Weekly Reader: Another page from the tobacco playbook

Q: Which sports organization spent $1.2M on lobbyists and congressional lobbying in 2014, and has a political action committee that raised $900,000 in the last election cycle?

A: (Say it in Chris Berman's voice) The NAtional. FOOTball. League.

This one slipped by me. The NFL is becoming a fairly serious player in DC.

One might suspect the ongoing storm over brain trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy as the principal motivator for this increasing flexing of political mu$scle, and you'd be right to a large degree. Roger Goodell's halting and embarrassing turn on Capitol Hill in 2009 (seven years ago, if you can believe that) prompted the league to pour increased effort into, er, persuading members of Congress (the House Judiciary Committee in particular) to look more kindly on the NFL where concussions and trauma were concerned. You'll notice said committee has said bupkis on the subject since. (The bombshell admission of a link between football and such head trauma earlier this year happened before the House's Energy and Commerce Committee.)

But the final straw, so to speak, was actually Ray Rice's assault on his wife. As members of Congress got agitated and began to poke around the league's exposed nerves, the league finally concluded it needed a full-time point person on The Hill, and appointed a former Joe Biden aide to the task (some critics, you'll read in the link above, likened her move to that of a former lobbyist for MADD taking up a new job lobbying for the spirits industry, and they're probably not wrong). The most recent issue to come under NFL influence-spreading is the lucrative gambling rings-in-all-but-name known as daily fantasy sports, which has required a particularly blatant form of double-talk.

So what's the complaint? Corporations (which are people, my friend) have the legal right to lobby politicians. And if you want to assert that such lobbying takes place in every and all circumstances in a completely ethically pure and above-board manner, you have the right to do so.

I'll laugh in your face, but you do have the right to do so.

For comparison, the NFL's political spending noted above is about double that of MLB, NHL, and NBA combined, and the NHL and NBA don't even have PACs (the NFL's PAC about doubles MLB's in funds raised as well, even collecting almost exclusively from NFL owners and their family members).

Of course, those with a nose for history will remember that lobbying is reminiscent of how other ethically challenged businesses have preserved themselves over the years. One such industry that might come to mind? Oh, I don't know, maybe...the tobacco industry, already known to be tied to the NFL in spirit?

Is it legal? Yup. Does it smell? Oh, Hell, yes. (And I do use that word theologically.)


More stuff worth reading about that game:

*Ken Stabler was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Of course, he wasn't around to enjoy it, sadly.

*Speaking of the HoF induction, the game that typically goes with it had to be canceled, apparently because the paint used for the on-field logos turned hard and impenetrable. Wait, since when have rock-hard surfaces been a problem for football?

*The Tampa Bay Buccaneers franchise is trying a different kind of deep-freeze to rehabilitate its players.

*Sort-of football story: Um...o.k. 


From the Lords of the (Olympic) Rings:

*Is it bad sportsmanship to be vocal about cheating (which would seemingly be a pretty serious offense against sportsmanship)?

*When you've committed so many failures in preparing for the events of the Olympics, a pool that is suddenly and unexpectedly green is going to raise questions.


Other sporting realms:

*The NBA's Adam Silver has sounded almost progressive at times, and MLB's Rob Manfred has brought a degree of transparency to his office. MLS's Don Garber can be a little opaque at times but that league isn't quite there yet enough to cause great concern. So, if any commissioner was going to make the NFL's Goodell look like a morally upright and forward-thinking person, it had to be the NHL's Gary Bettman. And on cue... .

*Sometimes it's good to tip the hat to achievements without getting ethically worried, and so here's to Ichiro... .

*But then, some folks make that impossible.

Ichiro!

Baylor

It's as if God decided to deliver me some headlines tailor-made for a blog about sports and faith.

On Thursday, heads started rolling at Baylor University. Proceedings were announced to fire the school's president, athletic director, and head football coach. (The athletic director has since saved the school the trouble by resigning.)

As you've quite possibly heard by now, the terminations were carried out in response to a report from a law firm investigating allegations of sexual abuse against female students at Baylor, many (but not all) by members of the football program. The university's Board of Regents issued a Findings of Fact report which speaks to nothing less than institutional failure, particularly regarding Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization of 2013, both for the university as a whole and the athletic department and football in program in particular.

