My wife and I had our first child this past September, our son Reggie. He’s almost three months old now, and I have to tell you, among the many thoughts and fears that I have about his future, the most prominent concern his potential to become a great athlete who makes more from product endorsements than he does from his actual sports salary.
Which sport is he most genetically suited for, I spend my nights wondering, if in fact he’s going to be great enough to get all of those ridiculous endorsements? What if I steer him into the wrong sport and therefore he’s not as great as he might have been and no one wants him to endorse their products, or if he’s only so-so and then he can only get C-level endorsements for crappy fast-food chains and local sports outlets?
Time and time again, I’ve thought to myself, if
only there were some sort of thorough genetic test that could be administered to him right now that would tell me whether he was more likely to excel at distance running or table tennis or Australian rules football, I could get this little giggling, drooling, farting, future multi-platform money-making machine geared in the right direction immediately.
Well, imagine my surprise when I woke up to this Sunday’s
New York Times and discovered that
there is such a test.
A company in Boulder, Colorado called Atlas Sports Genetics is offering a $149 DNA test that analyzes your child’s ACTN3 gene for variants that have been shown to be present among different kinds of elite athletes. The R variant evidently is usually in evidence with powerful, speed-oriented athletes, your Michael Phelps and Usain Bolts of the world. The X variant is more associated with endurance athletes. The Times article doesn’t indicate whether one is guaranteed of having either the R or X variant of ACTN3. I can only presume that if your child has neither, you should buy him a chemistry set.
Now, being a father who definitely wants to know whether I should start my 3-month-old on a training regimen of sprint-crawling or distance-crawling or if I should just aim my efforts more towards a Nobel Prize, I called Atlas Sports Genetics this morning for some more information. When I got through to a customer service rep, the first question I asked was, “is three months too young for me to get your test?” To my considerable relief, he reassured me. “Absolutely not,” he said. “We recommend on our website that it’s for one year and above, but at three months you will get the same information.”
He explained to me the way it works, which is pretty simple. You sign up on
the Atlas website. You pay $149. They send you a kit, which sounds like code for “a cotton swab and a plastic baggie” (I asked if I could get a discount by using my own swab and baggie… the answer was no). You swab the inside cheek of your child (or newborn) and send it back to Atlas, who then forward it to a top-secret lab in Australia. Then you get back in the mail a detailed report which tells you exactly how much money your child can expect to make hawking what products.
Or something like that. The rep actually tried to explain the various results to me on the phone, but I cut him off, because frankly it was boring and didn’t involve any discussion of endorsement money. Here’s
the page on their website that lays it all out in startlingly vague detail. I’ll investigate that later. Right now I’m too busy forking over my 149 smackers and yelling SHOW ME THE MONEY at my computer screen. I mean, there’s never really been a big-time star athlete with a lot of endorsements named Reggie before, has there? None that leap to mind anyway.
This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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Comments
by L'etat, c'est moi on Dec 1, 2008 6:51 PM EST reply actions
I don’t know how I did that ^
by L'etat, c'est moi on Dec 1, 2008 6:52 PM EST reply actions
Merci beaucoup L’etat.
by No Mas Large.tsn on Dec 1, 2008 9:03 PM EST reply actions
At the risk of throwing cold water on the tinge of humor here, I’d like to observe that I find it distressing that we spend more money and time on trying to discover whether our child is the next Lebron or Tiger and not on whether they might be the next Nobel prize winner or inspirational leader… which will do more for society in the long run and which will be remembered in a century? (e.g. will kids be reading about Lebron in 2108 or Obama?)
I promote sports. I like sports and I encourage my daughter to play sports. But genetic testing? Is this China? East Germany? Sigh…
by shuttleman58 on Dec 2, 2008 9:41 AM EST reply actions
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What will they think of next? When it comes to extracting money from worried
parents, there’s no shortage of business models. Now the so-called “sports
gene” test for only $149 is finding a market for one reason only: because
we parents are under so much pressure these days to make sure our kids succeed.
That’s because kids are facing competition everywhere they turn — in school, in
sports, in music, you name it. One girl I know even had to compete to get
into her school’s community service program!
All this hyper-competition makes us parents feel like our kids must be “the
best” if they’re going to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. Our evolutionary
hardwiring — which arose when it was essential for parents to push their kids
to compete for food and to stay away from predators — reacts to the competition
in our children’s world by turning on our “fight or flight” anxiety. It
makes us feel that we have to do whatever we can to help our kids compete and
win.
Enter the entrepreneurs willing to “help” us do that! Enter our criticism of
parents for taking that bait. And yet. Let’s tease out exactly why
we criticize them. Because isn’t it perfectly understandable that we want our
kids to achieve? Sure. But the problem is that schemes
like genetic testing put pressure on the kids to excel. And such pressure
backfires. What makes children excel in sports is their love of the game
— which comes from the fun of playing, the feelings of camaraderie, the pride
from acquiring new skills. Their passion motivates them to practice and
eventually excel. But pressure from without — from anyone, for
example, expecting them to live up to the ‘promise’ of a so-called
’sports gene’ — is a good way to kill that passion.
Kathy Seal
Coauthor, Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids
www.kathyseal.net
by kathyseal on Dec 2, 2008 7:06 PM EST reply actions
Hehehe you won’t find out about the TRUE potential of your child until at least his early teens by then they will have made MILLIONS.
Remember the old fashioned way of parenting when they would just let their kids try various sports. How ineffecient, thank god for Atlas.
by eatchinesefood51 on Dec 2, 2008 11:25 PM EST reply actions
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