On Becoming a Super - Part 8: Brad's Act One
March 7, 2020

    My husband kinda looks the part of a superhero.  If you've seen Shrek 2 – the one where Shrek turns into a human – then you have a pretty good idea of what Brad looks like.  The human version of Shrek is a close approximation.  (The similarities in personality are uncanny too, but that's a different story.)  Or, if you gave dark hair and dark eyes to Bob Parr – the retired Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles – you'd have drawn a decent cartoon version of Brad King.
    
    Both Shrek 2 and The Incredibles came out the year Brad and I married, so we've always had a special affinity for these animated flicks – and this was long before we had kids.  We used Shrek-themed plates and napkins to serve the cake at our wedding.  Goofy, I know.  And we still laugh today about how Brad filled up my little Toyota Corolla the way Bob Parr filled up his dinky little compact car in the The Incredibles.  Brad had more of a commute to work than I did during those first few years we were married, so we decided he should drive the Corolla.  But it was a tight squeeze.  And let's just say the Corolla took a bit of a beating.  You remember that scene in the movie where Bob Parr busts out of his tiny car, breaking the door off and lifting the car up in frustration, only to freeze in mid-ex-superhero fit when he realizes he's being watched by the neighborhood kid riding by on a tricycle?  Yeah, it was something like that, only in slow motion, over the course of about a year. 

    Brad started looking the superhero part at a pretty young age.  He was adopted at birth, and as far as we know, his parents did not develop any kind of relationship with his biological mother, who was probably young and single.  We don't even know whether they met her, let alone whether they ever found out any details about his biological father.  This was 1968, and all the arrangements were made by the adoption agency.  Many adoptions were shrouded in secrecy in those days, and true to form, Brad's parents didn't discuss the adoption – ever.  Brad says his grandparents mentioned it from time to time (with mild disparagement), but his parents never did.  His sister, who was adopted at birth four years after Brad, tracked down her biological mother later in life, but Brad has not yet done so and remains ambivalent about whether he will.

    So the origins of his superhero-ish looks might remain a mystery.  But they started becoming rather undeniably apparent very early on in his life, and somewhat comically so.  His parents (his adoptive parents) were quite small people.  His dad never topped about 5'4" in height and may have weighed about 145 pounds in his most robust years as a union iron worker.  And his mom, who worked a variety of pink-collar jobs through the years, was about the same size as his dad for many years, until his dad passed away about a year and a half ago and she lost some weight.  They had no way of knowing, when they brought home this normal sized infant boy in 1968, how out-of-place he would soon look.  

    But it didn't take long for Brad's extraordinary genes to start expressing themselves as he grew.  And grew.  And grew.  And grew.  He quickly scrambled to the top of the growth chart, and his parents had a man-child on their hands in little more than a decade.  Brad stood six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds by the time he was twelve years old, and he could grow a full mustache and beard by the age of thirteen.  One of his nicknames growing up was "Big Enough" – from the extended family members who would ask, "Is he big enough yet?"

    They put him in football – a natural sport for a giant kid growing up in central Oklahoma in the late '70s to mid-'80s.  He also played basketball, a sport that he enjoyed and had a fair amount of success with.  But he had the gladiator-in-training look of a football player, and it was on that field that he excelled.  It was from that field that he was recruited by both the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University to play college football.  He ended up accepting a full football scholarship at Oklahoma State.

    But, again, this was the late '70s to mid-'80s in central Oklahoma.  These were the days before coaches and parents thought about the sports arena as more than a mere field of physical competition.  There wasn't much talk back in those days about sports as an avenue for character development, and athletes – particularly gifted male athletes – were often given a pass academically and not pushed to develop themselves off the field with the same rigor as they were expected to perform on the field.

    So even though Brad looked the superhero part from junior high on, he will readily tell anyone today that he missed out on much of what makes for true superhero development – its moral and intellectual components.  And the irony of the situation is not lost on him: that it was precisely because he "looked the part" and possessed all the physical presence and power of a real-life superhero that he got by without a full superhero education.  It would not be until much later in life that he would make up for this shortfall, finding his true superhero calling in becoming a father.  Stay tuned for more on that.