Sports "curses" and sports belief systems

I could easily move on from last week's post, but since the two most "cursed" teams in the playoffs are the ones who made it to the World Series that starts tonight, it seems worth the effort to break down how the idea of cursed teams functions within the belief systems of sports that were the subject of last week's post.

In case you've been under a rock for the last few days, the Chicago Cubs are in the World Series for the first time since 1945, and looking to win their first Series since 1908 (not a misprint), which is, of course, a drought of 108 years. Their counterparts in Cleveland, in the meantime, have not won a World Series since 1948, and though they have been to the World Series a few times since then, those trips to the Series were painful enough to suggest "cursedness" for some more than long-term absence from the Series (a la the Cubs). They were the victims of Willie Mays's catch (i.e. "The Catch") in 1954, they were on the wrong end of Atlanta's only World Series win in that run during the 1990s, and were within an inning of winning it all in 1997 only to watch Jose Mesa blow a save to the then-Florida Marlins. It seems fair to say that Cleveland fans have known their share of baseball-propelled grief.

Popular culture has in fact used both of these long droughts for movie fodder. It takes a kid with a surgery-enhanced arm to rescue Chicago in Rookie of the Year, while Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen and others did the trick in Major League and its lesser sequel. So that part's a draw, I guess. The celebrity-endorsement battle goes decisively to Chicago, however, as the likes of Bill Murray and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam have been regular presences in Wrigley Field, and the ancient stadium (which still didn't exist when last the Cubs won the Series) and the long lack of success have become oddly fashionable in recent years.

So anyway, back to the idea of curses. The story goes that in that 1945 Series the Cubs declined admission to a man's billy goat, supposedly prompting said man to pronounce a curse on the team, which either said the Cubs would never get to the Series again (in which case it is now broken), or would never win again (yet to be determined). The incident happened in game four of that series, and though the Cubs lost that game, they did win one more game in the Series, so it doesn't seem as though the curse was effective immediately.

Ridiculous as the whole thing sounds (and is), it persisted as good newspaper fodder, although "persisted" might not be the best word. The team went 82-71 in 1946, but didn't have another winning record until 1963. Is that cursed, or just bad? It seems the "curse" language didn't really kick in until 1969, when the team got out to a big lead in the National League East only to collapse and lose the division to the New York "Miracle Mets." Their next actual playoff appearance was not until 1984, when the team achieved the then-unprecedented feat of blowing a 2-0 lead in the National League Championship Series, losing three straight to the San Diego Padres (with a misplay by Leon Durham being magnified in the malaise).

A handful of other unsuccessful playoff appearances followed, with the next major flareup of curse talk coming in 2003. Holding a 3-1 lead against the Marlins, and with lots of talk about curse-busting in the air, the Cubs lost to Josh Beckett but still came home needing only one win to get to the Series.

*Full disclosure: I was at game four in Miami in 2003, which the Cubs won handily to take that 3-1 lead. On my way out of the park with my father-in-law, we were passed by numerous Cubs fans chanting "bring on the Yankees!" At that point I lost all respect for Cubs fans and would have been happy had they never made it to the Series again, and would not be bothered if they didn't win. Don't presume, or you deserve whatever sports suffering you get. (See, even I have my belief systems about sports.)

Game six offered for many the ultimate "curse event": a foul ball into the stands, which Cubs OF Moises Alou attempted to catch, instead glanced off an unfortunate fan. How that explains how the team suddenly gave up eight runs in the inning is beyond me.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, bad teams were frequently the norm as well, with that 1954 WS loss followed by its own stretch of bad teams, with occasional winning records and no playoffs until that 1995 event.

Based on this admittedly limited survey, curse talk (in these baseball cases at least) seem to serve a few functions:

1) covering for a long stretch of losing baseball, although not necessarily immediately. It seems to kick in only when said sad-sack team comes close to winning. The Cleveland version of a curse didn't even get invented until after 1960, when the team traded popular and successful Rocky Colavito. While the talk might have local currency, it takes the approach of success for it to go national.

2) somehow filling an apparent need for a better story than "this team was bad for a really long time and now they're good but still can't win it all."

3) avoiding blaming the team for its failures.

