The classic confrontations: Ali vs. Foreman, Batman vs. the Joker, and Dad meets his absolute angel of a daughter's new boyfriend.
The edgiest go-round is apt to be the kitchen bout that sets Dad against date -- the subject of Terry Vaughan's new book, Not With My Daughter!: A Dad's Guide to Screening Dates and Boyfriends (Skyhorse Publishing, 2014).
"You can see why dads get a little bristly," Vaughan, 44, says. "We know what the intent is."
Dad knows exactly what the intruder has in mind. This fatherly insight comes from having been, himself, a teenager with the same idea. Dad's objective is to make sure the young man with a dream understands it's not going to happen.
Fathers traditionally have delivered this message by means of terror and interrogation. In Meet the Parents, for example, Robert De Niro plays Dad as an ex-CIA spook with a lie detector.
Real life topped the movie when President Obama's older daughter, 16-year-old Malia, went to prom earlier this year. The White House termed information about the boyfriend "classified," according to The New York Times.
And then, here's Vaughan -- a former British Royal Marine commando, contestant on the History Channel's marksmanship series Top Shot and expert on body language. He recommends commando thinking as applied to boyfriends.
"It's my military training," he says. "Plan for the worst and hope for the best."
At best, he shoots for Dad in the role of honest and reliable guide, a turned-to ally, confidant and protector in Daughter's search for Mr. Right.
The worst -- he describes how to win a beat-down with an especially poor choice of boyfriend material. ("Hit him until the threat is dealt with ...")
That said, he writes that he is "just like every other father in the world with daughters. I'm scared!"
But it's time to man up.
LET'S CHAT A BIT, YOUNG SIR
Vaughan is home on the range in Wyoming. On the phone, he is quick to laugh -- even at the idea of being an expert on boyfriends.
Vaughan's daughters, Cora and Sophie, are 13 and 10. He hasn't had any serious boyfriends to contend with so far. In fact, his current problem is to play down the tough-dad image, or else scare off his daughters' friends entirely.
Reputation precedes him as the dad who not only knows how to put his dukes up and his foot down, but who wrote the book on it.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time, there's no reason to be [a horse's patoot]," Vaughan says.
Corporations and law enforcement agencies hire him to teach nonverbal communication: the meaning of glances and handshakes. How to predict what people are going to do based on the way they stand, how they align themselves -- information they might not mean to give away.
He says the book came from people at his presentations telling him, "I wish I could have you and your people-reading skills next to me when my daughter starts dating.'"
This made him realize "nothing is going to save me from my two daughters' coming of age," and he'd better have a strategy.
In the book, he plays out various sorts of boyfriend encounters. Such as: the one who rolls his eyes. The one who withholds. The one with the fake smile, coming on like "a slippery used-car salesman."
And one of the trickiest to analyze: the one who shows no fear of Dad, not even face to face on Dad's home turf.
One explanation is positive. The lad has nothing to hide. Vaughan extends a hopeful hand to the possibility that Daughter has brought home, simply, a nice guy.
Then again, she might have locked on, well -- like the bad boy her mom fell for, like Vaughan remembers himself.
His teenage self never worried what his girlfriend's dad might do to him, he says. "I was getting beat up by my own dad."
On the plus side, "I went in being myself."
Among his tips on how to reveal a bad boyfriend:
• Check out his look. Piercings and ripped jeans: not a great impression, but could be more honest than overly dressed up. "Clothes are a costume."
• Give him a sniff on the sly. Minty breath: maybe he's coering up. Reeking aftershave: Could be a good sign. If he thinks the nose-hammering stink makes him alluring, the squirt doesn't know much about women.
• Ask easy-sounding questions that probe for more than surface information. "How fast will your car go?" "How many in your family at home?" (He does have a home, doesn't he?)
At the extreme of bad encounters, Dad's job is to bounce the bum. But this only works if Dad has built up a long and trusting relationship with his daughter, Vaughan cautions.
Dad comes swooping out of a thundercloud at his own peril. Daughter has to believe in Dad's judgment, knowing the old man has been right before. Otherwise, the bad date is going to look all the more attractive.
OTHER SIDE OF THE KITCHEN TABLE
Meantime, Daughter is doing ... what?
"Try not to leave them alone together," is the advice from Cosmopolitan magazine. "Slight discomfort" is good as it gets, the women's magazine advises. "Naked terror" is a possibility.
Vaughan aims his last chapter, "Just for Her," directly to Daughter. He offers tips on how to size up a boyfriend realistically . ("If you go out to eat, watch how he treats the waitress.")
Dad's ability to protect his baby is slipping away at this point, Vaughan explains. One day, he'll be out of the picture. Don't look for him ever to be happy about it.
Still, it's reasonable to expect him "to try to develop rapport with your flame."
HOLD ON THERE, YOUNG LADY
Even while he is scrutinizing the boyfriend, Vaughan says, Dad needs to remember that girls make trouble, too.
It could happen that doe-eyed and innocent Daughter is the one to make Mr. Right go wrong. How well she follows Dad's righteous code of conduct depends on what she thinks of her father in the first place.
Here again, Vaughan casts back to his own dating years.
"We assume our daughters are angels," he says. "But I don't remember ever dating an angel.
"But she was somebody's angel."
Family on 10/29/2014