Actor Alfonso Ribeiro applies the intense, winning-focused mentality from his showbusiness career to parenting his sons in youth sports.
Ribeiro believes in teaching his children to take control of their own outcomes, a lesson he illustrates through baseball.
He has learned to temper his vocal intensity at games to avoid negatively impacting his children’s experience.
“I literally started working from Day 1 at 8 years old,” he says.
He has developed a mentality that he feels has kept him in his line of work for 46 years. It is now influencing his two sons, AJ, 12, and Anders, 10, when they play baseball.
“My boys would obviously agree to this, but I’m hardcore,” the actor-entertainer tells USA TODAY Sports. “Everything I do is about being the best, and most of that is because the only thing I understand is just the way that I view my life in show business: One person gets the job.
“So, with that idea in my mind, there’s only one option, and that is, you’re either first place, or you’re losing. Second place is the first loser. So for me, it’s about ultimately doing everything you can to be the best that you can be. Always.”
His sons, who are in the car with him during our phone interview, are smiling knowingly, he says. He is driving them to practice in Southern California. He has been out there since he was about their age. He moved from his home in New York City to play a character by the same first name on “Silver Spoons.”
“Alfonso” was Ricky Schroder’s easygoing best friend who liked to sing and dance.
Ribeiro had a longer-lasting – and cornier – role as Carlton Banks, Will Smith’s cousin, on another hit sitcom, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
“Everyone thinks of me as the character that they know, but the person is very different from that,” says Ribeiro, 54. “My intensity level is through the roof.”
He believes it has gotten him to where he is. He also struggles, like us, to hold it together at his sons’ games so that it doesn’t brim over and become too much of a distraction.
“Nobody has ever said that I don’t share my thoughts,” he says.
We spoke with Ribeiro about how he tries to bring out his kids’ best qualities through sports, wherever it might lead them.
Our childhood is distinct from our kids’: Pull out what works best for everyone
Ribeiro, born in Harlem and raised in the residential Bronx section of Riverdale, put himself out there as a kid. He landed the part in that first audition for a PBS series, “Oye Willie,” and at 12 found himself starring in a Broadway musical, “The Tap Dance Kid’ and, soon after, a Pepsi commercial with Michael Jackson.
“In my business, it’s all about winning, and one person gets the job, that’s the only person who’s gonna win,” he says. “So I don’t know anything other than what do we need to do to win? What do we need to do to be the best?”
Before you form an opinion about his sports parenting, let’s put his career in context. He rose to stardom during an era when 30-minute comedies like “Silver Spoons,” Diff’rent Strokes, “Who’s The Boss?” and “The Facts of Life” dealt with hard life lessons and family issues interspersed with humor.
As a sports dad, he has learned to make light of himself while still getting to the heart of potential issues.
“I do not try to get down on anybody,’ Ribeiro says about watching his sons play baseball. ‘It’s all positivity in what I’m trying to do, but I’m vocal and I share my thoughts. There are times when some bad calls go a certain way you know, I gotta go take a walk because I don’t want to mess it up for them by me being vocal or saying something confrontational.
“All those things don’t work well as a parent watching your kids play sports. So I recognize it and I’ve recognized it because there have been situations where I’ve been vocal and it didn’t work out well.”
‘Own the moment’: We can put our kids in position to succeed, but the game is in their hands
During his adult life, which has taken him to hosting “America’s Funniest Home Videos’ and ‘Dancing With the Stars” and acting in commercials, Ribeiro has become a PGA Tour ambassador, semipro golfer and professional race car driver.
His daughters, Sienna, 23, and Ava, 6, got into gymnastics, but Ribeiro has thrown himself into the kids sport with which he is most familiar. He grew up a New York Yankees fan – he’s still a diehard – and one of his first loves was baseball.
He tried football, but felt claustrophobic: “The first time I got tackled. I was face down in the mud and that was not working for me.”
Something about baseball pulled him back. As an adult, he realized their were so many lessons he could take from it.
“One of the things that we have in our house is you’re not allowed to look at a strike three,” Ribeiro says. “And people go, ‘Well, of course it’s gonna happen.’ We understand that, but going in, that’s probably the only thing today that I actually get upset at. And here’s my reasoning: As an African American in America, there are certain realities. And that is that when you leave it up to someone else to make a decision about your outcome, a whole lot of factors get added into that decision-making. I can’t leave it up to someone else to decide how my life is gonna turn out.
“So when you’re standing in the box and you’ve got two strikes, and someone throws a ball that’s on the edge, and you take it, hoping that the umpire is going to view it favorably for you, you’ve given that person that power to make you happy or to make you sad, to be righteous or to not. But when you’ve got the bat in your hand and you swing, you took control of that moment.
“So things like that are important to my overall reasoning behind playing certain sports: You take control, you own the moment, you make a mistake, you own your mistake, you recognize that it was a mistake. You move on from that mistake and you can’t wait for the ball to come to you again so that you can show that was a one-time mistake and that’s not who you are. So all of those things are part of my love of sport and my love of my children playing sports.”
