What games show us about ourselves

We don't have cable.  We keep a Netflix account so we can watch mostly British shows and some old Star Trek shows, and my annual anniversary gift is a subscription to mlb.tv, plus we have a whole heap of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, so our entertainment needs are plentifully met in our house.
There are losses, though.  I don't get to see The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.  I didn't expect to find that such a loss, mind you.  To me, Fallon was the guy who kept cracking up during Saturday Night Live sketches, and one of the perpetrators of one of the worst semi-baseball-ish movies of my lifetime, Fever Pitch.  (I would go so far to say that that particular movie was the one that convinced me not to be such a completist about baseball movies -- it's o.k. to miss some of them.)
Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I'm starting to think I might be missing something.  Having Idina Menzel sing "Let It Go" accompanied by The Roots playing children's classroom instruments was inspired and will be hard to top.  Another of his stunts, though, while funny in so many ways, makes me think a bit about how we treat our sports heroes.
Robinson Cano, longtime second baseman for the New York Yankees, made his first appearance in New York recently with his new team, the Seattle Mariners.  Fallon convinced Cano, who signed a crazy megabucks contract to make the move, to go out into NYC and get booed before he even took the field.  Watch the video here.  Go on, I'll wait.
You've seen it?  No cheating, now.
Now you've seen it?  Good.
You see what happens.  Fallon's lackey persuades each jaded cynical New Yorker to boo at the big glossy photo of Cano, which some do with more vehemence than others.

Booooooooooooo!

When they turn to boo again, all of a sudden Cano's there.

Boooo -- oh, hey, Robinson Cano!

In not one case does the fan continue to boo.  Some react with a bit of shock, one with something that looked like fear -- "oh, crud, he's gonna kill me" -- and some manage to slip seamlessly from booing into glad-handing and merriment, which would seem a little psychotic to me if the whole situation weren't so lighthearted from the outset.
None of the fans really hated Robinson Cano, when facing him in the flesh, no matter how angry their sentiments might have been when Cano signed that contract.  About the meanest thing any of them managed to say to him in person was to hope he played well, but didn't win, which is about as fair a wish as can be made for a player whose team is playing against yours.
Interesting how suddenly being face-to-face with Cano made such a difference.
Of course, Fallon's little experiment isn't exactly scientific.  The passerby involved were specifically being encouraged to "boo" the Cano picture, which is not at all like being in a stadium in the heat of the moment.  Still, the difference between anonymity and presence does show up rather strikingly.
Of course, I'm not entirely sure that booing in the stadium is the best example of how anonymity liberates the lesser impulses within.  While you can still get some serious demonstrations at the ballpark or arena, it usually takes something more than leaving for a fat contract to get them to happen for more than a few at-bats.  The Internet, on the other hand...
Of course, that doesn't apply just to sports.  Perhaps it reaches its worst depths on the subjects of politics or religion.  Maybe this is a case where fan behavior at games should have been a warning to us all, rather than being the end-all of human depravity.
The fat contract itself, of course, would be a worthy topic of discussion.  But as always here, I'm a bit more fascinated with the ethical choices fans make, and what degree the Christian faith tradition (I'm certainly not qualified to speak from any other perspective) can or should inform that choice.
That said, I'm not going to be as down on one good boo as you might expect.  Note that: one good boo.  You've expressed your disappointment with, in this case, Cano's choice to leave with one good lusty boo; fine.  Now move on.  Get back to cheering for the players who are actually still on your team.
Which to me makes it interesting that none of the fans in the Fallon clip, given the opportunity to ask Cano directly why he could leave the Yankees, did so.  Most turned basically into fumbling starstruck fans when confronted with Cano's presence.  Either (1) these are raging hypocrites, or (2, the more charitable option and the one I'm taking for now) they really don't hate Cano, even for leaving their team; the boo is more of a societal expectation than a genuine measure of hurt or anger.  Then again, the in-stadium experience is likely to be rather different.
It's as if they know it's really not right or ethically justifiable to disparage a player (who is, after all, a human being) that way.  Being in a crowd in the bleachers provides a nice little mask of anonymity and distance from the offending player, so that moral twinge is harder to feel.
Still, based on totally unscientific observation (i.e. watching sports for many years), I can't help but feel that in-crowd behavior is not nearly as awful as it used to be.  (Outside the stadium, on the other hand, it can still be horrific, as Bryan Stow can tell you, or maybe his family can on his behalf.)  I suppose that may be tested this coming NFL season if Michael Sam makes the St. Louis Rams roster. I'd also notice that this characterization probably does not apply to European soccer.
Still, there's something there that should have been a warning, a source for concern rather than an occasion for jokes about Philadelphia fans booing Santa Claus.  It's not always about the game.  Sometimes it's about what the game shows us about ourselves.