This is the vexing part to me. The Kansas City Royals weren't thought of as "cursed" in their thirty-year gap between World Series wins; they were just bad. Nobody has invented curses for the Padres (established 1969) or Houston Astros (1962), who have never won the World Series, or the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals (1969) or Seattle Mariners (1977), who have never even been. Yet a colorful if highly anecdotal story about a goat gets to explain a century of un-success in Chicago.

I wonder if curses are just a particularly maddening manifestation of the "my team, right or wrong" mentality. My team can't be this bad; something else must be to blame. If my team is this bad, does that mean I'm bad too? If you are forced to accept that your team is bad, or that it plays badly when it gets to the playoffs, then your sports belief system is challenged, and that's the one unacceptable thing for a sports fan to contemplate.

Really, I promise you, rational people, people who act and think intelligently and rationally and ethically in every other part of their lives, absolutely fall into this mindset when it comes to their team. It's beyond the similar mindset of blaming umpires or referees for bad calls; it starts to veer into talk of conspiracy theories and "rigged" contests at worst (the NBA seems most prone to the latter talk, though). (And in case you're wondering, yes, I do speak from experience.)

It gets a little ugly, and is bad enough to witness in sports. Just imagine how nasty it would be if that mindset crept into our lives outside baseball, or sports in general. Like, say, in religion. Or politics.

Just imagine, indeed.

At least one cycle of curse-talk will end with this series, thank the Lord.

Maybe it *is* a religion...

This one was too much to pass up...

You may have noticed in different news outlets (or on my social media feeds if you follow those) an amusing-looking story about a course offering at Presbyterian College, a small (yes, Presbyterian) school in a small South Carolina town, on a timely subject: The Religion of SEC Football.

It's an elective course, team-taught by professors in history and English who both identify as intense fans of schools in the Southeastern Conference. The course description is fairly descriptive:

Woo Pig Sooie!? Roll Tide!? Go Cocks!? What is it about college football that turns otherwise sane people into raving lunatics? Why is it that each fall millions of people schedule their lives around SEC football, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for RV’s and tailgating for days prior to a game? Why do fans often hate another school — such as the ‘Bama fan who poisoned 130-year old trees at Auburn? This class will attempt to answer these sorts of questions by exploring the ‘religion’ of Southeastern Conference football and how each of us fit into that faith.

Sounds like fun, I guess.

In truth, the course is not new. It was first offered back in 2003, and has been offered "periodically" ever since. For whatever reason, this was the year that nationwide publicity came upon the class. It's a fairly interesting coincidence of timing, as Presbyterian's football team is making its biannual pilgrimage to serve as a sacrificial lamb for an SEC school, in this case the University of Florida, later this season. (Tickets are available.)

Of course, PC (as it's sometimes called) has a bit of experience as a sacrificial lamb. The school's athletic programs moved into NCAA Division I in 2007. The football team plays in the Football Championship Subdivision (what used to be called I-AA), in the Big South conference, but like many schools on that level it sells itself out to big-time programs as, in essence, cannon fodder. The gain in such a sacrifice, of course, is a paycheck, one that provides a substantial chunk of the athletic budget for a school of PC's size. (Please divest yourself of any fantasy you might hold about athletic revenue having any beneficial impact on the school's academic programs. Boosters essentially have to be bribed into supporting anything academic.)

I can only wonder what the benefit is beyond the paycheck. Partly as a result of their paycheck pursuits (they also travel to play Central Michigan of the Mid-American Conference), PC only has four home football games this year. If the point of such a move in the athletic department has anything to do with the enhancement of campus life, four home games seems a pretty meager return. For what it's worth, the Blue Hose (yep, that's the nickname) basketball program has known some bumps along the way in its Division I journey (with no subdivision to cover itself in that sport) but at least they got to play half their regular-season games at home last season.

In short, it might be worth some professor's time to develop a course on PC's own athletic journey and what, if any, benefit it has brought to the university as a whole. But for now, back to the class subject at hand, the "religion" of SEC football.

You might be expecting this blog to jump in feet-first. And yes, this blog would normally not pass up a chance to do so. But honestly, I can't quite get that excited by it.

Yes, there's a ton of excess in SEC fanship. The anecdotes related in the larger article above are all sufficient evidence of that -- the parents who blew off their daughter's wedding because it conflicted with a 'Bama game, the 'Bama guy who poisoned the Auburn trees, the PC professor who floated to his wife the idea of naming their child Zorback (as in Ra-Zorback) (I'm guessing he was at least joking somewhat, but it really did happen to someone...). It's comical, or it would be if it weren't so sad.

