Nobody has to be perfect to be a mentor. Sometimes the flaws are the curriculum.
I’ve spent years thinking about mentorship. Building programs around it. Sitting across from young men trying to convince them that somebody believes in them. And the longer I do this work, the more I keep arriving at the same truth. The greatest mentor most of us will ever have doesn’t show up through a program or a nonprofit or a coach with a clipboard. He’s usually already in the house. Or he was supposed to be.
I’m talking about Dad.
And before you close this tab because your father wasn’t perfect, or wasn’t present, or was some complicated mix of both, stay with me. Because that’s exactly the point of this piece. Nobody has to be perfect to be a mentor. Most of the time, it’s the flaws, the scars, the things a man carries and can’t quite put down, that make him the perfect mentor for the kid watching him. I’ll come back to that. First I want to tell you about a father who did it deliberately, and what the science says about fathers like him.
“Everything You Do Has to Be Legit”
If you watched Jalen Brunson drop 45 points in Game 5 to clinch the 2026 NBA Finals, you watched the finished product. What you didn’t see was the blueprint. The blueprint has a name, and it’s Rick Brunson.
Rick gave his son a line that I would tattoo on the wall of every gym in America if they’d let me:
“Everything you do has to be legit.”
Sit with that. Not everything you do has to be impressive. Not everything you do has to be seen. Legit. Real when nobody’s watching. Honest at full speed.
Rick Brunson’s story argues against the way our culture talks about fathers. He built Jalen deliberately. Jalen was always told to imagine a defender guarding him, even when he trained alone in an empty gym. That way, solitude was never an excuse for sloppy footwork or a lazy follow-through. Rick and his wife, Sandra, posted notes on the bathroom mirror, on the garage door, and inside Jalen’s school lunch bag that read “the magic is in the work.” Jalen sells merchandise with that phrase printed on it today, and if you search it online, his name is usually the first result.
The American writer James Baldwin wrote that children rarely obey their elders, but they never fail to imitate them. That observation captures the Brunson story better than almost anything written about the family since. Jalen didn’t run five miles at dawn or drill the same crossover a thousand times because his father told him to. He watched Rick do it first, morning after morning, through a career built on non-guaranteed contracts and sudden phone calls telling him he’d been cut.
Rick never coached his son as a small child. Not from a bench, not with a whistle in his mouth. He trained him instead, with force that matched the real world, to prepare him for the uncaring nature of adulthood. He did it through discipline, over years, through repetition.
That’s mentorship. Not the motivational speech. The five a.m. imitation.
Fathers Are Not Optional Scaffolding
Here’s the part that should bother all of us.
American culture has grown comfortable treating fathers as optional scaffolding. Nice to have, but not structurally necessary. A mother’s love is treated as elemental, something a child can’t survive without. A father’s love is often treated as a bonus, and dads get praised for just staying around.
Just staying around. Think about how low that bar is. We hand out credit to fathers for attendance. We don’t ask mothers to clear that bar because we assume they were never going to leave. And in making that assumption, we quietly told a generation of men that their presence was a nice extra rather than a load-bearing wall.
The Brunson story argues against that framing. And now, so does the bloodwork.
The Body Keeps the Score
Researchers at Penn State followed nearly 400 families from infancy onward. They filmed parents playing with their 10-month-old infants, filmed them again at age two, then drew blood from those same children at age seven. They were checking for early markers of heart and metabolic trouble, including inflammation and blood sugar regulation. The kind of low-grade physiological stress that quietly predicts disease decades down the road.
A father’s warmth, or the lack of it, in a child’s first two years showed up clearly in that child’s bloodwork at age seven.
A mother’s warmth didn’t show the same link, at least not in a way the study could detect. And the researchers were careful here, so let me be careful too. This does not mean mothers don’t matter. Obviously. It suggests that maternal care is often so foundational to a household, so assumed as the baseline everyone builds around, that the father’s behavior becomes the variable that tips the outcome one way or the other. In the researchers’ words, fathers determine which direction the family outcome tilts.
A separate 30-year study tracked boys from age nine into their late 30s, measuring how much time their fathers spent with them in childhood against their cortisol rhythms as grown men. Same families, three decades, controlling for household income, education, even the sons’ adult relationships with their fathers, all to isolate the contribution of early involvement alone. Boys whose fathers were more present grew into men with more stable, better-regulated stress hormone rhythms thirty years later. Those same men reported markedly less tobacco and illicit drug use across their 20s.
