I'm certainly in no position to know what Aaron Rodgers does with his time in those first days after the season's over. Rest, I'd guess. But at least on occasion, it seems he uses such fame as he has for good things.
Rodgers has made appearances for an organization called Raise Hope for Congo, an organization that points to the desperate situation in that country in which what one might call "conflict minerals" are found (think "blood diamonds," but with items like tungsten, tin, tantalum -- materials for the manufacture of electronic devices, like your cell phone or maybe even the MacBook on which I'm typing out this blog industry). Warlords, financing their war machines with profits from those minerals, using rape as a weapon of war; it's all there. And Rodgers, who turned out to have a teammate from that troubled country, put his Cal education to use and studied up on the conflict, and now seeks to use that learning, and the fame that comes with being a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, to motivate college kids to do, well, something about it.
Good.
You didn't think the whole NFL was evil, did you? (And before you ask, no, I didn't believe the whole NFL was evil, smarty pants.)
Rodgers is hardly the only pro athlete to use fame and/or fortune for good. Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, went so far as to establish an orphanage in Zambia with his wife, and to write, presumably with some help, a book about it (one which also gives expression to his faith). For his charitable work Kershaw won baseball's Roberto Clemente Award, named in honor of the Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder and humanitarian who lost his life in a plane crash trying to deliver relief supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake in late 1972. The latter simply goes to the point that athletes doing good isn't a new thing. Your favorite (or least favorite) player might just be doing that kind of good right now without your even knowing it.
So there is all this good being done by people whom we pay money to watch play games. Why, then, does someone like me feel compelled to tilt at the windmill of how sports cuts against the grain of serious faith all too often? (As usual, I do feel compelled to point out when others with more audience than I seem to grasp this; I only wonder if #9 is too low.)
For one, there are certainly bad apples in the games we watch -- the Richie Incognitos of the world -- and they often grab our attention. But many of the most difficult problems that sports cause to the person of faith, those things that give pause no matter who much we don't want to watch, are not that easily attributable to the doings of any one individual or group of individuals.
C.S. Lewis, in one of his prefaces to The Screwtape Letters, offered the following take on how that book's concept of Hell took shape:
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
Something probably akin to what Hanna Arendt called "the banality of evil," it points to the degree in which the evils of much of the twentieth century -- or those we see -- have their origins in hidden, 'clean' places like shabby offices or gleaming corporate towers.
I would also add that these sources may not even intend evil in the world.
We see phrases such as "systemic evil" or "systems of oppression" used for this phenomenon in more contemporary times. I would also submit that many of the most oppressive or degrading aspects of sports these days are also systemic.
Football locker rooms are intense places; keeping dozens of high-charged personalities in any sort of cohesive order is probably a task too tall for any one coach, maybe even for a whose staff, so the coach counts on team "leaders" to keep watch over the younger players. So, when a bad apple manages to get himself counted among those "leaders," who's going to keep an eye on him?
Or let's pick on baseball. Some of the most outstanding talent in the game hails from one or another corner of the Caribbean, especially in the Dominican Republic. With sometimes-inconsistent control of such things as birth certificates or other medical records, it becomes easy for a player, under the guidance/exploitation of a buscone, to present a false name and fake documents to MLB scouts (the younger the arm, the more valuable the prospect) in order to enhance his prospects for getting signed to a rich contract. Hence Roberto Hernandez becomes Fausto Carmona; Juan Carlos Oviedo turns into Leo Nunez; and more. That's if you're good enough to have a chance, and if you can withstand the culture shock of relocating from the DR to some small minor-league town that's colder than you can imagine. If not, you just go back to your life, probably a poor one.
These are hardly the only examples. Systems that drive you to lie about your condition when you've been found to have a concussion, so you can get back into the game -- even knowing what the world now knows about concussions; the college basketball phenomenon of the one-and-done player, loosely connected at most to any kind of academic endeavor; the corruption that has been known to seep into bidding for Olympic games or World Cups; name your favorite example.
Systems seem to thrive on depersonalization; it's easier to ignore the mounting evidence of the damage football can (repeat: can) do to the human brain and send out a damaged player to resume play when he's a jersey number or position abbreviation instead of a person; when the kid in the DR is a sixteen-year-old with a 90-mph fastball instead of a person with a name; when people become simply cogs in a machine, before they are people.
And therein lies the rub. Where do we, the ticket-buyers, fit into the system?
Let that one roll around in your head for a while.
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