But such idolatry (and that's what is, well beyond mere "zealotry" as called in one of the articles) is hardly restricted to the SEC, is it?

The conference has its own network, sure, but in this they followed the lead of the Big Ten Eleven Fourteen Whatever.

Despite the antics of certain church-attendance-enforcing head coaches/violators of the Constitution, the SEC doesn't actually engage in the direct mixing of their athletic programs with religious missions (looking at you, Notre Dame, BYU; please sit down, Baylor).

Is the SEC egregiously bad about worshiping its teams, or even its own conference reputation? Yes. But you don't have to be in the SEC to have a cultish following.

Are they that much worse than, say, the Big Whatever, the Other Big Twelve Ten Whatever, the ACC, or the Pac-10 Whatever? I don't know that they are. And does it even compare to the idolatry of the NFL, the league which (as one of the better lines from Concussion puts it) now owns the day of the week that used to belong to the church?

And that probably isn't the worst part. The worst part, beyond the idolatry of any individual team or conference, is the inherent, but much less questioned, idolatry of the sport itself -- an idolatry that, as regular readers of this blog will guess I believe, claims its own physical sacrifices regularly.

When somebody develops an academic course that tackles that particular worship, then I'll pay more attention.

Circle Nov. 19 on your calendar...

Playing games after Orlando

One "game memory" that is still pretty strong me is a memory of the absence of games.

This was, as some of you might remember, the week following September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). Major League Baseball was most affected, with a week's worth of games having to be postponed and rescheduled, resulting in baseball's first World Series to stretch into November. College football and the NFL ended up missing a week of games themselves, but that only amounted to one game in those sports. This was of course necessitated by the grounding of air travel in the US; indeed many of those MLB teams had a challenge getting home from the road trips on which they were engaged at the time.

I have the distinct memory, by about Friday of that week, deeply regretting that there was no game to which to go. Mind you, I was living in Tallahassee at the time, and the closest team, the Tampa Bay (Devil, at the time) Rays, were more than five hours away (and they were closer than the Atlanta Braves; I had actually measured this in the only way that made sense to me, by going to games in both places and comparing the distances). Nonetheless, that Friday night, even as I knew it was a practical impossibility, I ached for it. I ached for it, even as I was somewhat ashamed for doing so.

There was, as best as I could comprehend it, a desperate need to be among other people in a way that had even the tiniest tinge of normal to it. The week of course was filled with many different types of gatherings at churches and city halls and capitals and courthouses and all manner of other public places. But the very point of such gatherings was their not-normal-ness. The very point was the abnormality and the mind-numbing and mind-blowing horror of what had happened.

Games did resume, eventually, and while there were memorials and ceremonies at the "first game back" at minimum (and particularly pronounced ones at the first games back for the New York teams, the Mets first and then the Yankees), there was still baseball. The rules of the game were still the same. The interruption of baseball ritual by the displacement of the seventh-inning stretch with "God Bless America" (a disruption that seems to be receding somewhat but has long overstayed its appropriateness) marred the longed-for normality of a ballgame, but it was still baseball, gosh darn it.

There aren't many kinds of disruptions that can get games called off. (Whether or not this is a good thing is a discussion that is needed at some point, but this isn't the night.) A riot in a city can get that city's teams to postpone or move games, and natural disasters can sometimes cause cancellations or relocations (the Florida teams can get put off by hurricanes, as can teams in Houston, and earthquakes have been known to cause cancellations and postponements in California).

Our current situation is one in which a crime or tragedy with nationwide repercussions has no effect on the scheduling of games, but has a major effect on how said event is carried out, locally for certain and nationally in some cases. The latest instance of this is the set of responses to the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event with definite national repercussions and reverberations but one most intensely felt in central Florida.

Though I don't know for certain (I really cannot watch every game, after all), the standard response that I would guess happened pretty much everywhere was the traditional moment of silence. That could be done, and I'd guess was done at baseball games on that Sunday, probably at the next game of the NBA Finals (that I did not get to see), and probably at a number of minor-league baseball games as well. The Orlando Magic, the city's NBA franchise, was no longer playing; that left local commemorations to Orlando City SC, the city's MLS club; Orlando Pride, their new team in the Women's Professional Soccer League; and to a secondary degree the Tampa Bay Rays; obviously they're not in Orlando, but they are the closest MLB team and it's not a crazy drive. (The Pride were away last weekend; their next home game is Thursday night.)

