"It doesn't matter to me. I don't care if I know him and I don't care if I don't,"says T.J. Houshmandzadeh of his father. "At the end of the day, if I had done that to my kids, would I want to get to know them? Yeah, I would. But I wouldn't expect them to put the effort in. They know of me, but they don't know me. You chose to leave. I didn't choose to be born. If I get to know him, cool. But I'm not going to put in the effort. I don't call people back when they call me."

Houshmandzadeh talked to his father for the first time this past summer, making the call to Iran, but he's not making any appointments for another one. His uncles liked the original Touraj, a college student when he met their sister, and over the years have encouraged him to reach out.

"His dad was a nice man; he treated my sister well," Anthony Norman says. "He got called back to Iran. He had to go. His dad got sick. He wanted my sister to go back with him and take the kids. He tried to get my sister to marry him. But she didn't want to go to a foreign country. I can understand that, too.

"I think it upset him he never got in touch. But that was tough to do. They were tough to find. They were never in the same place for a couple of months at a time."