He has told crowds gathered at his town-hall-style events that he has to leave on time to make it home for family dinner night. He goes to his kids’ baseball and basketball games. He follows his son’s travel hockey team out of state.
AP FILE PHOTO
Governor Christie
Chris Christie’s been doing all that while being governor,
becoming a possible presidential pick and now dealing with the biggest crisis of his political career.
For that balance, and the public way he’s done it, Christie has been named a Father of the Year by the National Father’s Day Committee.
“It’s particularly nice because it’s the thing I care about most in my life, more than anything else, more than my job or anything else,” Christie said on his monthly radio show Monday night. “I know that what Mary Pat and I care about the most is continuing to check ourselves about what kind of parents are we being and how are we doing with our kids.”
Each year the Father’s Day/ Mother’s Day Council’s committee honors a celebrity or politician father, a dad in the apparel industry — which supports the organization — and one “All Star Dad,” nominated by his child and chosen through an online contest. That contest is still running through the end of April and the winner will be selected in May.
Also receiving the award is designer Vince Camuto, CEO of The Camuto Group, who is best known for co-founding the women’s fashion brand Nine West.
Christie’s mentor, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, was honored with the award in 1986.
Other past recipients include former President Bill Clinton, former New York City Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, basketball players Shaquille O’Neal and Amar’e Stoudemire, baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and author Tom Clancy. It was first awarded to U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1942.
Dana Verrill, executive director of the council, said the organization had been considering Christie for some time.
“It’s been chronicled that his kids are very important to him and he tries to be a great father to make sure he participates in their lives, and to us that’s the most important ingredient to being a father of the year,” Verrill said Tuesday.
Verrill said the committee considers a number of factors when selecting nominees.
“We look for someone with leadership, whether they’re a politician or a celebrity or whatever, trying to find the right balance between work and family is really important and most of all someone who has all the qualities of a great dad,” he said.
The goal of the event is to highlight good dads to bring attention to Father’s Day and raise money for charity, he said.
Verrill said sometimes those picks are controversial. Clinton was honored last year — long after his extramarital affair became public.
In recent weeks Christie has been at the center of the George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal. And over the course of his first four years in office, Christie has battled the reputation that he is a bully. Videos of Christie arguing with teachers and yelling at a critic while walking the boardwalk with his family have gone viral. The governor maintains that he’s passionate about causes he believes in, but that he isn’t a bully.
The 73rd Annual Father of the Year Awards reception at the Hilton Hotel in New York City on June 4 benefits Save the Children’s United States programs, which aim to break the cycle of poverty by providing children with educational programs and proper nutrition.
Christie said Monday he isn’t sure if he’ll bring his children to the event; it is on a school day.
“I don’t want to be an irresponsible parent by letting them come to my Father of the Year award and miss school,” he said, adding he’ll check their school schedules before deciding.
Christie’s oldest son, Andrew, a college sophomore, is the catcher for Princeton University’s baseball team.
When the governor and his wife learned the team would play two games on Easter — preventing many of the teammates from traveling home for the holiday — they decided to host two dinners at the governor’s mansion in Princeton. The first was for about 50 family members in the early afternoon. The second dinner drew an even larger crowd — the Tigers, their coaches and their families.
When Andrew was in high school, Christie was criticized for taking a state police helicopter to his son’s baseball game. The state was later reimbursed for the cost of the flight.
Christie spent the three days before Easter in Massachusetts for his younger son Patrick’s hockey tournament. Before leaving Thursday morning, Christie spoke at an event in Jersey City where he explained that he brought his son because they were leaving immediately after he was done speaking.
“I’m a hockey dad,” he said.
He’s often seen at his youngest daughter Bridget’s basketball games and once told a crowd at a town-hall event that her aggressive playing style can be “embarrassing.”
When his daughter Sarah was considering where to go to college next year, Christie was with her when she visited the University of Notre Dame, where she decided to enroll.
When Christie easily won a second term last November, it was his four children who walked out on stage to introduce their parents at the victory party.
But Christie also admitted that his children “had a good laugh” when he told them he was named Father of the Year, not for New Jersey, but the entire country.
“Most kids, if you’re doing your job the right way, love their parents but don’t necessarily think they’re father or mother of the year. They don’t think about them in that context,” he said on the radio show. “It’s a really nice honor.”
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