I recently made the point in this space that among my many talents, commemorating special occasions with thoughtful prose on greeting cards is not one of them.

Ironic, I know, especially because as a child, I thought that working for Hallmark would be a wonderful way to make a living since my mother always cried whenever she read my cards to her. Now, however, I know that mothers can cry over any number of things their children do, including scratching themselves in the school play.

I’m the one who usually goes for the Peanuts card that reads: “Happiness is a kiss on the nose . . .” or the one with the purple lilacs that says “Our love for you will not abate, for all eternity I will wait . . .”

I mean, how can you beat that?

Underneath, I’ll scrawl my feeble thanks to my husband for being such a wonderful father to our children, that I could not hope for one any better.

I rationalize that there really are no words to adequately capture feelings like these on the inside of a greeting card anyway.

I mean, how do you thank a person for flying across the country with your very small children to meet you at NBA Finals and Super Bowls he would never come close to actually seeing,  just so you would not have to be away from them for too long?

I remember at least one of those trips taken in the middle of potty training. And by “in the middle,” I mean it was not yet completed even though like many parents, I imagine, we made the mistake of thinking that if we wished for it hard enough and bribed the child long enough, somehow it would magically just happen.

I remember the hotel room in which the training failed, and I remember walking in just seconds after the clean-up to find only a sheepish grin on both daddy and child.

I know that mothers possess many great qualities but that fathers, or at least my children’s father, is the parent with the patience to sit through 613 straight episodes of “Sponge Bob” or worse, when it’s the only thing that makes a sick child happy.

If only fatherhood could be summed up on a greeting card or captured in a highlight reel. Rather it’s a million moments spread out over a lifetime. It’s the hockey games in the basement with pillows tied to your shins; amusement parks constructed of K’Nex and condominiums from Legos . It’s the weekend mornings spent coloring at the kitchen table and keeping beauty shop appointments where your toenails are painted pink, your hair combed against the grain and little hands tickled rather than massaged.  

It’s resisting the urge to protest the first time your son doesn’t want to kiss you in front of his friends, and biting back tears the first time a boy likes your baby girl and she likes him back. It’s preferring to be home with your kids over any golf course in the world, and never calling it “babysitting.”

It’s knowing every teacher’s name and after-school activity and carpool schedule and lunch preference without having to ask, and being able to remind your wife whenever necessary.

Once, when our daughter was four and Rick had to leave town for one night on his first-ever business trip, he was nearly out the door when Amanda ran to him and wrapped herself around his legs.

“Daddy,” she cried in desperation, “does mommy know what to do?”

He always did.

Still does.

And I’m thinking that might make a nice Father’s Day card.Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.

White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko is a soft-spoken, thoughtful man. So much so, that when he makes a point as he did on Wednesday in the cramped quarters of the visitors clubhouse at Wrigley Field, you can almost miss it if you’re not paying close enough attention.
 

It was the kind of statement generally accompanied by a pointed finger or a raised voice. But when Konerko brought it up before the White Sox defeated the Cubs in the first game of their rain-shortened series, he did it in his typical quiet fashion. But his words packed quite a punch.
 

Konerko was asked if the New York Times’ report that Sammy Sosa tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003, suddenly makes players such as his former teammate Frank Thomas, look like a stronger Hall of Fame candidate.
 

Thomas, one of the top sluggers in the game, was dwarfed in comparison to the seasonal home run numbers later put up by Sosa, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. But Thomas’ body never changed dramatically in proportion like the others, and his numbers elicited admiration but never suspicion.
 

One would have expected Konerko, who has also developed a reputation as a “clean” home run hitter during his career, to issue an impassioned statement in support of players like Thomas. Instead, he chose to address those who created and carried the message to him.
 

“Unfortunately, today it’s just not a story for me,” Konerko told reporters. “Some guy writes an article, the sources aren’t public. One of two things needs to happen for me. . . . Sources need to put their names behind it and put [their] faces out there and tell people who [they] are. Or Sammy admits to it . . . .
 

“That’s the only two ways this becomes a story. I know, obviously if you guys are standing here, it’s a story. But I just think it’s sad that it has come to the point that news comes out of reports of unnamed sources. It gives a bad name for you guys . . . It’s not very American.”
 

Clearly, Konerko, who rarely ducks a question, put some thought into his response and was genuinely disturbed with the way the steroid reports have leaked out through unnamed sources. We all should be disturbed on some level.

But he’s picking the wrong time for the wrong argument.

It isn’t just that a reputable news organization “broke” the story, though that’s a good place to start.  Because there are so many disreputable outlets of information, it is understandable that everyone gets lumped in together. Also, the New York Times is certainly not infallible (they may never fully recover the credibility lost over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003).

There was a time when newspapers almost never printed stories with unnamed sources unless it carried national security concerns like Watergate did when the Washington Post broke perhaps the story of the century. Certainly sportswriters were never allowed to cite unnamed sources, a practice used with regularity now for the most mundane stories.

