What do we actually think of athletes?
To be more precise, do we, in the theological, agape sense of the word, love athletes?
Do they get to be full-fledged people, children of God, in our eyes?
Some qualifications:
I am limiting, for now, this discussion to professional athletes in team sports. Of course this is not to suggest somehow that college athletes are unimportant (leaving aside the question of collegiate athletes in certain sports as 'amateur'), or that Serena Williams or Usain Bolt are undeserving of Christian love. Rather, I suspect that the dynamics of fan relationships with those classes of athletes are different. One's affection for Serena is a lot less guided by the clothes she wears while on the court (it's possible to have an opinion about them but that's another issue). But as Jerry Seinfeld notes, our opinion of or affection for a baseball player, for example, is highly conditioned by what he's wearing on the field. College athletes, particularly in the high-revenue sports such as football or basketball, come closer to having the same issues as the pro team-sports players, but for now I'm going to hold that the professional/amateur divide still matters. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.
I am also aware that in most cases we don't know the athletes personally. We are, however, called to live in Christian love towards people we don't know personally on a regular basis. To be precise, we can't use that as an excuse to withhold love from anybody; presumably that includes athletes.
I ask the question because it's inescapable, when deciding whether a Christian ethical case for watching football as it stands is currently possible. We are charged with approaching all persons, near or far, from a viewpoint of basic Christian relationship. A minimum requirement of this is recognizing a full measure of human worth in each person.
Do we really do with this with athletes? Or does the way we watch games hinder our ability or willingness to see the athletes we watch as fully human?
I dare say most of us would not willingly claim to see the players on the field as anything less than full human beings. I question, though, whether the particular nature of fandom or rooting for teams diminishes that capacity in us more than we realize. Seinfeld's comedic riff above (made famous in another setting as "rooting for laundry") isn't completely off-target here. The same player we root for passionately as long as he's wearing the home team's jersey becomes an object of derision when he gets traded or -- especially -- if he leaves as a free agent.
But our affection for the players who wear our laundry is also changeable, violently so at times. The player who makes a critical error and has 50,000 people suddenly booing him relentlessly probably isn't feeling his full human worth at that moment. The more excessive, depraved fan might continue to hound that player well beyond the rational sell-by date for such rage, but even the fan who has the more sane position of moving on from such moments probably doesn't quite completely get over that moment of anguished fanhood.
This is important to note: the question here is not about the deranged lunatics who hound athletes on Twitter or poison the comment sections of online articles with their poisonous bile. This is about us. Are we capable, short of some sort of tragic off-field circumstance, to see those gladiators of the gridiron or mid-court magicians humanly? Or does the apparatus of fandom prevent us from doing so?
Being able to step away from the passions of the game, to turn away from the cheering and booing and highs and lows of the game and to regard these athletes as human beings first and foremost is an essential and unavoidable step in deciding whether or not to participate in a game system that is, at least for some number of those players, causing irreparable damage that will impede their future lives, if not cut them short altogether.
But sometimes I fear we don't manage to see these players as human beings even off the field or court or rink or pitch. It sure doesn't seem as if sports fans were prepared to see the Atlanta Hawks' Thabo Sefolosha as a person stopping to give money to a homeless man instead of a thug who got what he deserved from New York City police (although a jury evidently decided that they could see him this way after all), much less as a person who deserved his day in court to speak in his own defense. Were people not properly guided by the sports media that so dictates our view of athletes? Or did such an athlete, a depth player on a less-heralded team (albeit one that had its own experience with racial insensitivity barely twelve months ago), simply not matter enough to draw the attention of the sports-fan masses?
Fans haven't seem inclined to cut Matt Harvey a break either, and all he did was care about whether he'd be able to pitch again in the future. He was judged insufficiently loyal to his jersey for being uncertain about how to proceed, when caught between two parties -- the New York Mets and his agent, Scott Boras -- neither of whom has his interests principally at heart. Some of the things written about Harvey (who is pitching after all, and won the first game of the National League Championship Series last night), by supposedly respectable national sports columnists, would make the most vicious political commentators blush with shame. They were vile, as if Harvey were some sort of subhuman beast of burden to be abused as necessary for the unthinking satisfaction of Mets fans. Playoff success has probably bought Harvey a repreive, but he most likely gets thrown under the bus again as soon as he gets knocked around in a key game, or gets pulled early only to have the team lose.
Our heated rooting for our preferred laundry does not allow for complexity; the player must serve our interests at all costs, and failure to do so is cause for condemnation or personal destruction. Even successfully serving those fans, however, doesn't always cause those fans to embrace those athletes as fully human. Idolization is no less a form of dehumanization than abuse or personal destruction.
Can we see the athlete as a human being? Or does our zealotry for the games they play blind us to seeing and embracing them as human beings and exercising fully human concern for their well-being and health?
A former seminary classmate and (I hope) good friend of mine wrote in a sermon recently that:
First Corinthians 13 ought to encourage us to step back from even our most cherished and fiery opinions, rants, ways of being, and ask "Why am I doing this?" If I cannot honestly say, "I am doing this for love and in love," then the legitimacy of my whole enterprise must come under serious doubt.How much of what we do and say in the thrall of sports fandom would actually pass such a rubric is probably chillingly small. When participation in a game becomes a far more literal matter of life and death than we are accustomed to acknowledging, even if the life-and-death result plays out only years later, our normal ways of relating to athletes cannot stand. They must be human beings first and foremost. We cannot ethically or faithfully do any less.
Thabo Sefolosha and Matt Harvey: human beings
No comments:
Post a Comment