Read that again. Active fatherhood showed up 30 years later in the son’s bloodstream and habits.
I’m going to say that again, because I know somebody read it but missed it. A father’s presence is written into his son’s body three decades after the fact.
Those studies mirror exactly what Rick Brunson was trying to pass to Jalen through five-mile runs and drills. What looked like tough love from the outside was an early, unscientific demonstration of what the data now confirms. A father’s presence is not a supplement to childhood, something a family can do without if life gets busy. To get as metaphorical as Baldwin, it’s part of the foundation on which the rest of the house is built.
The Buffoon Problem
So if the science says fathers carry this much physiological and behavioral weight, why does it feel like the culture keeps saying the opposite? Because it does. In prime time, on a loop, for decades.
Turn on a family sitcom from the last 30 years and a familiar character shows up. The father who can’t be trusted to load a dishwasher correctly. Who needs his wife’s patient correction to function in his own home. Who exists mainly to be laughed at and then fixed by mom before the credits roll.
Researchers who coded family sitcoms from 1980 to 2017, examining 578 scenes across 34 top-rated shows, found that fathers were shown as humorously incompetent parents in fewer than one in five relevant scenes during the 1980s. By the 2000s and 2010s, that number topped half. Mothers received no comparable treatment. They were increasingly written as the competent center of gravity in the household while fathers stumbled around them. Good for a laugh, not guidance.
A separate study out of Brigham Young University examined two of the most popular Disney Channel shows aimed at children and found fathers portrayed positively less than half the time they appeared on screen, and as straightforward buffoons in nearly 40 percent of their airtime. When the kids on screen reacted to their television father’s foolishness, nearly half of those reactions were negative. Eye rolls. Mockery. Open annoyance. Modeling for young viewers exactly how to regard a dad’s authority. One of the researchers put it plainly: children who watch enough television portraying fathers as bumbling idiots may start to believe fathers actually are bumbling idiots, even though real fathers aren’t.
And here’s the cruel irony. This pattern runs directly opposite to reality. Pew Research data show that fathers now report parenting as central to their identity at rates matching mothers, and that their hands-on childcare time has nearly tripled since the 1960s. Real fathers got more involved in their children’s daily lives, and television responded by writing them dumber, decade after decade, as if competence and fatherhood had become mutually exclusive premises for a joke.
It’s worth sitting with one more number from that body of research. Only 39 percent of fathers said they believed they were doing a good job raising their children. Thirty-nine percent. From the generation of dads spending more time with their kids than any generation before them. That’s what two generations of ridicule does to a man’s confidence in his own role.
A father who benches his son, who refuses to grade him on whether the shot goes in, who tells him to be quiet and sit down when he complains to the referees, has been trained by decades of sitcoms to expect ridicule rather than respect for exactly that kind of firmness. Rick Brunson never seemed to absorb that message, or he simply ignored it. He acted as if a father was supposed to be an authority in the home, not an accessory to it. As if discipline were itself a form of love rather than a poor substitute for it.
Hardness Is the Point
Rick has been open about the fact that he was, at times, more of a coach than a comfort. Jalen has described a game in Dallas when the Mavericks were losing badly and he spent the first half complaining to officials instead of competing. His father told him, mid-game, to be quiet and go sit in the locker room. Rick has also described benching his son as a teenager for failing to compete hard against a clearly weaker opponent, reasoning that a young player’s effort against easy competition still reveals something true about his character. Rick made sure his son never mistook talent for entitlement, never assumed his gift alone would carry him.
Modern culture has grown suspicious of that kind of hardness. Often labels toughness harmful. And look, stripped of context, a father who benches his son and tells him to be quiet can look cruel from the outside.
But context is everything. Jalen Brunson stands 6-foot-2 in a league increasingly built for much bigger, longer men. He was doubted at every level of the sport. In high school. In college. At the 2018 NBA Draft, where he fell all the way to the 33rd overall pick despite winning two national championships at Villanova and National College Player of the Year as a junior. The doubt never really stopped. Not through four seasons in Dallas. Not through the first year in New York, when critics called his contract an overpay.
What stopped was his vulnerability to that doubt. Because his father had already run him through every version of it years earlier, in an empty gym, long before any general manager or draft analyst got the chance to do it first.
That’s what a mentor does. He doesn’t shield you from the fire. He introduces you to it in controlled doses, while he’s still standing next to you.
Now the Part I Didn’t Want to Write
Man, if I’m being real with you, this section is the reason this article sat in my head for weeks before I wrote it.