But when a newspaper like the Times prints a report with unnamed sources, that does not mean that they do not know the source or that the source is not credible. In fact, the veracity of the source in all likelihood passed stricter standards because it was not identified.

If Konerko doesn’t know this, he probably should by now — if only because this is a story that a player of his stature should comment on, rather than come across as if he is defending Sosa.

By taking one of the most important Chicago “sports” stories in years and turning it into a debate on whether it passes the credible journalism test, Konerko, for all of his sincerity, is deflecting attention from the real issue.

And while he is surely allowed his opinion, this was simply a poor time and the wrong place to inject it. Read Melissa’s column on Crosstown Classic on ESPNChicago.com.

They never banked on getting caught.  

Never thought we’d all learn to spot the bad guys among the real ballplayers. That we would not see athletes who had become stronger but men who looked like teenaged acne sufferers, freaks with block heads and raging tempers and bloated statistics that did not make sense.

They thought that we were stupid and they were smart and that they would never get caught, as all cheaters do.

And now, what? We’re taking polls to see who will still vote Sammy Sosa into the Hall of Fame?

No. No. And again, no.

No matter his numbers or his raw skill or the magnitude of his career. No matter if he ever admits his sins, but especially because he has not.

We did not do this to Sammy Sosa.

Sosa, revealed in a New York Times report Tuesday to have tested positive in 2003 for performance-enhancing drugs, did this. And no one expressed surprise because as one name fell, and then another and then another, we became experts at detecting cheaters.

All we needed was the proof, and we have it now from a list of 104 players who failed urine tests six years ago that was supposed to determine whether drug-testing would be necessary. Well, it was. And now the “anonymous” list is leaking out one drip at a time.

It stinks for baseball, of course. For all the players who did not cheat and whose careers, like Frank Thomas’ and Harold Baines’, never drew the admiration and honor they should have. When Sosa and Mark McGwire were putting up their insane home run numbers in 1998, we actually bought into it and worse, lauded them for bringing fans back to baseball.

Shame on them

Shame on those of us who are talking about still considering them for baseball’s greatest honor; those of us who have suggested creating a special wing for cheaters in the Hall of Fame.

Could there be a stupider idea? Create a special place in the most sacred temple of the sport for those who have disgraced it the most?

Why do we put athletes into their sports’ Halls of Fame? To make sure they are never forgotten, that they are forever memorialized .

The cheaters do not deserve to be memorialized.

And there isn’t a chance we will ever forget them.

It does not matter if we blew it on bad guys decades ago. We’re smarter now. Smart enough to know all about performance-enhancing drugs. Smart enough to find out who is using them.

Too smart to blow it again. Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.

If there is one thing that unites the modern-day sports fan, it is the belief that modern-day coaches and managers aren’t tough enough on modern-day athletes.

Fans just love when gruff old guys with paunches or even gruff middle-aged guys with six-packs — but preferably all former hard-nosed players themselves — put the shoe to a player’s hind end, rip them in the press and really get after the lazy, overpaid good-for-nothings.

That is, unless, that particular tactic does not result directly in a world championship, preferably within 30 days.

Then the gruff coach or manager is vilified as being out of touch, his players quit on him and he is summarily fired.

The rumblings are starting up again about Cubs manager Lou Piniella.

I started hearing it last season, this Lou-is-old, Lou-has-lost-it, Lou-is-soft routine. These are the same people who believe Lou should pull second base out of its mooring once a month just to get his team jacked up and really show his players he means business.

Even when this seemed to work for him, it never really did.

His family was embarrassed, the effect on his teams was short-lived if it did anything at all, and occasionally he’d pull a hamstring or worse.

And at 65, you no longer pull hamstrings. You herniate discs and give yourself cardiac arrhythmias.

Tonight, in a radio show on WGN promoting my biography of Lou Piniella, former White Sox, then Cubs and now Sox broadcast analyst Steve Stone brought up the subject. I told him that Piniella has spoken about the concept of “old-school managers” and that he doesn’t think they can survive in today’s game with today’s players if they refuse to adjust.

Stone said that he doesn’t believe in that and told the story about how successful managers Tony La Russa and Bobby Cox scoffed at that notion.

It sounded familiar because I had actually quoted Stone telling the same story in my book.

“I don’t think Lou today is the same manager he was when he was tackling Rob Dibble,” Stone said in my interview with him last summer, referring to Piniella’s infamous 1992 wrestling match Dibble, then his player on the Cincinnati Reds. “I don’t think he’s mellowed in terms of intensity. I think he realizes there are ways to do things now maybe he couldn’t before. And there are things he did before he can’t do now. But one thing I disagree with, he said you can’t handle players today the way you did in 1990. I posed that same scenario to [Atlanta Braves manager] Bobby Cox and he said that’s a bunch of horseshit. He said you make a set of rules, they apply to everybody and you live with that set of rules. Players will get used to whatever set of rules you implement. And I do know there are certain things Lou tolerates that most likely Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa wouldn’t.
 

