Pictured is a dad with his young daughter at Mother's Beach. Here are a few Father's Day Events in California.

Are you looking for something special for your dad this Father's Day? Begin looking at sports and you'll have your best opportunity to come up with a gift most dads will like. Tickets to a ball game, a sports museum, or participation in a sporting event is generally popular with all but the most die-hard couch potatoes who prefer chips, a brewski and re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond on TV.

Mother's Day has come and gone, and Father's Day is looming on the horizon. In 2011, it is held on Sunday, June 18. It is always held the 3rd Sunday in June. While Mother's Day has never been a difficult holiday to promote, Father's Day has experienced a much tougher road. When President Calvin Coolidge in 1924 recommended the nation honor fathers, the concept wasn't extremely popular, so he never wrote a proclamation or made the day official. Ad agencies ran with the national sentiment and began creating campaigns to laugh about a men's holiday based on the concept that father's should be honored in the same vein as moms.

Several formal attempts to recognize the holiday were defeated by Congress until President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers in 1966, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.

On Father's Day, more COLLECT phone calls are made than any other day of the year. Flowers, candy and other items awarded mothers during their holiday are not necessarily associated with dad, however, and sales figures bare this out.

In our search throughout California to find "Dad" themes, they are much harder to come by. There are Mother's bars, Mother's restaurants, Mother's Market health food stores and Mother's Beach - beaches galore. But the few efforts to name a diner "Dad's" has generally proven less successful.

So what can you do for a dad to make him happy? Sweet poems often miss the mark, as do pink roses or a bouquet of daisies. Why not celebrate dad with the tradition older than Father's Day? Take him out to the ball game. Major League Baseball is over 100 years old and is America's summer tradition that men primarily sustain. ONLY men are allowed on the MLB teams, the American and National Leagues-and California has both leagues! When one of the teams, San Francisco Giants, won the World Series in 2010, it was a great day for many California dads.

Oakland A's, San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers all play games in California on Father's Day in 2011. The A's play the Giants while the Dodgers play the Astros. Although it may not be viable for you to take your dad to one of these two games, you can always buy tickets to a ball game, purchase a ball cap, some memorabilia, or other such items. Another option is to take dad to a brew pub or sports bar where the games are showing on the big screen while you eat. Don't be surprised if he watches the game while you eat. It's a natural reaction with many dads.

We saw the online free poetry web sites with poems for Father's Day and they were pretty sappy and hard to understand. The cards in the shops often miss the mark, as well. If you want to celebrate American traditions, give your dad a call between the commercial breaks in a ball game on TV, and please, don't call collect! Make it your treat this time around.