My father and I are estranged. I love that man dearly. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I’ve stopped trying to make them resolve into something cleaner. There’s distance there, the kind that builds up slow over years until one day you realize you’re writing an essay about fathers and mentorship and you haven’t called yours.
So I called him.
We talked for six hours straight. Six hours. Let that sink in, because estranged relationships don’t produce six-hour phone calls. Whatever is broken between us, the thing underneath it is clearly still alive.
But here’s the honest part, the part that hurt more than the silence ever did. Somewhere in hour three I realized my father doesn’t listen to me. He hears me. Then he keeps talking. He listens to other people, though. I’ve watched him do it. Which means the problem isn’t his ears. It’s what’s at stake when it’s his son on the line. Listening to a stranger costs him nothing. Really listening to me might mean sitting with what he missed. And for men of his generation, talking is the relationship. Six hours of talking at me might be the closest thing to “I love you and I don’t want to hang up” that he knows how to say. That doesn’t excuse it. I’m just telling you it took me six hours to hear what he wasn’t saying.
It happens, man. More families than will admit it are living some version of this.
But here’s what I refuse to do. I refuse to pretend I learned nothing from him. Because the truth is I learned so much from my father that I’m still unpacking the lessons in my forties. Some of it he taught me on purpose. How to work. How to carry yourself. How to handle it when life doesn’t hand you the guaranteed contract. And some of it he taught me by accident, through the flaws, through the distance itself. He taught me what silence costs. He taught me what I wanted to do differently with the young men in my life. Baldwin was right. I rarely obeyed him. I never stopped imitating him. And now my whole life’s work is deciding, deliberately, which parts of the imitation to keep.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about imperfect fathers. Even the broken parts are curriculum. Even the estrangement is teaching you something, if you’re honest enough to sit in the discomfort and read it.
So no, I’m not writing this from some mountaintop of a healed relationship. I’m writing it days after a six-hour phone call that didn’t fix everything, from the middle of a relationship that’s still complicated. My father may never become the listener I need him to be. Part of my work now is grieving the conversation I wanted while still valuing the one we can actually have. And I’m telling you, with all of that on the table, that my father, flaws and distance and all, is still the most influential mentor I ever had.
You Don’t Have to Be Perfect. You Have to Be Legit.
This is where I bring it back to Rick’s line, because it’s the whole thesis of this piece.
Everything you do has to be legit.
Notice what that sentence doesn’t say. It doesn’t say everything you do has to be flawless. Rick Brunson wasn’t a perfect father. By his own account he was sometimes more coach than comfort, and I’d bet there are conversations in that family that were harder than anything that made it into a feature story. My father wasn’t a perfect father. Yours probably wasn’t either. Perfection was never the assignment.
Legit was the assignment. Real. Consistent. Present enough that your kid can watch you get up at dawn and imitate it. Honest enough that when you fall short, you fall short in front of them instead of hiding it, so they learn that falling short is survivable.
The research says a father’s warmth writes itself into his child’s blood. The Brunsons say the magic is in the work. Baldwin says the kids are imitating you whether you like it or not. Put those three together and you get the job description: you are being watched, the watching is shaping a human being at the cellular level, and the only requirement is that what they’re watching is real.
So here’s my challenge, and I mean this for every man reading.
If you’re a father, stop waiting until you’re healed, wealthy, or wise enough to mentor your kids. You’re already doing it. The only question is whether the material is legit. Post the note on the mirror. Run the miles where they can see you. Bench them when they coast, and make sure they know it’s because you refuse to lie to them about what effort looks like.
If your relationship with your own father is complicated like mine is, do the harder thing. Go back through what he gave you, including the painful parts, and separate the lessons from the wounds. Keep the lessons. Work on the wounds. And if there’s a phone call you’ve been putting off, make it. I finally made mine. It didn’t fix everything. He still can’t listen to me the way I need him to, and he may never learn how. But I showed up imperfect for a man who showed up imperfect for me, and if you’ve read this far, you already know that’s not failure. That’s the whole thesis, happening in real time.
And if you grew up without a father at all, hear me clearly. The research on what fathers provide isn’t a sentence over your life. It’s a map of what to seek out and what to become. Find the men who are legit. Then be one, for somebody younger, so the kid watching you never has to write an essay like this one.
The magic is in the work. The mentorship starts at home. And nobody, not Rick Brunson, not my father, not me, not you, ever had to be perfect to change a life.
They just had to be legit.