The Rays, to a degree, had the first chance, and coincidentally Friday night's game had already been planned as a "Pride Night"; thus the team had a ready-made vehicle for recognizing and honoring the families of the victims, and stepped up their efforts pretty effectively, it would seem; Friday night's game was a sellout. Do not underestimate the significance of this; the Rays do not get sellouts, outside of Opening Day, and sometimes not even then. Orlando City followed the next night with their own effective commemorations (another thing that just doesn't happen: a game stoppage at the 49th minute as a moment of silence was observed). The city's franchises in the Arena Football League and the East Coast Hockey League also held commemorations at their immediate next games.

On the national level perhaps the most effective commemoration, subtle but unmistakable, occurred last Thursday night, during the US Men's national team's match against Ecuador; team captain Michael Bradley took the field with his more typical captain's armband replaced with a rainbow-colored armband with the logo #OneNation emblazoned on it. The USMNT and MLS (which had been on a break for the Copa America Centenario tournament in which the USMNT was playing) had hit the airwaves with video messages of support for Orlando and the victims' families (at least one prominently featuring among its voices Sporting Kansas City's and USMNT's Graham Zusi, an Orlando native).

These commemorations are, sadly, in line with a pattern that has had the tragic opportunity to become well-established.

I really don't make any claim that any of this is wrong in any way. Sadly, with such tragedies allowed to be routine, it's only going to become an even more well-established pattern. And particularly on the local level, I really don't think a team can do any less, nor should they do so.

There is one thing I still have to caution against, though. It is a caution similar to the one expressed here, against thinking that sports can fix us. Sports might be a tool to do so, but can't do the job.

As sports can't fix us, neither can sports heal us.

Earlier today Richard Lapchick contributed this column to ESPN.com. Lapchick is no ordinary ESPN foof; he has a rather formidable title and role as the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida, and the director of UCF's Institute For Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (For the Florida geography-impaired, UCF is in Orlando.) You might have heard of that Institute for its reports on such things as graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, or its "report cards" on racial and gender hiring in Major League Baseball and other big-time sports programs. Being able to be critical of big-time sports and its ethical shortfalls is part of his job.

Side note: I can't think of many things that would entice me to leave my current vocation, but if a Christian-affiliated college, university, seminary, or divinity school were ever to create that kind of institute ... I'd at least have to think about it.

Being based in Orlando, Lapchick has had a front-row seat to the city's response to the Pulse attack and to the reactions of its sports franchises in particular (he acknowledges being at both the Rays game and the Orlando City match in the article, and even speaking to Orlando City's squad last Friday). Most of what Lapchick has to say in the article I have no problem with, but there is one sentence that just can't go unchallenged:

Sports can heal and unite and can change society forever.

Forever? Really?

If you followed that link earlier you know I already have a problem with the notion that Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier didn't heal anything. It changed the US forever, yes. It opened eyes, sure. It changed many Americans, no doubt. But let us be blunt: does the United States look like a healed country to you in terms of racial relations?

Similarly, while Billie Jean King made an undeniable difference for women in sports, it would be a major stretch to suggest that women in sports have anything like equality with their male counterparts (for one example, the US Women's National Team in soccer is now embroiled in multiple legal proceedings against the US Soccer Federation over unequal pay, even though the women are vastly more successful than their male counterparts). For that matter, the United States doesn't look all that much like a healed country in terms of gender relations either.

Sporting events can be moments of respite or relief, which can be a part of a healing process. You can't grieve 24/7, and if a communal experience of catharsis in a sporting event can provide that brief period of relief or respite, all to the good.

But healing, people of faith or no faith should know, doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It is a process that takes time, and deep engagement with the source of the grief. It isn't about "getting back to normal," because that "normal" is never coming back. Some new place becomes "normal," but it's a "normal" that will never forget the attack in this case.