Predictably, the story has spawned a great deal of pontificating, high-minded speculation about culture change in college sports, and predictably self-interested tweets from Baylor players and ship-jumping by recruits. In the meantime, the university has named an interim president (who I think was once a New Testament professor of mine, not at my most recent seminary stop) and an acting head coach, Jim Grobe, once of Wake Forest. This is an interesting hire; Grobe, who retired from Wake just a couple of years ago, looks like a true interim hire -- someone who will not, and quite possibly does not want to be, considered for the permanent position, but will get the team through the coming season.

Grobe also has a track record, albeit not as impressive as that of fired coach Art Briles, of success at a  school not accustomed to it. His overall record wasn't great, but Jim Grobe coached Wake Forest to an ACC championship and an Orange Bowl bid. That remains one of the most impressive "wait, what?" accomplishments in athletic history.

Briles's success at Baylor looks similar, with the exception of apparently being more lasting. The school's football team now plays at a shiny new stadium that would never have happened without the success of recent seasons there, with players like Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III and a lot of attention to the program and, by some remote extension, the school.

The allegations, which were being investigated for almost a year by the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton, have rained all over that success like a particularly nasty Plains thunderstorm.

Where this case stands apart from so many others is this:

Baylor University is a Christian institution of higher education. Its website will tell you so.

As a former student at a Christian college and a former professor at a Christian university, that does make my ears prick up in this case. Unchallenged sexual assault doesn't really go very well with such a self-description.

A university Board of Regents (or trustees or governors, as they are variously named at different schools) can be a vexing thing, making prescriptions about educational matters in which they have no ability or expertise or, in the case of a Christian institution of higher education, expecting the school to serve as little more than an extended Sunday school.

In this case, I am trying to read events at Baylor optimistically. The Board of Regents at Baylor, I am hoping, really valued Baylor being a Christian institution (whatever that means), even at the expense of all that football glory.

Much of the commentary around the Baylor case has not commented on this aspect of the school's identity. A few have, but many have not. This may be why what has happened at Baylor won't really be a sign of general culture change after all. Most of your big-time football franchises in the NCAA don't have that particular pressure to live up to Christian principles, even if their coach is barely concealed preacher-wannabe. If pressure comes to clean up a situation like this one, it comes mostly through threat of legal action. (Sadly, the desire to do right by the university's female students doesn't really seem to register at most universities.)

So no, I'm not looking for any kind of culture change from this situation, outside of Baylor at minimum. As for Baylor itself only time will tell.

*Some commentary after the fact has suggested that Briles saw himself as a guarantor of second chances, for players who had gotten into trouble at other schools. Well, if you're going to give out second chances, you are obligated to put in place a system of oversight to make sure those second chances don't end up bringing harm or assault to others. If you don't, your gracious second chance starts to look awfully opportunistic. There is zero evidence that any such oversight was ever put in place in these cases. 

**I'm going to forego the wide-open opportunity for schadenfreude that the university's president, a man who made his reputation zealously pursuing what he saw as a sexual misdeed, is now losing his job over failing to pursue charges of sexual assault at all. At least I'm mostly going to forego it.

Where this becomes challenging for us is in the conflict between Baylor's much-proclaimed Christian identity and its increasing desire for success in the cutthroat world of college football. What had looked like a great story rapidly denegerated into a story of soul-selling, looking the other way in the face of one of the most vile and unchristian, not to mention criminal, things that one human being can do to another. Whether Baylor's football team will ever regain its lofty heights is pretty doubtful. What Baylor would be willing to do in order to get there, we shall see.

I don't, despite the title of this blog, hold to the notion that football (or any other sport) is a religion. I am beginning to wonder, however, if sport is a belief system. And I am beginning to wonder if that belief system is at all compatible with the following of Christ that is the call of any self-proclaimed Christian. (And yes, this does bear implications for the usual subject of this blog. We'll get there.) On this, I am less optimistic. And while football may be the place where the belief system of sport and the Christian walk are most in conflict, I fear what it may mean for the relation of the Christ-follower and the big-time sport that so fills up the culture in which we live.

An image from Baylor's website.

Spectacle, the NFL draft, and Johnny Manziel

With the NFL Draft bearing down like an out-of-control freight train upon the American consciousness, it seems like a good time to talk about spectacle.

