With Elder S. Gifford Nielsen at the Conference Center, former BYU All American and Houston Oiler quarterback and now an Area Seventy of the Church in Sugar Land, Texas.
As a 15-year-old high school sophomore in 1977, my relationship with my inactive-LDS father wasn't great, in part because I had abandoned our shared dream of becoming a boxing champion in favor of American football, a foreign game to us both.
Certainly, some of it was age-related and immaturity, but I did harbor some resentment that my dad was never there for Fathers-and-Sons outings, or didn't chaperone dances, youth conferences and scout campouts, as other dads did.
Perhaps sensing our fractured relationship, my scoutmaster and youth leader, Neal Nelson, suggested that I invite my dad to a special stake priesthood meeting on a Sunday evening in mid-October. BYU's football team had played Arizona State in Tempe the previous evening but without their All-American quarterback, Gifford Nielsen, who remained in Arizona to be the featured speaker after the team returned to Provo.
Nielsen had torn the cartilage in his knee a week or two before at Oregon State and was done for the year, so he came to the ASU game and our stake fireside hobbling on crutches.
My dad accepted my invitation because he knew I was reaching out but also because Gifford had finished sixth in the Heisman voting as a junior and he was intrigued such a nationally recognized star would speak in our stake center.
Interestingly, one of the few things my dad and I did agree on was our love for Arizona State football. Much of that had to do with ASU's All-American defensive end Junior Ah You, a family friend from Kahuku, Hawaii. Dad played bass guitar in a Polynesian band that performed at luaus and Junior was their Samoan fire knife dancer.
In an era before the NFL, NHL and MLB came to Phoenix, it was the Suns and ASU football. That was it. And aside from facing the Celtics in the NBA finals in '76, most of the time the fan-support ratio in the Valley of the Sun was probably 80-20 ASU. Attending a few ASU games a year with tickets from Junior had been one of the few enjoyable things Dad and I did together.
And because of ASU and the many Cougar faithful in our LDS ward, we were very much aware of BYU and Gifford Nielsen. Basically, we hated BYU. We regarded their passing attack as inferior and didn't understand why a "Y" was on their helmet and not "BYU" — there was space for "ASU" on the Sun Devils' helmets — even their mascot, "Cosmo," wasn't as intimidating as ASU's "Sparky."
Our sentiments changed that October day when we left the stake priesthood fireside.
Gifford Nielsen completely won us over.