The survivors of the Pulse attack, or the family members and loved ones of the victims, did not wake up "healed" on Sunday because the Rays and Orlando City played games on Friday and Saturday, and they were invited. They may have awakened to the realization that many more people cared for them and empathized with them and maybe even grieved for them, felt their pain or shared their sorrow to some small degree. They may have even been able to sleep for the first time in days, who knows? But the process of healing is still only just beginning for them. And if those games and the outpouring of care and affection they showed provided even just a little bit of that relief and respite, all to the good.

But let's not put the words "heal" and "forever" together here. There are just as many homophobic people around as there were before the Pulse murders. That particular hatred is not going to end because of a couple of sporting events, any more than racism was eradicated by sporting events in the wake of the Charleston church shooting last year, or by Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron. Sport simply isn't that powerful.

What it can do is still pretty amazing in the face of such shock and grief. Sporting events are still places where people who wouldn't even give each other the time of day elsewhere are united in common purpose. That's almost church in some ways (or a more successful example of what church would hope to do, maybe?).

Christian faith acknowledges one healer, called a Gentle Healer by some, a Wounded Healer by others, both accurate enough. Again, though, I don't think that in this case any particular religious affiliation is required to get that healing is too deep and too long a process to be accomplished by any sport, or certainly by any one game. It can be a step or a part, but it can't do it on its own, and evidently not forever.

Note the armband.

The Band Geek: college version

I have in a previous entry explored the degree to which my young life, in ways I didn't see at the time, was governed by the rhythms and schedules of football, at least during the fall, due to my membership in the marching band. Another past blog post explored one early if not quite informed introduction to the spectre of catastrophic injury even at the high school level, again as part of that marching band experience. However, it is needful for me to admit that this was not the full extent of my band-geekery.

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't). There was good reason for this besides the football team's ineptitude; Wake's basketball team was actually pretty good in those days (and this was pre-Tim Duncan), and had a sort of moment in the spotlight when an upset win over DePaul (they used to be good, too) prematurely ended the career of their longtime coach Ray Meyer, a sentimental favorite to win it all or at least get to the Final Four in his final season. Delaney Rudd, Anthony Teachey, Danny Green (not that one), and the next year Muggsy Bogues showed up. Good times.

The college marching band experience was a little different, mostly because (1) the games were on Saturdays instead of Fridays, which gave the experience a slightly different vibe, and (2) Wake Forest simply wasn’t that good. Dublin High’s teams were not necessarily perennial playoff winners, but they usually won more than they lost. Wake’s teams didn’t. (This was in 1983 and 1984, long before the Demon Deacons’ inexplicable run to the 2006 ACC championship and Orange Bowl appearance on January 2, 2007.) When the most ardently cheered player on the team is the punter, you know the team isn’t that successful. (To be clear, the punter deserved the cheers: Harry Newsome was an All-American in 1983, and went on to an NFL career with, I think, the Steelers and the Vikings.)

The university’s athletic department recognized the general lack of appeal of a poor team with a small alumni base, and during the two seasons I was in the marching band the games tended to be followed by some kind of entertainment show or concert. Because of these I got to see Bob Hope live (clearly Wake’s students were not the intended targets of these shows), as well as the Four Tops and Temptations, so the effort was worthwhile for me at least, and I was not so young and stupid as to be unable to enjoy such legendary acts. Some of the acts were less familiar to me, which got annoying as the band absolutely was not allowed to leave early in those cases. This also provided me an introduction to the mingling of sport and entertainment that would become another piece of the puzzle in these later years, sorting out the ways in which football generates and keeps its hold on its acolytes with spectacle and distraction.

Road trips could be a different affair as well. Back then, some combination of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Duke was certain to be on the schedule, and those were pretty quick trips. Others could be longer and a bit more involved. As well, sometimes the road trips only involved a pep band, with no time spent on the field (I remember a game at Richmond -- yes, Wake Forest traveled to a game against a 1-AA team -- that was pep band only. Back then they were still playing at the stadium that now houses the Richmond Kickers soccer team.) 

Maybe the most notable road trip was to Georgia Tech, if only because several of my high-school classmates had chosen to attend that school. I snuck off for the third quarter and spent it among them, in a Georgia Tech student section, in my Wake Forest band uniform (this was a real marching trip, no pep band). The other memorable (and much less pleasant) part of that trip was a girl I was interested in making it clear she was dating a rich sophomore instead. As you can note, very few of my marching band memories from my Wake Forest time really involved the actual game of football at all, aside from cheering for the punter. (Wake Forest also hosted a high-school marching band competition, for which we band members were assigned various tasks. That was more fun than any game I ever attended.)