Oh, and Johnny Manziel too.

The NFL has, to its credit if you believe it's a good thing, done a pretty amazing job of turning its off-season into a spectacle almost equal to that of the season itself. (Reminder: the subject of spectacle and its relationship to the ongoing concern of this blog was introduced in the previous post.) This itself is not necessarily unique to the NFL, but what is particularly of interest is how much of this off-season spectacle revolves around young men who have played absolutely zero snaps in the league as of yet.

Major League Baseball has long enjoyed an offseason spectacle of sorts, so old and traditional that it earned itself a nickname -- the "hot stove league" -- that has long outlived the source of the name. That bit of spectacle revolves around the trading or potential trading of players and, in more recent years, the signing or potential signing of free agent players. As with much of baseball, the hot stove season unfolds in a relatively leisurely fashion, with occasional spasms of activity around certain off-season markers such as the Winter Meetings or general managers meetings in which trades were often culminated in the past. But again, the emphasis is on players who have established themselves and in some cases are about to get obscenely rich. What the NFL has done is make an all-consuming spectacle of a sequence of events, from NFL scouting combine to the draft itself, out of players entering the league, rather than familiar faces in the league.

Of course, it helps that the players are not exactly unknown. Thanks to the popularity of college football, the league doesn't have to introduce these wannabe-NFL players from nowhere -- in many cases these guys are pretty familiar already. On the other hand, many of the players who become "stars" in the draft -- early draft choices, the number one pick, and so forth -- are not necessarily the ones who became most famous in the NCAA. Really, how much did you follow Carson Wentz's career (North Dakota people, put your hands down) before he became a potential #1 or #2 pick? And when a team settles on an offensive lineman for their draft pick, that player isn't going to be as famous as the Heisman Trophy winner.

No matter. First the combine -- a glorified workout session -- leading to the final frenzied push to the draft itself. People now make actual careers out of projecting the draft's results. (Looking at you, Mel Kiper.) What used to be a Saturday afternoon affair has now blown up into a three-day event, although how many people actually stick around for the sixth and seventh rounds isn't necessarily clear.

NOTE: yes, the NBA does a similar thing with its draft, although it's only two rounds and contained in one evening, and there's nothing like the NFL combine. Also, the number of international players that get drafted in that league require a bit of introduction that even the most obscure o-lineman doesn't on Draft Day. 

And yes, there was even a Kevin Costner movie about the NFL draft, at least nominally. (At least it didn't wipe out as badly as the FIFA movie.)

There's a reason I'm alluding to the NFL Draft here, in a blog that concerns itself most frequently with the traumatic effect of the game of football on some substantial chunk of its players. It is at the draft, and during the combine and process leading up to it, that the commodification of the athlete is most clearly on display.

The combine is, frankly, a meat market. The appeal of a bunch of post-college guys standing around in their tighty-whities getting measured and poked and prodded escapes me. At least the potential draftees get to put on clothes before they go out on the field in Indianapolis and run and jump and throw or catch footballs, while Important Men with stopwatches stand around and look important and measure things.

From there NFL scouts will also make visits to various college campuses for "pro days," in which players who for whatever reason don't get to the combine are measured and commodified. Meanwhile the Kipers of the world issue weekly updates about Who Will Be Drafted When, with the breathless urgency of the live updates from Baghdad during one Iraq war or another. It will get louder and more breathless until this weekend.

At the draft itself a select pool of likely high draftees is invited to demonstrate their fashion sense, or lack thereof, while sometimes getting phone calls and otherwise waiting for their names to be called, to find out which franchise controls their fate and how much money they will or won't make. They might get interviewed, or filmed hugging their weeping mother or who knows what. They'll walk to the podium, endure a handshake from Roger Goodell, hold up a replica jersey or ball cap, and be shuffled off to be discussed endlessly.

ESPN or the NFL Network will try to convince you that these players are Real People, with lives and families and interests outside of football. This is less untrue than it is irrelevant. What matters most, what matters at all from this point forward is their value or usefulness to the franchise that drafted them. If it doesn't work out for the team, well, remember that NFL contracts, aside from signing bonuses, are not guaranteed.

