Asitha Jayawardena is a pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeon at Children's Minnesota, which means he spends his days (and nights and weekends) helping young patients overcome all manner of obstacles.
He's also the dad of two young girls, one of whom, at age 5, is a huge fan of Caitlin Clark, the Iowa Hawkeyes basketball phenom and all-time leading scorer--for both women and men--in NCAA Division I history.
In late February, Jayawardena brought his daughter to see Clark compete against the University of Minnesota at Williams Arena in Minneapolis. The performance was unlike any he'd witnessed. Father and daughter were transfixed and transformed.
He decided to write something about it, maybe for Facebook, mostly for posterity. An open letter of sorts, to this young woman who brings such joy to his daughter.
"To be honest," Jayawardena wrote, "we really don't have much in common. I'm a first-generation Sri Lankan immigrant, and my parents didn't really know much about American sports, so I found my own path. I remember watching a VHS tape with a documentary I found of Michael Jordan and was amazed by him. I watched 'Space Jam' and joined my middle school basketball team. I was terrible. On my best day, on full stretch, I'm a whopping 5 feet 4 inches."
He sent it to some family members. They urged him to think bigger than Facebook. Get it published, they suggested. Get it in front of more eyeballs, they suggested.
"I literally Googled, 'Where should I place a sports essay?'" he told me.
Google suggested he write an op-ed for his local newspaper, something he'd never done.
"I wrote a couple pieces for the New England Journal of Medicine," he said. "I'm like, I'm just a doctor. Really, I'm just a dad."
Nevertheless, he finished his letter to Clark and sent it to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. They published it the next day.
It's a beauty. I had to track him down to tell him so.
"I've been intentional about building my relationship to these two absolute gems of humans -- but at first, it was hard to connect," he wrote. "I played dress-up and dolls and let them paint my fingernails -- all of which they loved, but mommy was always better at it. We started regular daddy daughter dates to help foster our relationship.
"My youngest daughter was an easy egg to crack," he continued. "We both love cinnamon rolls and have regular daddy daughter dates exploring various cinnamon roll shops around the Twin Cities."
I lost my composure around cinnamon rolls.
"My eldest daughter has been more complex," he wrote. "It took a while, but I found my cheat code. Caitlin Clark.
"Before you came along," he continued, "I was stuck in a rut in my own fatherhood, because I had only ever imagined raising a boy. I don't believe this shortsighted childhood perspective was borne of bigotry or pro-patriarchy sentiments. Rather, like many Americans, my fault was that the lens in which I viewed the future was biased by my own personal experience."
I wasn't the only one moved by his words. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar tweeted out his op-ed. So did Hall of Fame sportscaster Dick Vitale. An interviewer at the Big Ten Women's Basketball Tournament asked Clark if she'd read it. She said she had.
Jayawardena's daughter, so far, has not.
"I'll take the essay and hang it up on her wall at some point," he told me. "But she's the person I least need to explain this phenomenon to. Someone on TV wears a ponytail just like her and is doing amazing things on the court and is fun to watch. That's all she cares about."
Clark's stats mean less to his daughter, Jayawardena said, than the joy and self-assurance she brings to her craft.
"That's why this piece resonated with people, maybe," Jayawardena said. "Maybe we miss the mark a little bit talking about all of her records. Her biggest influence, at least in my family, is helping my daughter just grow into her own confidence. It turns out a lot of other dads are feeling that same way."
There's something really remarkable about that. If my dad and I wanted to fan out together over a female athlete when I was a kid, we would have been hard pressed to find one. She certainly wouldn't have been on every network, in every newspaper, selling out stadiums, fetching $200,000 for a game-worn jersey.
The fact that Jayawardena's daughter, that millions of daughters--and sons--can grow up watching Clark win like they watch the sun rise and set is powerful in a way we probably don't even understand quite yet.
" So much of what l learned from sports translates to my day-to-day life," Jayawardena said. "If you're not good at something you practice until you get good. Give your best effort no matter what. Be a good teammate. In the operating room, I lead my team to all achieve the same goal, which is to take care of our patient.
"So when I think about my daughter," he continued, "I feel like she's learning those lessons from us watching Caitlin Clark. When you're painting fingernails together you're not really talking life lessons. When we're watching Caitlin Clark we're talking about how she hits that shot so easily. That's transformational."
In a million different ways. I'm so grateful to Jayawardena for capturing and chronicling a bunch of them.
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Heidi Stevens is a Tribune News Service columnist. You can reach her at [email protected], find her on Twitter @heidistevens13 or join her Heidi Stevens' Balancing Act Facebook group.
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