After transferring away from Wake Forest in the middle of my sophomore year (to major in music, ironically), my exposure to live football became much less frequent. My new school didn’t field a football team, and aside from one trip the next fall to see Wake Forest at Georgia Tech and catch up with my old band mates, I saw very few games live, mostly during my time in graduate school at Florida State; my fellow grad students in my degree program generally got together to get tickets for one game per season. Otherwise, I frequently spent football Saturdays across the campus, working in the music library. Most of the time, though, the game was on our television at home.

While there were no major on-field injuries during the games I saw at Wake Forest (at least not that I remember), I did get an early introduction to the signature malady of the current age of CTE: the concussion. In my first semester at the university one of my classmates in an introductory theatre class was a walk-on football player, whose hopes to play for the Deacs had been derailed by a concussion suffered during pre-season training. Or at least it was supposedly a concussion. At least a few folks suggested he had suffered more than one, and you couldn't really be certain that wasn't the case.

He was as nice a guy as you could hope, but clearly not all was right with him. On more than one occasion he would be found in class zoned out, completely having lost track of all going on around him, noticing nothing but the headache. The professor didn't really know what to do with him in those situations. Part of the responsibility for this class was to work as off-stage personnel for the theatre division's fall production (Shakespeare, but I don't remember what). This fellow and I were both assigned to the costume shop. There was enough of a challenge for him and his enormous hands trying to manipulate sewing needles and replace small buttons. On the bad days, it was impossible.  He made it to most of the classes, occasionally missing because, as he would later explain, he just couldn’t get around the pain. By the end of the semester his symptoms had abated somewhat (and I do emphasize somewhat), but while he tried again, to my recollection he never made Wake’s active football roster. But since I was only there for one more year, how would I know? He might just have gotten on the roster later, as messed up as his brain clearly was.

I wish I could say I was enough of a prophet to see from his difficulties that it was all going to end badly, and that football was a sport with a serious head trauma problem even at that time. No, I didn't see that coming, being in a way still too close to it, I guess. Though my direct experience of the game was going to wane in the intervening years, I certainly wasn’t ready to walk away from it yet. That was still years in the future.

If a punter was ever going to look like an All-American, this was it. Harry Newsome at Wake Forest.

The two- (or three-) way street

Loyalty is an awfully strange word in sports.

There's the whole business of which loyalty we're talking about.

There's the question of coach or manager loyalty to players. Players' loyalty to coaches or managers. On the pro level, ownership adds another level to the loyalty question. And then there are the fans, the ones who, in Jerry Seinfeld's words, root for laundry.

Loyalty got an unfortunate social media workout last night, apparently, in the recruiting life of the Texas A & M University football franchise. Notice the word "recruiting" in that sentence. In other words, the question of the loyalty of football players who are, technically, not yet part of the program or franchise became an open question, and as a result, some football players who were planning to join that program are now no longer planning to do so.

A little background is in order; a more detailed sketch of the events leading to this impasse is here. To be brief, the program has had some difficulties holding on to the highly touted quarterbacks who have variously played for or committed to the franchise, to the point of losing players who had made "oral commitments" to play at Texas A & M. Up to last night, the main shocking news was that the two quarterbacks who got most of the playing time last season had decided to transfer to other schools.

Seeing the instability, Tate Martell, a highly ranked high school quarterback who had made an oral commitment to A & M before his junior year of high school (yes, junior year), made the strange announcement that while he was still committed to A & M, he was going to take advantage of all five of the official visits a high schooler is allowed to make to different football franchises. While this might sound a little like telling your girlfriend that while you're still dating her exclusively that you're going to go on dates with four other women, one could argue that the franchise is "dating" a whole bunch of other quarterbacks while theoretically remaining "committed" to you.

Whatever the reason, Martell made the decision to "decommit" from Texas A & M, re-opening his recruiting process more fully and spilling some beans on who else had expressed interest. This was last night, a little more than two weeks after the decision to make all his visits.