And even that human-interest angle is, in the end, part of the spectacle. One would think we were choosing our representatives to defend Earth in some kind of interplanetary battle royale.

Perhaps the most revealing spectacle, one that isn't necessarily going to happen at every draft but happens just often enough, is the Player Who Slides Down The Draft Board. This is usually a fairly famous collegian (the spectacle works best if it's a quarterback) expected to be drafted pretty high, who instead gets passed over by team after team until suddenly we're down around the 20s in picks and he's the only guy left in the green room. This becomes a spectacle rather like that of vultures circling a wounded animal. What went wrong? Why is everybody passing on him? What ugly secret do these teams know about him? It gets pretty grotesque, really, until some team finally pulls the trigger and drafts the kid.

This happened to Aaron Rodgers eleven years ago, and he turned out okay. He fell all the way to the 24th pick in the first round of that draft before the Green Bay Packers selected him. He had to wait a few years for Brett Favre to clear out, but things have turned out pretty well for Rodgers, and his draft slippage only comes up to demonstrate, as here, that it didn't hurt his career so much.

This also happened to Johnny Manziel.

You may remember two years ago that Manziel, carrying the monicker "Johnny Football" and a reputation towards recklessness both on and off the field, tumbled through the first round before being drafted 22nd by the Cleveland Browns.

Now Aaron Rodgers and Johnny Manziel are extremely different people. Rodgers has, for one thing, a life beyond football, or perhaps more accurately an awareness of how to leverage his football fame for things beyond football, and generally seems a level-headed sort. These are not words that fit well with Manziel. Further, Rodgers slid into possibly the best possible football situation for him, while Manziel slid into the dumpster fire that is the Cleveland Browns.

Manziel was pretty well-known as a party animal when drafted. It couldn't have been a surprise that he didn't immediately transform into a choir boy upon being drafted. Even so, his two-year descent from hope of the franchise to outcast is pretty striking.

The troubling possibility I can't escape is that Johnny Manziel, the spectacle, was more useful to football than Johnny Manziel, the football player, at least until he started hitting his girlfriend. Until he invited the ugly spectacle of Ray Rice back into fans' memories, the screwup, the struggle to do anything useful on the field while continuing to be a party boy off it, was a useful storyline. The Browns can't really be any more embarrassed than they usually are, and they get to cut Manziel loose, sign Robert Griffin III, and be in line to draft the aforementioned Carson Wentz, who doesn't initially look like that much of a party boy. The NFL gets to pat itself on the back for maneuvering an abuser out of the way.

The spectacle serves to keep all eyes on the league. A quiet offseason doesn't serve a league that thinks $25 billion (yes, billion) in annual profits is its natural right. Keeping enough eyes bedazzled to sustain a whole network and a daily ESPN show all year long is paramount, not to mention selling jerseys and all that stuff.

In a league where commodification and spectacle and distraction are as paramount as all this, would you really trust the higher-ups to give a damn about the health of your brain, not to mention the rest of your body?

Not if that brain is working, you wouldn't.

Would you also expect the fans who buy all the stuff, who shout obscenities at you before you're even drafted, who spew bile anonymously on sports radio and internet comment sections, to have your back?

Yeah, right.

So if the DeAndre Levys of the world are taking their own health into their own hands, it is only because it has become clear to them that they are the only ones who will.

The number of ways the NFL Draft is a disturbing spectacle would require an entire blog even to begin to express its breadth and depth.

Lawrence Phillips

It may have escaped notice in the broader culture this week, what with the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman, among what seems to be too many others (even in the sports world the passing of one of the greats who straddled the Negro Leagues and MLB, Monte Irvin, made headlines), but Lawrence Phillips died this week. In prison. Apparently by suicide.

It would be hard to avoid wondering, almost by reflex, if his life had any chance of ending any other way.

Phillips came to fame as a powerful running back at the University of Nebraska, you might recall. He starred for the Cornhuskers in 1994 as they won a national championship (such as it was at the time), but only played two games in 1995 before being suspended from the team due to an assault against girlfriend Kate McEwen, a Nebraska basketball player at the time. Coach Tom Osborne went against his straight-arrow reputation by reinstating Phillips later that season on the premise that without football, Phillips would never be able to conquer his personal demons. More on that later.