Sports help us decipher between who we are and who people think we are
Ribeiro told comedian and actor Andrew Santino in 2021 for Santino’s “Whiskey Ginger” interview show that folks come up to him and call him “Carlton.”
During the 1980s and into Ribeiro’s “Fresh Prince” days of the 1990s, characters were spread across fewer channels. The ones we followed we felt we knew intimately.
Sometimes, we don’t want to comprehend that the person behind the character can be someone completely different.
Ribeiro credits his dad, a former correctional officer at a prison who became his manager, with separating reality from the fantasy world of television.
He has tried to do the same for his kids.
“Obviously, my goals are for them to be happy and to achieve the best that they can achieve, whatever that might be,” he says. “I don’t think any parent is like, ‘Nope, I don’t want them to play major league baseball.’ Of course, that’d be amazing, right? But I’m also not crazy and not delusional. It’s a long way and a long road to playing professional sports. And we have tons of professional athletes that are our friends. I’ve had those conversations and it’s like, ‘Yo, it’s one in a million.’
“We should probably not go at this like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna be the one in a million.’ ”
Still, the boys know their dad can be tough, but, he says, it’s all they know, similar to the way he felt as a child actor fighting for roles.
“It’s about what are we gonna do? What kind of work are we gonna put in? Are we puttin’ in the work to be great or are we accepting mediocrity,” he says. “I don’t accept it. So, in them at times they’ve got to deal with that kind of energy.
“You’re gonna have coaches that are gonna be hardcore with you. And if you can’t handle that, then you’re not gonna be successful in sports. So you’re gonna have coaches that coddle you, you’re gonna have coaches that are showing you all kinds of love. You’re gonna have coaches that won’t show you any love. I believe that my coaching style with my kids (brings out the truth) when you’re not putting in the work, when you’re not working hard enough, when you’re not doing what you need to do. When you’re not understanding what your goal is, then we’re gonna drill it till we get it right.”
Establish a baseline, but check in with your kids about what they want
We are almost to the field, where Ribeiro’s sons will have a group practice.
“As I’m talking to you, you probably feel some of the intensity of what I’m saying,” he says. “The one thing my boys know (is) that I want them to succeed. I want them to be great. Many different ways to get there. This just happens to be the one way that I understand it and know how to get there.
“I wouldn’t say (it’s) yelling. I would say stern intention. There’s very little need for yelling, but intensity is yelling and yelling is anger. Intensity is about intense focus, right? Intense feeling, passion.”
He sees those qualities in AJ and Anders in the backyard: “I’ve never seen two people more competitive. They’re constantly going at it.”
Ava, his younger daughter, “is a beast with gymnastics,” he says. “The worst she’s ever gotten in the overall is second place.”
He admittedly doesn’t spend as much time with her as with his sons, whom he started coaching when AJ was about six. Early on, when he used to help coach their teams, his energy came straight at them through throwing, catching, pitching and fielding instruction.
“I set a great baseline and now allow them to kind of do their thing,” he says.
To a point. AJ had a game where his batting technique seemed off. His dad didn’t say anything during the game, seeing if his son could work his way out of it. When it was over, Alfonso told his son what he saw.
“Well why didn’t you tell me?” was AJ’s response.
“So that’s my OK to give him information that I see,” his father says, “and then let him make whatever decision from it that he wants to make. He either wants to listen to it and do it, make the adjustment. That might be too big of an adjustment that day, so we’re not gonna do it, but give him the information and let him do with (it) as he pleases.’
As we all know, giving instructions to our kids mid-game can be a tricky practice. Ribeiro has checked with their coach about it. He laughs at the recollection.
“I will say that our coaches, as a rule, they’re not wanting you to do it,” he says. “I’ve had my own individual conversations with our coach. He doesn’t want it all the time. But he also wants the success. So he’s kind of OK with me.”
Know your kid and his or her sport, and have an open discussion about it. Be willing to concede.
Ribeiro says he has softened through the years.
“I now recognize that yes, it’s about winning, but it’s also about learning, and it’s about growing, and it’s about developing, and all of that is what gets you to winning,” he says. “So, we spend our time focusing on the fundamentals to be the best that we can be. But I am no holds barred, say it like it is … I don’t sugarcoat.”
“My boys now, they’re very little things to really work on (in the car),’ he says. ‘There might be a like, ‘Hey, what were you thinking in this situation?’ But it’s not like me getting down hard on them anymore. There was a time when I would.”
After he drops them off for practice, he says he’s going to grab a coffee and relax. He is learning, like all of us, to let them go.
“Educate yourself with the sport that you want your kids to play,” he says. “Know what type of kid you have. Is your kid someone who needs tough love? Do they need loving? Do they need, ‘We’re just gonna pretend.’”
He makes believe himself once a year at a golf event in Lake Tahoe, when he does the “Carlton Dance.”
“I’ll do it on on the 17th hole but that’s about it,” he says. “It’s not for me.”
Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
