Fatherhood Quote by Marv Levy

A coach’s best lines usually come dressed as locker-room practicality; Marv Levy’s lands like a confession. The power is in the pivot from inherited ritual to moral recoil. “When I was twelve” sets the scene in the key of nostalgia and initiation: a boy invited into a traditionally masculine rite, supervised by a father whose approval matters. Then the sentence snaps. The bird isn’t “game,” it’s “a bird” and then “this creature” - language that refuses the euphemisms that make violence feel like sport.

Levy’s question isn’t anti-hunting as policy so much as anti-denial as posture. He’s describing the first time the story adults tell (“this is fun,” “this is tradition,” “this is what men do”) fails to cover what’s on the ground: a small body “laying there.” The subtext is a young person realizing that community can normalize cruelty, and that the word “fun” can be a moral anesthetic.

The line that really turns the screw is the equality claim: the bird “was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.” It’s a startling, almost disarming bit of empathy, not abstract but bodily and immediate. For a coach - someone paid to channel aggression into rules and meaning - the memory reads like an origin story: the moment he learned to separate discipline from harm, to ask what our rituals are actually doing. Levy doesn’t sermonize; he leaves you with a question that indicts the listener’s vocabulary, not just the act.