What's a sports nut dad supposed to do when he has two daughters instead of two sons? Well, he oversees their development as girl jocks. I went to my first Phillies game in mid-July, It was only a week or two after my sixth birthday, and I had already been a diligent fan, memorizing and learning how to do batting averages and earned-run averages, and the spelling of even difficult ethnic names of players like Rip Ripulski, Ray Semproch, Stan Lopata and the immortal Go-Go Chico Fernandez. Ella was just about that age when she curled up with me on the couch one night as I was idly watching a Philadelphia 76ers game. My ardor for sports-watching had cooled over the years, but I still felt a bit of the connoisseur about it. I was one of the lucky boys-cum-well-really-still-boys to become a professional sportswriter. I had worked as a small-town columnist, as a TV sports producer and even as a reporter for a year at Sports Illustrated, the premiere sports magazine in America. Sportswriters, and especially ex-sportswriters, as I was by that point, can be a cynical lot.


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Marie Warga, at the age she says her father was sexually abusing her. Marie Warga learned that her father was attempting to contact her, she wrote this letter to him. Warga is entering her senior year in college, and intends to become a lawyer.
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That happens to me as a writer a lot. I was writing for an audience, puffing out phrases I thought people could relate to. My story is solely that.
Finding out dad isn't your biological father. Follow our live coverage for the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic. There is a small but real chance you don't realise the man you call dad isn't your biological father. Up to 3 per cent of people are the genetic offspring of someone other than the man they think, according to UNSW Professor Rob Brooks and Swinburne University of Technology Professor Michael Gilding, who have both studied misattributed paternity. Possible scenarios include mum having multiple sexual partners at the time of the child's conception, undisclosed adoption, medical mistakes, the parents using a sperm donor to conceive or "dad" arriving on the scene when the child is too young to remember. Either way, on a peak-hour bus ride at least one passenger is likely mistaken about who their father is — could it be you?