When Christine Brennan was turning 8, she asked for a baseball glove as a birthday present. That was a remarkable request for a girl to make in 1966. What’s even more remarkable, her father bought the glove and then taught her how to use it.

In a tribute marking her Dad’s 75th birthday five years ago, Chris wrote: “Immediately, this man became the only guy in town who was playing catch in the back yard with a girl. What were the neighbors to think? He went back to the store and bought the girl a baseball bat.”

Now a sports columnist for USA Today and a frequent radio and TV commentator, Chris has published a memoir, “Best Seat in the House” (Scribner), and with Father’s Day approaching, the subtitle is instructive: “A Father, A Daughter, A Journey Through Sports.”

Dads and daughters have always bonded through athletics, but in Toledo, Ohio, in the mid-’60s, that usually meant sharing seats in the stands, not positions on the field. The Brennans lived near “The Glass Bowl,” the University of Toledo football stadium, and as a small child Chris remembers watching the glow of the stadium lights and wondering, “What’s going on there?”

“When Dad started to take me to games, we would walk together, hand in hand,” she writes. “Sometimes I wanted to run. I couldn’t wait to get there. Pretty soon, we would be among hundreds of spectators, funneling through the entrances into the game. I held Dad’s hand tightest then.”