997, a lot of prominent players, including future Hall of Famer Mike Piazza were in ABQ. It was minor league baseball but it felt important, at least to me as a kid.
In researching this column, I forgot what a total shithole Albuquerque Sports Stadium was… at least compared to the comfy Minor League parks of today. It was bland, cement, bench seats which burned your ass in the summer and all the warmth of a medium-security prison
I get it has been 25 years since they left town, and cameras sucked back then, but my goodness, nothing but shitty pictures exist online.
Catchy-ass name too. Not.
That’s why I don’t mind “Rio Grande Credit Union Field at Isotopes Park” like it is now. Albuquerque Sports Stadium is so bland.
Couldn’t they have called it “Field surrounded by Cement?”
So we head there one night. I remember it being a night game, because we almost always went during Sunday matinees. Dad was working Monday-Saturday and Sunday in the 1990s was a dry day for the state and county so no chilling at home having a few, and I believe bars were closed on Sundays.
So Friday night was rare to do this.
I was trying to rack my brain if it was 50 cent hot dog night or Funny Nose and Glasses Night. After remembering some more, It dawned on me that it was the latter.
Stupid me always wanted to go to that. Why? I don’t know. It’s not like I ever wore them again or there was social media to be kooky on.
Most notably, I am certain this was the last thing my dad ever took me to. I am 99.999999% sure.
Weekends with him until I became an adult were spent chilling at the house. He’d make food, and he’d watch TV and relax and I would be in my room with my giant console TV watching stuff. It was fine.
I started watching “60 Minutes” at age 12 because of that. “Simpsons?” same. I became cultured and into pop culture because of those weekends, so no biggie. We weren’t the road trip type. I get it.
Plus if it were me, I don’t like to spend money, so I get it even more.
So this was it. The last time he ever took me to anything.
I asked ChatGPT to do a version of me at 14, and it got me 98% right, minus a gap in my teeth and my hair wasn’t that tight. No fades though. I was a fuzzy mess back then.
Yes, I did have a helmet full of soft serve that night.
We get there early to get the glasses, and my dad gets a beer and I get a pickle to go with my ice cream and a cold Dr. Pepper in one of those waxy cups from the 80s and 90s (I miss scratching those)
But I am living my best life
Note: Jesus, I was an annoying kid. Kids my age were already getting arrested for drugs, and I look like this. Maybe it was all me that is too blame… My god.
So we watch the game. I am pretty sure it was Dukes vs Colorado Springs Sky Sox. It seemed like that was the only team the Dukes played.
One of the big additions to the ballpark around this time was the POS scoreboard that was there before was replaced by a scoreboard with a video screen!
(Note NMSU’s current scoreboard for baseball is worse than the old Dukes scoreboard.)
Look…a BofA sign! United NM Bank (now WF) and Furrow on the left photo!!!
The new one, we would refer to it as a “jumbotron” but it was a mere LCD screen which probably cost more than something 100x the size costs now.
Shout out to Furr’s grocery store in the right photo!
This was 1997, mind you, so seeing a videoboard at a stadium was a novel concept in these parts at that time. I was blown away, especially because, hey, we can be on it!
So we sit in the general admission bleachers and watch the game and watch the camera and see where it pans over to between innings.
Of course, you got the people waving at the camera, the “Hi, Mom!”
You got a ton of Mexicans - remember, I am Mexican, so I can say it this way - afraid of the camera, hiding their face behind their love one or their shirt because, “Eeee, how embarrassing!” and of course, the frat boy types always doing dumb shit on camera, something we still see at college events now.
Cut to the middle of the 5th inning. It’s an official game. This is where it feels like the break between half innings is a little longer as they are getting that dragging rake thing across the infield to smooth it out.
(It’s called a field groomer. I checked)
Well, in that half inning, there was a lot of camera work panning the crowd, and towards the end of that crowd panning, the camera focused on three college-aged girls, who were dressed like the 1990s.
Dark skin Hispanic chick in 1990s era cutoff jean shorts. Much taller lighter skin Hispanic chick in a UNM tank top and black shorts with long, long hair, and Blonde white girl with acid washed jeans with a red ABQ Dukes shirt.
The blonde was my kind of girl… Haha. All three were gorgeous though.
Every minor league camera operator does this move still because they are horny incels.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “incels” it’s basically a computer nerd type that would rather play video games, stay on the internet than you know…actually pick up girls. They bully people on Twitter, pretend they are the coolest ever, and they usually are slovenly men with no purpose and a weird lust for Lara Croft.
They will cut back to the same chicks OVER AND OVER AND OVER again as a “joke” but in reality, it’s to get a better look at the action those girls have going on.
So the girls in this case were victims of said horny incel cameraman. Jeez, just go ask for their number, geek.
So, in the 7th inning, beer is cutoff, and my dad has had 2-3 of them. Nothing too bad. Not like I was scared to drive home to Socorro or anything. The end of the inning, they cut to the same three chicks again.