After his junior year Phillips entered the NFL draft and was taken by the St. Louis Rams (as they were then), who gave up Jerome Bettis to make room to take him (think they might like that move back?). Phillips played only four years in the NFL, plus some time in Europe and Canada, punctuated by more run-ins with the law, before washing out of professional football.

At the time of his death Phillips was serving a thirty-one-year prison term for assault with a deadly weapon (a car) as well as domestic violence. He had recently been labeled a suspect in the murder of his cellmate and charged with murder in September. A number of other violent episodes were scattered across his lifetime.

It seems that Phillips -- Ray Rice without video -- should not pass from the scene unremarked, but it's almost impossible to know where to start.

1. As football coach (and also assistant athletic director), Osborne made the choice to reinstate Phillips only a short time after he had been suspended. As assistant athletic director, one wonders how Osborne considered his responsibility for the athlete who was dragged down a flight of stairs.

2. ESPN columnist Ivan Maisel reconsiders the Phillips incident at Nebraska and the fired-up reaction (his own included) to Osborne's reinstatement at the time. (Here's one example of that fired-up reaction.) I don't quite understand Maisel's current rationalization of now understanding why Osborne didn't "take the easy way out". Exactly what signs were there that football was of any aid in reining Phillips's demons? And how appropriate is it to sacrifice one athlete to redeem another? In retrospect it seems that Osborne did take the easy way out.

3. This points towards something that needs to be said about not just football, but any sport. Sports are not magic. Phillips's demons were not going to be controlled by playing football, or by any other sport. The impulse to "rescue" a troubled young athlete is understandable and even laudable, but the degree to which others are damaged by that rescue attempt is deeply problematic. Phillips didn't commit a victimless crime. Very few people seemed to remember that at the time, and it's not always clear that we're any better about that today when an athlete is implicated in a crime.

4. If you're interested in what it's like to be in one of the severely overcrowded prisons in the USA, or California in particular, Phillips wrote a series of letters to former coaches which provide some insight.

5. Phillips's brain will be donated for study at Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy  Program. This is the program that has reported findings of CTE in 88 of 92 brains of former football players (most recently this unfortunate soul). You might be shocked to hear that this actually concerns me. If Phillips was suffering from CTE it does need to be established. And one of the acknowledged potential effects of CTE is the kind of violent mood swings that may have led to violence in some other former players who were later found to have CTE (Paul Oliver and Jovan Belcher come to mind, but they are hardly the only examples). It's going to be a challenge to make a definitive link between CTE and violent behavior, but it won't be for lack of potential case studies. Still, where is the dividing line between Lawrence Phillips, man who made a whole heap of horrible choices, and Lawrence Phillips, (potential) CTE victim (if that diagnosis should eventually be made)? Does this further complicate evaluating how Phillips's behavior was handled over the course of his career?

Regrettably, a sad and ugly story still has the potential to get sadder and uglier.

Ryan Freel and the sorting point

I have admitted, in this space and others, that I can't really watch football anymore.  I just can't.  I keep up, to some degree, and I know that my Ph.D. alma mater is in the alleged national championship game for college football's Football Bowl Subdivision, and that the NFL franchise in the nation's capital is having a rotten year, but actually sitting and watching a game is beyond me at this point, when all I can do is wonder how many years that hit took off a player's memory or cognitive function.

I have also admitted, in this space and others, that I'm a big baseball fan.

Therefore, specifically because I know my own biases, I am compelled to devote this column to the first confirmed case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a Major League Baseball player.

Ryan Freel was a utility player.  He played for several teams, the Cincinnati Reds for six years and spent shorter terms with the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, and Kansas City Royals.  According to his own account, he suffered "nine or ten" concussions across the course of his career, from being hit in the head by pitches or other thrown balls, from collisions with opponents, teammates, bases, walls, and all sorts of other things.  A sentence from the ESPN.com report linked above offers a pretty good description:

Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform." 

He was the prototypical "scrappy" player, one who didn't necessarily have the natural gifts of other players but hustled relentlessly and played with reckless abandon, without regard for his own body -- a phrase which rings eerily prescient now, after Freel committed suicide one year ago Sunday (December 22).

