Hoffman (that's a "he," right there with renowned sportswriter Shirley Povich and renowned theologian Shirley Guthrie) is Professor Emeritus of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He has served as the Executive Director of the American Kinesiology Association, and the editor of a notable text in that field, as well as the author of Sport and Religion and the particular object of interest for today's blog, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sport. Prior to his entry into academia he worked as a basketball coach. Hoffman also describes himself as an evangelical of long standing, son of a Baptist minister in western Pennsylvania,
Between all of these elements, Hoffman has become a man with major questions about the current state of sport, and evangelical enmeshment in it.
Good Game is a pretty thick volume, so I'm not going to try to discuss it all in one fell swoop. I will, however, offer up some description and commentary on Chapter 7 of that book, one which (although Hoffman doesn't draw it out as explicitly as possible) has great relevance to the frequent subject of this blog, the destructiveness of football to, in particular, the brains of several people who play it.
Chapter title: "Building and Sacking the Temple."
The chapter, as does the book in general, touches on and reaches across many different fields of encounter between sport culture and evangelical culture (Hoffman is quite specific about his own experience and his audience as a result). Among the topics in the chapter are the fad for "Christian" workout videos and proliferation of elaborate gymnasia in certain large churches; the tendency towards glorification of six-pack abs and such as somehow especially "Christian" as a reversal of long-standing suspicion of the body in Christian culture across the centuries; and the meat of the chapter, the proffering of sport as a way of building the body in such a "Christian" fashion flying in the face of prolific demonstration of sport (particularly highly competitive sports, including on the pro level) as having instead a destructive effect on the body, i.e. "sacking" the temple (the body) instead of building it up.
Those who have followed sports for some time will recognize some of Hoffman's examples; a fourteen-year-old Little Leaguer whose arm broke in two places in delivering a pitch (shades of major leaguer Dave Dravecky, whose own arm-snap was a lot more public when it happened and who also gets a mention in the chapter); the damage of boxing; Mike Webster, Terry Long, and Andre Waters; a litany of bodily injuries as described by former major-league catcher Bob Brenly, not atypical of what many ex-catchers describe; the romanticism of injury (both receiving and inflicting) by former pro footballers like Don Meredith, Michael Strahan (yes, the guy next to Kelly Ripa each weekday morning), and Lawrence Taylor (the guy who broke Joe Theismann); the frequent concussions of the likes of Al Toon, Steve Young and Troy Aikman (who is quoted as incredulously wondering "How in the world could anybody endure this for 10 years?") and former athletes, especially devout evangelicals like Orel Hershiser and Kevin Seitzer (as well as Dravecky) citing their faith as the explicit reason they were eager to push themselves to return from injury (multiple beanings in Seitzer's case).
Football, perhaps the most exalted sport in the evangelical culture Hoffman addresses, doesn't come in for particular exaltation in Hoffman's view. To Hoffman, in particular because of its far more widespread participation and its hold on American culture, football is a "greater threat to health than boxing" (178). Hoffman cites the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research and its implication of football in the greatest number of catastrophic injuries, notes football's responsibility for 68% of the 62,000 high school sports injuries reported annually, and also cites former San Diego Chargers staff psychiatrist Arnold Mandell's experience with the "carnage" up-close.
In short, in Hoffman's words, "[I]t is impossible to overstate football's assault on the dignity of the human body" (179).
This is a serious charge to come from Hoffman, who is quite interested in a theology of the body as a cite of the Imago Dei. The Incarnation, that mystery in which the Divine took on human flesh not as a cheap suit but as a real and concrete identity, is a major source of Hoffman's distress at the destructive nature of modern sport. Frankly, it's hard to argue against the thought. One doesn't need to slip into undue body adulation to find it hard to stomach how much modern sports (not just football, but certainly it stands out) wreaks harm and not help on the human bodies that throw themselves into it.
Though Hoffman does not expand on his concerns about football greatly here (his net is wide enough to cover all sports), his concerns are highly informative when considering the ethical implications of participation in football as a fan/supporter/consumer of sports. He has plenty to say about that too, but that will wait for another time.
Hoffman, Shirl James. Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010.
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