“Can you imagine a guy in leftfield walking after the ball in the corner [as Sorianao did in ‘08] for Tony La Russa?” Stone continued. “Bobby Cox was a guy who stopped a game in the sixth inning, got up out of the dugout and pointed out to centerfield and then-rookie Andruw Jones, who dogged it after a fly ball that dropped in front of him. And [Cox] said, ‘Come on in,’ in the middle of the inning and only when Jones got in did he take somebody from the dugout and run him out to centerfield. Then he told Jones, ‘Go in and sit down in the lockerroom. You obviously don’t want to play. . . ’ ”
 

When Piniella was first hired as the Cubs’ manager, he was asked about his style and replied, “You appeal to people’s pride. That’s where it starts. You can’t be a hard-ass as a manager, and I’m not a hard-ass. . . .
 

“When I came up to the big leagues . . . boy, you had to respect the manager because if you don’t, you’re not going to play on that team. Now the manager basically has to earn the respect of the players, and that’s my job – earn their respect, so I can expect respect back at the same time.
 

“That’s really the way I operate. These are the guys with the longer-term contracts. And they’re the ones who are the most important cogs because they’re the talent.”

In other words, don’t upset the high-priced, veteran talent.

Is that wrong? Perhaps in theory, but not in practice.

If a person is capable of evolving after the age of 60, Piniella has. He was still maturing at the age of 63, the last time he kicked dirt on an umpire’s shoes.

“After that, he was embarrassed, he was,” Trammell in an interview for the book last year.  “[The umpire, Mark] Wegner said he felt it was degrading and Lou said, ‘You know what? I’ve done that a half a dozen times in my career and nobody ever said that to me. I never realized it.’ And he told me, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ “

So call him soft.

Or call him a horse’s you-know-what.

If he doesn’t win here, that’ll hurt a lot more.

Pressure, some genius coach or manager once said, comes from within.

So brilliant was this proclamation, that every other coach and manager alive picked up on it, unimaginative athletes followed and a cliché was born.

Clearly, none of the geniuses had the kind of day I had Sunday.

This is pressure, my friends.

Pressure is navigating O’Hare with your 13-year-old daughter, who you are about to release into the jaws of air travel, a world now so sinister that signs warning of flying with Swine Flu assault the senses and a simple clearing of your throat is grounds for arrest. When you no longer travel often, as I once did, you forget all the savvy traveler shortcuts.

For example, avoid waiting for 15 minutes in a line marked INTERNATIONAL, when you’re holding a ticket to Phoenix.

When your on-line boarding pass isn’t scanning properly in the e-ticket kiosk, repeatedly jamming it in there isn’t your best option, especially when perfect strangers are shouting instructions to you like, “PUT IN YOUR CONFIRMATION NUMBER,” and then muttering bad words to themselves.  

 And when your child calmly leads you to her gate, puts herself on-board and sends you on your way, you should heed her commands.

In my defense, I was jittery not so much because Amanda was on her way to visit relatives in Arizona by herself, but because I was on my way to speak to a women’s group by myself.

No one can really help you when you’re a public speaker. It’s you, the microphone and in my case, dead air when, in the middle of a really rousing story, you start thinking about your little girl sitting in a Swine-infested airplane, lose your train of thought and require an audience member to remind you where you were.

OK, so maybe you’re saying this is self-imposed pressure. And you might be right. When speaking to a large group, unless it is as a warden at a state penitentiary, the audience is generally rooting for you to succeed. No one boos when a joke falls flat. And only occasionally will someone sitting right up front doze off. It’s usually always the ones in back.

And besides, this was nothing compared to what awaited at my next stop of the day, my 11-year-old son’s playoff baseball game.

So here’s the question? Were we as parents adding to the incredible, almost unbearable pressure of the moment by wildly cheering each ball and strike as the lead changed hands in the sixth inning? Or were we as parents the only ones aware of the incredible, almost unbearable pressure?

Was it really necessary for the other’s team’s coaches to call timeout after every other pitch to change pitchers, catchers and hold impromptu infield meetings on the mound? And do we all need to be institutionalized after many among us on the sidelines had to stop watching altogether when the game went into extra innings?

Of course, because it was the kind of day it was, this was not my family’s biggest concern. Rather, as the game neared it dramatic conclusion and – THANK THE GOOD LORD ABOVE — a victory for our team – MY GOD, A DELICIOUS VICTORY — my husband Rick and I were equally concerned that we make the start of Alec’s piano recital.

You want pressure? How about possessing the nerves necessary to make that split-second decision of whether to go straight to the recital with your son dirty and smelly, or make the detour home to bathe and thus risk being late and having to bang through the door during some other child’s performance?

We didn’t bang through the door that loudly.

And Alec made it all the way through “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” without the help of anyone in the audience.

Now that’s pressure.Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.