For whatever strange reason, one of A & M's coaches, Aaron Moorehead (the wide receivers coach), then fired off a series of tweets on the subject of loyalty. It was hard to escape the notion that Moorehead (the college coach, the presumed adult in the room) was going off on Martell, the 17-year-old high school quarterback). Moorehead, because of NCAA rules, couldn't mention the name of a recruit who had not yet signed a letter of intent (which Martell is not eligible to do until this coming February), maintained that he wasn't tweeting about who people thought he was tweeting about, but went right on tweeting in a way that more or less said that these tweets about loyalty were "relevant" to the situation that everybody thought he was tweeting about.

Meanwhile other recruits took notice. A highly-ranked receiver, taking notice of the words of his "future coach", used Twitter to announce his own decommitment. (This receiver, Mannie Netherly, has already received an offer from the Mississippi franchise. Things do change quickly.) This didn't stop Moorehead from tweeting, adding that kids these days were too sensitive and "soft." This in turn persuaded another recruit, not committed to Texas A & M but still considering the franchiie, to decide he was no longer considering the program. Another player, not even an A & M recruit, offered the opinion that the tweetstorm (apparently that's a thing now) had probably cost A & M about twenty-five recruits, while others weighed in on one side or the other.

Today brought the mandatory apology from Moorehead and vague insinuations by head coach Kevin Sumlin that Moorehead might lose his social media privileges.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds the whole business bizarre on its face. I can't possibly begin to enumerate the dumbfounded and I-can't-believe-I-have-to-ask questions this provokes in me, but just to name a few:

1) Making "oral commitments" before junior year of high school? Since when is that ever a good idea? And yes, I've heard the stories of offers to kids in junior high, I just don't want to acknolwedge them. I suppose on some level that making such an early commitment theoretically allows a kid to play his last two years of high-school ball without all the distraction of a full-blown recruiting process, but I have my doubts that this theory really works out that well in practice. And who's to say that any of the coaches who recruit you as a sophomore are going to even be around by the time you're a senior, much less ready to join the franchise?

An "oral commitment" is a strange thing. It is utterly without backing. It has, really, about as much credibility as your promise to your doctor to exercise more and cut back on the sweet stuff.

2) Coaches are not really the best people to go tweeting or otherwise browbeating about "loyalty" to a program. To pick on the currently humiliated Moorehead: is he really saying that he plans to spend his entire career as A & M's wide receivers coach?

Even in my short stay in academia I climbed the career ladder. I moved, after three years of teaching at a small evangelical school in south Florida, to a much larger state university out in the plains, one with one of the better music programs in the country and with much more interest in basketball than baseball. For me, the appeal was threefold: a slight pay bump (but also a move to a much less expensive place to live, which heightened the effect), a chance to work with graduate students and not undergrads only, and, well, the prestige of the music program there. Such a move was no declaration of disaffection for my previous school, but I will never doubt that it was the right thing to do at that time in that career and will never regret it.

It's hard for me to believe that Moorehead isn't going to want to climb the career ladder in football coaching at some point. And hey, this is the good ol' USA; nobody's really going to begrudge him that privilege. He might move to another school for an opportunity to be an offensive coordinator, or maybe even a head coach, or he might make a move to the NFL. (Of course, how much the publicity from this incident will affect such opportunities for him in the future remains to be seen.) But a system that allows him to demand such loyalty out of players who might not even be at A & M before he climbs the next step on the coaching ladder is a broken system, isn't it?

3) Twitter, boy, I don't know... .

4) I won't even get into the degree to which this whole process is utterly divorced from the basic concept of a college or university education... .

5) And because you know this blog is going to go there whenever the chance arises, this coach (the one tweeting how kids these days are too sensitive or soft) is somehow being trusted with, among other things, the health of the players who play under his direction, including yes, the health of their brains. Sound like a good idea to you?

6) I haven't waded into the cesspool of comment sections or Twitter replies to get any reactions from fans of A & M or other franchises, the ones rooting for laundry. I'm not going to, but I'm going to guess that it's ugly and vile and petty towards the de-committers, and obnoxiously defensive of Moorehead. That apparently is what fanhood requires (auto-correct wanted to change that word to "manhood." In that case I have to concede that auto-correct might have a point). Defend the franchise against any and all assaults, including any physical ones committed by players or coaches, but turn on the franchise and demand blood if it doesn't win enough games. I guess that's fan loyalty.