Like so many football players after their careers ended, Freel's life after baseball was increasingly consumed, apparently, with symptoms like headaches, loss of attention or short-term memory, and swings from depression to explosive emotion, not to mention a family increasingly wondering what had happened to their son, husband, father.

Freel is somewhat of an atypical case for baseball.  While players hit in the head by pitched balls can and do suffer concussions -- Justin Morneau (now of the Colorado Rockies), Brian Roberts (just signed by the New York Yankees after years with the Orioles) and Corey Koskie (once of the Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and Milwaukee Brewers) are examples of players whose careers were derailed by concussion-related symptoms -- most of baseball's concussion-sufferers have been catchers.  Possibly the most well-known example is Mike Matheny, who actually had to retire from baseball due to ongoing symptoms.   Matheny may also offer some hope; he is now manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, taking that job five years after his retirement, and having pretty respectable success in it (the Cards made it to the World Series this year, in case you've forgotten).  Possibly the highest-profile catcher to see his career affected by concussion symptoms is Joe Mauer, the All-Star catcher of the Minnesota Twins, who is moving to first base next season (the position occupied by Justin Morneau, when health allowed, until he was traded this past season) in hopes of avoiding any more concussions.

Catchers are easily put in the most situations that might lead to concussions and their complications.  In addition to the risks any batter faces of taking a pitch to the head (rare, and frowned upon), catchers also face particular risks associated with the position they play.  When a fastball upwards of 90 mph (sometimes even 100 mph or more) tips just slightly off the bat of a major-league hitter, it is physically impossible for a catcher to react quickly enough to keep the ball from slamming into his face mask or helmet, if that's where it's headed.  More rarely, the end of a hitter's swing just might slam the bat into the catcher's helmet.  These are not intentional; they happen nonetheless.

More dubious is the home-plate collision.  If a runner happens to be approaching home plate at about the same time a throw is reaching the catcher in an attempt to get that runner out, a collision is a frequent result.  Sometimes a catcher is attempting to block the runner from the plate even though the ball hasn't arrived yet, sometimes the runner is attempting to knock the ball loose from the catcher's mitt or hand.  Either way, the result is typically the most violent play in baseball (though a few accidental collisions between fielders come close at times).  All the padding in the world can't necessarily stop the catcher from sustaining a head injury in that situation.

Of course, Major League Baseball, like its companion league the NFL, has taken a head-in-sand approach to the issue, moving to deny any responsibility for such injuries and claim that the problem is a distinctly minor . . .  .

Wait, what?  Actually (and amazingly), MLB has done quite the opposite.

Even before the results of the tests on Ryan Freel's brain were announced, MLB had already taken steps to cut out one of the major contributors to baseball head injury; the elimination of those home-plate collisions.  Already MLB had instituted a seven-day disabled list specifically for head injuries -- an opportunity for a player to recover without missing more time than might be necessary if the problem is diagnosed quickly and accurately.

This is frankly mind-blowing.  The same league that turned a blind eye to drug scandals in the 1980s and performance-enhancing drug use in the 1990s is actually being shockingly proactive.  MLB and its owners can be profoundly corrupt, whether it comes in the form of holding municipalities up for glossy new stadiums or ignoring some of the horrifying practices involved in the development and signing of baseball players from the Caribbean region.  In this case, though, there seems to be genuine sorrow when a player like Matheny has to retire, a sorrow which in this case seems to be prompting genuine and surprising willingness to address the problem, even if the rules of the game are affected.



One of my least favorite parables in the Gospels is the so-called parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25:31-46.  It is probably familiar to most folks with much church experience at all; the nations are gathered before the Son of Man, who separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, sheep to the right and goats to the left.  The Son of Man then praises those on the right (who are now not sheep but "the righteous") for their responses to him when he was in need; feeding the hungry, clothing those with no clothes, visiting the sick or imprisoned.  Those on the left, the "accursed," are upbraided and even cast away, for exactly their failure to do those things the righteous did.  In each case, the rationale is offered that what you did to "the least of these," you did to Christ.

To me, what has lately jumped out at me about this passage (a troublesome one to me and others) is that, even as a sorting is portrayed at the beginning of the story, the "righteous" and the "accursed" had actually "sorted" themselves well before coming before Christ, by their actions towards those they encountered in need.  They fed hungry people or didn't.  How we respond to needs, to crises, to harms, to injustices in the world matters.  Those responses reveal us.  Further, they shape us -- ignoring one injustice or one need makes it easier to ignore the next one.

