Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 12 No. 2 | October 2019

10 Inside Hokie Sports I want to tell you about my dad. Actually, that’s not really true. What I really want to do is to tell my dad about the Duke game—and for him to tell me that the result was disappointing, but that I had done a great job of calling the game and he was proud of me. That would be business as usual. But he succumbed to multiple myeloma the morning of the game, and for the first time in my life, that won’t happen. So, I am in a coping place, which, in my family, means a writing place. I’m typing this as I sit at the kitchen counter in the house that I grew up in here in Chanhassen, Minnesota. I’m surrounded by reminders of him, but honestly, I’m struggling with where to start the story of Mark Laaser. That alone should tell you a little about him. He was so many things. I suppose, in a chronological sense, I should start at the beginning. He loved sports. He was an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan as a boy. This was during the golden age of baseball when titans of broadcasting like Jack Buck, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Carey filled the air of his childhood bedroom. They provided company for him during some difficult times then, and it isn’t lost on me that, later in his life, my broadcasts would do the same. I have a 1964 Topps Mickey Mantle card next to my laptop right now. It is reminding me of my dad and me scouring card shows and shops trying to gather the complete sets of the 1964 Cardinals and Yankees teams that met in the World Series that year. He was 14 then, and I now find it ironic that he probably was trying to recapture the innocence of his youth through that collection, but at the same time, wound up shaping mine. That’s kind of theway it workedwithus.Wewere connected—always. Father and son. We were so similar in our appearance, mannerisms and gifts. We were also similar in some less desirable ways. My dad was a complex man, and he understood like nobody else that I was, too. Before I get to what he came to be, here are some of the highlights of his life. He was a tennis star in high school. One of his favorite stories was of taking a game off Jimmy Connors in an Illinois prep match. He was a debate champion, a ping pong ace, and a fraternity brother. As I learned through some of my mom’s albums recently, he was “Marky” to her, and she was his “honey bun.” He was a history buff, an aspiring aviator, a living room “Jeopardy” champion, an amateur poet, and a quick-witted smart ass. He was a frustrated Little League coach and an advocate that the Princeton offense would take our elementary school basketball league by storm. He had seen it work firsthand while in seminary there. He was a renowned pastor and orator, a lover of travel, an adrenaline junkie, and a collector of interactions and baseball cards. He loved people. All of them. And they loved himback. As I mentioned, he was a lot of things—all at once. He was my dad, but he was also a son, a brother, and a husband—for 46 years. More recently, he was also Grandpa Mark to my sister’s four children. He was all of those things, but there was something else that shaped his life more than anything—a childhood sexual abuse victim. That’s where the record scratches, and the music comes to a halt—but only for a minute. For a lot of people, that comes to define their life in a negative way, and there is no doubt that it could have for my dad. He suffered, as many trauma victims do. The depression and compulsion that resulted from his abuse led him down some dark roads and plunged him into his own world of addiction. I was 7 when our world seemed to come crashing down. Notice the word “seemed.” God had other plans. My dad went to treatment for his own sexual addiction, which wasn’t really a recognized disease at the time. When his treatment ended, he became a counselor at the same center where he had been a patient. That only happens when you are meant for a higher purpose and have been blessed with transformational talent. My dad was. And here’s where the story really begins. Don’t get it twisted. It took courage for me to write those last three paragraphs. It infinitely pales in comparison to what my dad did. Rather than try to lock his demons in the basement of his mind and press forward, he chased them out into the open. He wrote a book about his life—all of it. I can’t imagine the guts it took to be vulnerable enough to confess his missteps and the abuses that led to them. It was only the beginning. As the world reacted to his story, often in an ignorant and juvenile way, my dad and a few other early pioneers forged ahead. They wrote, spoke and taught across the globe. To small groups and in back rooms in the early days. To packed auditoriums, banquet rooms and lecture halls near the end. My dad was constantly on the go. He traveled most weekends when I was growing up, and he loved it. The Delta Lounge at the airport was “his spot.” He once took a flight to New York, had lunch at the airport, and flew back to Minnesota to protect his platinum status. My siblings and I lovingly, and I suppose a bit sarcastically, called him “airport boy.” The man certainly knew the flight schedules. But more importantly, he knew the critical importance of his work. As recognition of the disease was in recovery started to take hold, he hit the gas. with Jon Laaser A Tribute to My Father THE OFFICIAL KIDS’ CLUB OF VIRGINIA TECH ATHLETICS 2 PLANS TO CHOOSE FROM ORANGE LEVEL: FREE MAROON LEVEL: $35 Visit hokiesports.com/hokiekidsclub to join!