They are all wearing funny nose and glasses, and the dark skinned Hispanic chick is gyrating, the blonde white girl in the acid wash jeans has her back turned to the camera shaking her ass the way almost every girl shakes their ass in the club in 2025. The UNM Tank Girl just grabs her tits (I debated on using that word, but the nature of her action makes me feel ok saying it.) and just jiggles the hell out of them.
For a 14 year old kid who, yes, I already discovered porn and R-Rated HBO/Cinemax, it was quite tame, but that weird hyper-sexual moment was unexpected at a Dukes/Sky Sox matchup that it caught me off-guard of course.
But in that split second moment, my dad, caught up in watching this new technological advancement for minor league baseball does what in wrestling they call “Breaking Kayfabe” aka stop pretending and he just says to himself, “Oh my god, she’s grabbing herself.”
You know, it was the most real moment, and considering the world we live in now where we deal with worse stuff out there on a daily basis, a bunch of girls doing risque gestures on a 1997 jumbotron that is less clear than a glass in a dishwasher without a rinse agent is far from pearl clutching.
It’s a moment in time. No one else likely remembers it but me. It was a real moment in a lifetime of hiding real moments. It did change me in the sense that I just said what was on my mind and was me all the time. No false front.
But it is interesting to see how deep the facade gets when you spend your existence not being open as a person. If a girl grabbed her breasts on a jumbotron while I was at a game, I would say something out loud TO MY WIFE because that would be something hilarious and wild, if not the least bit funny, and even to a lesser extent, me finding it attractive. I’m good. I didn’t need that.
What I am getting at is when you push it deep down inside, away from everyone to judge you on it, it comes out in weird ways, and yes, kids do recognize those things.
I dealt with so many girls with Daddy complexes, because no doubt their household was not unlike many during those days, and possibly still to this day.
Why do we spent all the time ignoring a natural part of life, men like pretty girls, over some uncomfy demeanor we have over our families? Why do we live our life like it’s the edited version of Pulp Fiction on TV where the actually becomes funny how much they tried to hide us from the language, violence, and sexuality?
(Don’t tell me the Travolta/Uma tense sexuality dynamic before the heroin overdose is not something that men dream of all the time!)
Yes, of course, men want a girl who can have a wild side at times, but when you don’t get a chance to see the 99 percent of the time where you are building a relationship getting help through communication and action, then a lot of kids are fucked now, because they are living a life where they do make mistakes as people are prone to do, but they do so without feedback and guidance from those around them.
This is most kids these days.
I am not talking about hippie parents who see their kid as their best friend and try to be touchy-feely. No, you talk about the things that make up the journey and they will be better off for it.
I know my wife is like that with my older nieces, and she is like that with others in her family that are of an age where they have to deal with shit. I think it’s important work that she has to do, and I think if I am ever in that position with my nieces and nephews and one day my kids, I need to show them this side of me, flaws and all, in order to show them it’s ok to be full of human nature. Imagine a world where we all talked to each other. Novel fucking concept, eh?
I don’t remember who won that damn game.
And I haven’t really thought about the fact that those girls—who looked college-aged at the time—are probably around 50 now, likely bottling up who they used to be from their own kids.
That moment stuck with me—not because it was shocking, but because it was real. It was the first time I ever saw being human from my family.
And for better or worse, I think that little flash of reality planted something in me. Maybe that’s why I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to be as honest and unfiltered as possible.
Middle-aged men—we have to talk to our kids. Not just about sex, but about what we went through. Show them our flaws. Give them the stories.
Because if you don’t, the world will give them something worse. Something fake. Something that doesn’t come with love attached.
And I think I’ve spent so much of my life being an open book because, in some weird way, a Triple-A baseball game—where a group of college girls were just acting like… well, wild college girls—was my only exposure to real sociosexual behavior in the context of being around my family and I was already near adulthood.
I may as well have been 6 years old the way my mindset was with parent/child interactions at the time. Everything is Disney-fied because everything is embarrassing to talk about.
That jumbotron moment was the only point of reference I had for how any of this worked—for how sexuality shows up in the real world, in front of you, without warning, when you’re not even looking for it and why you need to incorporate that in talking with your kids about everything
Shit like that matters and kids are beyond weird about things now because we live in a society that weirdly over shields them and then allows them to not develop normal mindsets on things because they are kids in front of a screen for so long and they don’t develop normal friendships anymore, much less romantic ones.
The generation in front of us has problems that have nothing to do with what they consume, it’s what they don’t consume at home with normal interactions with their elders. Society develops your kids mindsets because you are too afraid to be judged by your kids as…well, human beings.
Anyway, I never told that story before, and for as emotive as I am now, it’s a miracle I became this honest. I never have anything bad to say about my parents, but I will say that it was hard becoming James through things like this.
Who knew that “I Love You” and a peck on the cheek would be considered “weird and taboo” in the 2020s?
To steal the Dukes theme song… No, I come out swingin’, hustlin’ all the way. I would attach the video of the song, but Substack only gives me so much room, and I spent all morning on the AI pictures of the 1990s-era college girls at the game.
Play Ball.
James