No luck finding an out

So the NFL Draft is ongoing as I write.  All the big hype went to the first round last night, with unseemly levels of outrage and angst over who got drafted when or didn't get drafted until or didn't get drafted at all, having to wait for the indignity of being drafted in the second round.  Horrors.
In the meantime I must report that, alas, I found no ethical way back into football.
Yes, I actually used my final paper for my spring ethics class to find a way to follow football as a fan -- not so much for myself, but as an exercise that might be of some comfort to others.  I couldn't find it.
Some basic details:
1) Tertullian and Augustine basically mocked me for even asking the question.  While there were others of antiquity who expressed their horror/disgust/general rejection of "the games" as a general phenomenon (no, their scorn was not limited to the gladiatorial contests; pretty much any competition was repulsive to them), those two were the most extensive in their denunciation of the games and their deleterious effects -- on the competitors to be certain, but most especially on those who watched those contests.  Augustine in particular wrote of his acquaintance Alypius, who seems to have been turned into a stuporous drooling lump by the sight of the games.  Tertullian was particularly scornful of even the attempt to justify viewing the games, or for that matter the theater.  There isn't, on the other hand, much of any attempt in early Christian thought to address those games in anything like a positive way, despite the occasional encouragement towards physical wellness in the form of metaphors like Paul used from athletic endeavor.  Let's be clear that the point is not to equate football with the gladiator contests.  Even as there is a great deal of disfigurement involved in the modern game, it doesn't actually kill people -- at least, not immediately.  Long term?  Well, we've covered that ground.
2) Shockingly, I didn't find any kind of ethical comment on the First Deadly Age of Football.  That, as sports buffs recognize, relates to the earlier days of the game, when President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to demand changes to the game in 1905 after a number of deaths due to on-field injuries.  Perhaps it was Teddy's response that short-circuited any response from the Christian ethicists of the day, but I frankly was surprised to find nothing commenting on the game and its particular destructiveness at that point.  (There were comments from earlier, in the late 1800s, but they tend to react against sports more generally -- baseball as much as football -- and for general roughness of character as much as physical harm, if not more.)  NOTE: if you know of any comment from that particular period specifically on football and hits physical harms, please let me know!
3) There has been a decent amount of comment on sports more generally as a part of society and culture, and Christian reaction to/embrace of it.  These sometimes seek to explore Christian participation in sport, while others specifically explore fanship and its relation to Christian thought and behavior.  As most of them were written before the severity of football's brain-trauma crisis became clear, most of them do not address the subject.  One exception is Shirl Hoffman's Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor U. Press, 2010), which acknowledges some of the earliest cases of CTE to gain publicity but situates CTE within a broader range of injuries related to football.  Still, though, the most prominent publication on the subject remains in the secular sphere, with the bellwether volume League of Denial as the most prominent book to address the subject.
4) Specific comment on football and CTE is only starting to leak out, in smaller but more widely accessible media such as journals and blogs.  One example of the latter can be found here, in which a Virginia pastor comes down on the side of giving up the sport.  The journal Christian Century has taken to a good bit of comment on football in its blogs and some articles, and some of those address the specifics of the CTE issue and Christian response.  Benjamin Dueholm can't abide it anymore, while Rodney Clapp still tries to find a way to enjoy the sport.  Clapp's position is rather unimpressive: because the violent aspects of the sport are not those he enjoys, he takes it as acceptable to continue to follow the sport.  Dueholm is less sanguine: he rigorously pursues a more stringenly ethical course, noting that (in a real money quote) "social ethics, especially Christian social ethics, does not wait upon the letter of the law or defer to the judgments of 22-year-old men when deciding which things should be embraced and which things shunned."
And therein is the challenge.  Even the question of looking for loopholes becomes an ethical problem.    As long as this cloud hangs over the sport -- one in which lives have already been lost, and others irreparably (so far) damaged -- any following of the sport is going to be, at best, tainted with a form of ethical guilt.  No matter how flashy the spectacle, no matter how much characters like Johnny Manziel or Richard Sherman or others are ready and willing to jump up and distract you and me from the physical destructiveness of the game, giving it our allegiance is never going to be less than problematic at best, and quite possibly (quite likely) unethical as well.
Sorry, folks.  I tried.