More than a decade ago, I met a father who spliced together video clips of his 10-year-old son running in touchdowns and posted them on YouTube, soundtracked by Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings. Trying to crank up the hype machine.
The child never did reach the NFL. Not long after that I encountered another uber dad who purchased a speed gun to gauge how fast his 12-year-old threw the baseball. He even took pictures as verification. That kid never made it to the major leagues either. Extreme sports parenting is not a new phenomenon in America, it’s just the social media age has inevitably made it a whole lot worse and far more visible than ever before.
Witness Madden San Miguel, the most famous 10-year-old kid (an important word in the story) in America just now. From Dallas, Texas, he has gained national renown under his online nom de plume, Baby Gronk. A nickname paying homage to Rob Gronkowski, the former NFL superstar he supposedly resembles and will, we are assured by his hype-meister, one day emulate in the pros.
The primary school student has his own YouTube channel with 137,000 subscribers, 319,000 followers on Instagram, and is allegedly already making six figures from sponsors of his viral content. And his is quite an instructive highlight reel.
One video captures him running backwards on a treadmill while trying to field tennis balls being flung at him. Another shows him pulling a Cadillac Escalade down a driveway with his bare hands. A clip of a bemused pee-wee football ref wondering if the sleeve of fake tattoos on each of the boy’s arms are real is followed by footage of him smearing his hands with washing-up liquid before making an audacious one-handed grab on the run.
Some attempt to be funny, others showcase undoubted athletic talent. A few, like the one of him cradling a wad of cash, are just plain crass. All are cleverly designed to amplify the brand.
The problem is, every now and again, the child speaks to camera in a prepubescent voice, very obviously mouthing somebody else’s words, in a sinister way that makes you wonder what Svengali is behind this grotesquerie. In what will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever encountered a parent living vicariously through the sporting feats of their child, Jake San Miguel, his father and manager, claims to have been a high school prospect whose own pro ambitions were derailed by an ACL injury.
The American equivalent of the Irish pub bore claiming he would have played county and/or been scouted by United only he went over on his ankle.
In a rather sophisticated manner that may one day make him the subject of academic study of the modern disease of sharenting (parents who post everything their children do on social media), San Miguel Snr has carefully cultivated his son’s exaggerated persona, cannily naming him after the NFL video game, and telling one interviewer: “Since the age of six, he has been trained and programmed.” And made to wear a gaudy, oversized chain around his neck that says Baby Gronk.
“It’s like this, man,” San Miguel Snr told one interviewer. “If a parent cuts grass for a living, he’s going to show his son how to cut grass. I knew sports, that’s pretty much all I know so that’s why I got him into sports. I always tell him, if you don’t want to play sports, that’s okay.”
Various celebrities, athletes, and media personalities have testified about San Miguel approaching them, desperately seeking to engage in any way that might increase the boy’s notoriety. Consequently, his Instagram shows Baby Gronk meeting everybody from Shaquille O’Neal to Mark Wahlberg, and plenty of corporations have already done business with the family. But, as the hype and hoopla have intensified, more and more denizens of the sports world are castigating the father for gimmick parenting, using this innocent child as a mere prop, a marketing device.
San Miguel has defended himself by saying he’s cashing in for his son now in case injury, or other children catching up with him physically (he’s a big boy for his age), halt his march toward greatness. Meanwhile, the child is touring American university campuses like a high school gridiron phenom trying to figure out where he might choose to accept a scholarship to play college ball. Except the lad looks and sounds like he should be at home playing Fortnite or Minecraft or counting Pokémon cards.
We’ve been down this depressing road before. Many times. Earl Woods, the most infamous sports father of them all, put Tiger on The Mike Douglas Show at two years old, and it was only after reading Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict’s definitive biography that we fully realised how young Eldrick grew up in the maw of golf’s equivalent of the very worst Hollywood stage parents.
They turned him into a legend but forgot to allow him to develop properly from boy to man, a point illustrated yet again by Woods’ latest sordid relationship debacle currently working its way through the Florida courts. Always a price to be paid.
The other day, Baby Gronk Instagrammed that he was retiring from football. A kid fooling around online or serious brand pivot by a father worried about how much the world is appalled at his child exploitation? Truth or scared? Doesn’t matter. Still went viral.