Grantland writer Brian Phillips penned a column this week pointing towards the particular quality of the sporting year 2013 as one in which the fan's increasing and unavoidable awareness of the corruptions of sports (the CTE horrors of the NFL being only one of many addressed) somehow failed to intersect or connect with the sports watching experience.  Baseball had a frankly amazing season, even as the Biogenesis scandal unfolded; the NFL continues to thrive even as the increasing tide of CTE stories vies with murder, bullying, and who knows what else conspire to stain the sport; worldwide soccer is as huge as ever even as it becomes clear that next year's World Cup will take place in a deeply dysfunctional (and yes, fatal) atmosphere.  Somehow fans simply keep the two separate.  Fans do care, Phillips claims, about CTE and match-fixing and murders and suicides and murder-suicides, but kept watching as if unaffected.

To which I have to ask, how long?  How long can the two be held apart from one another?  How long can the two go on, coexisting, before the fan sorts himself or herself in among the sheep or goats?  Another scripture, Matthew 6:24, points out that serving two masters doesn't work out so well.  You end up serving one or the other.

Eventually a fan will serve one master or another; his or her attentions (and dollars, the stuff that actually hits sporting leagues or players where it hurts) will turn away from unrepentant exploitation in sports towards other pursuits, or he or she will keep on watching, less and less fazed by the mounting toll in bodies or brains or children in poverty in the shadow of flashy new stadiums.

I can't help but wonder if we -- not just the NFL or MLB or FIFA or whatever league you care to name, but we -- the people who put down the money to buy tickets or subscribe to cable to get ESPN in its various guises, or buy the merchandise or devote eight Sundays or six or seven Saturdays to tailgating, who buy product X because King James endorses it instead of product Y endorsed by Kobe Bryant, we -- are at a sorting point, slowly aligning ourselves with the sheep or the goats when it comes to the excesses and the abuses that are intricately bound up in the sports-fan experience.

This may require people of faith to make a leap many are not willing to make: to realize that one who may be an exploiter in one circumstance may well be the exploited in another.  For example: male athletes have, to put it mildly, a reputation as being sexually active, taking on groupies for pleasure (witness the claims that the late Wilt Chamberlain bedded at least 2,000 women in his lifetime).  An athlete who buys a prostitute? Clearly not paying attention to the women waiting in the hotel lobby.  By no means does every athlete do so, but many do.  When you're on the road, have plenty of money to blow, and plenty of women to enjoy, it's easy to do both.

Exploitative behavior?  Sure.  But does that make the athlete any less the exploited party when, after years of his league telling him concussions were no big deal, his brain ends up on an examining table in Boston or Pittsburgh?  I don't think so.  What are those millions of dollars (if they haven't been squandered by then) worth in that case?

Athletes are at a sorting point, too.  Are NFL or NCAA players going to stand by and continue to participate in their own brain damage?  Just how much are major-league baseball players willing to pump themselves full of chemicals in pursuit of a competitive advantage?

The tricky part is, one of the options requires an active choice.  You have to choose to walk away from your sporting passions, or at least to scream like Howard Beale in Network.  If you don't, you eventually go numb.  Of course, you can choose to let the corruptions pass unobserved, and go numb voluntarily.

Either way, you will go numb, eventually, unless you choose not to.

Way more important than what?

A headlines roundup/linkfest in rant form:

/rant begins/

Back in the first entry on this blog I made reference to the saying back where I come from, "Football ain't a religion.  It's way more important than that," from which this blog takes its name.

Of late I find myself wondering about sports, "Way more important than what?"

The headlines have asked the question: more important than having a functional mind and body when your playing days are over?

More important than getting through high school?

More important than getting out of a game alive, even if you're not playing?

More important than having a functional country?

More important than being yourself?

More important than not being jerks to a people who've already experienced plenty of jerkishness?

More important than basic functional decency to loyal (and successful) people?

More important than basically getting legal justice right? (Don't assume I'm on "your side" here.  I think all sides have royally f***ed this one up, pun intended.)

More important than, basically, life?


/rant ends/

/for now/