In this case, this particular situation is unique to college, and to college football somewhat. College basketball has its own profound corruptions and irregularities, but early recruiting just doesn't have quite the same hold on that game. Coach-hopping is maybe even worse, though. On the pro level, loyalty is deeply intertwined with money. (Not that it isn't on the college level, but for those actually playing it is mostly future money at stake.)

In all seriousness, I am not sure it requires a faith-based ethical viewpoint to make a person wonder if it would be best just to shake one's head and walk away from the whole business. A basic rational mind and sense of human decency might well be enough.

How nice that he bounced back so quickly...

A little life

No ethical discussions today. Just some sports-fan joy.

This was me Friday:

Orioles vs. Blue Jays, 3/4/16, Dunedin, Florida

That's Florida Auto Exchange Stadium in Dunedin, Florida, where the Toronto Blue Jays hold spring training. On Friday the Baltimore Orioles made their way up from Sarasota to play a little ball. With Friday being my day off, the timing seemed opportune.

It was a pretty typical spring training game, won by Toronto 4-3. The highlight was a three-homer inning in which Toronto built the lead that Baltimore would never overcome. 

My seat was actually much closer to home plate; this just seemed to be a good spot to get a picture of a baseball crowd on a sunny (but not too hot) March afternoon.

As this was Toronto's spring training site, you might wonder about the national makeup of the crowd. I'm sure there were plenty of Floridians around, but I was surrounded by Canadians. As a result, in odd moments between action I learned more about Ontario than I had learned in any one occasion since the last time I was there (2011, I think, when I attended one of my last academic conferences that happened to be meeting in Ottawa). 

And thankfully, no political talk. Just as well, I can't say I know that much about Justin Trudeau.

Being in front of live professional baseball game was all sorts of good for my psyche and my soul and all those good things. On the other hand, getting into and out of Dunedin, and the Tampa/Clearwater/St. Petersburg area in general, mostly managed to evaporate all that psychological healing before I even got back to I-75. Still, some residual effects (good ones) do linger.

Not nearly on the same scale, but still a pleasure, the Major League Soccer season started today, and I got to see Sporting Kansas City get an ugly win against Seattle Sounders. It's still not on the same level as baseball, and it was televised instead of live, but hey, small pleasures count. 

And of course my #3 sport preference, college basketball, is approaching its peak season. (I dare not use that phrase -- you know, the M-alliterative one -- for fear of copyright infringement.) The Kansas Jayhawks head into their conference tournament as the top seed, with their twelfth consecutive Big XII title wrapped up. They won the national championship in 2008, during my first year teaching at that university, and have been breaking hearts ever since. Still, this is "hope springs eternal" time. 

On occasion it's good to remember the pleasures of "participating" in sports. So no heavy ethical contesting tonight, just some enjoyment of such pleasures as sports can bring, and enjoying the way they can bring a little life to the everyday.

Clint Dempsey, you shall not pass!

The occasional voice

It's kind of sweet. People are now sending me links to feed the blog. Just my wife for a while, but now others too.

One link that arrived in such fashion is from the online site of the journal Sojourners, in which the author, pointing towards the release of the movie Concussion this week, lays out why his family does not participate in the NFL. (Now don't be obtuse, folks..."participate" is the term of choice in this blog for any kind of involvement in the NFL, including as a fan who watches games, buys tickets or merchandise, plays fantasy games, etc.) Unfortunately I could only get a free preview, and haven't wanted to spend the bucks to subscribe (I too often find their environmental writing naive at best), I can't quite read it all. It did, however lead me to other articles in that site, older ones not requiring subscription to read, by one Ernesto Tinajero. The first, in 2009, relates his choice to stop watching football; the second, approximately a year later, reasserting the choice and noting some of the events that had occurred over the year since.

I actually noticed some of my own experience in what Tinajero wrote; on those occasions when a football game would be, say, on a TV in a restaurant where I was eating, I would be more jolted than ever before when some particularly violent collision flashed across the screen, even if I wasn't trying to watch (or trying not to watch). I can't say as I'm quite as surprised by this as he is; nonetheless, it's more of a shock to witness than it ever used to be.

In the meantime, another voice appeared recently, with a much quirkier take on the question than I've even attempted; is it at all possible to avoid football altogether? Not just refrain from watching, but have no contact with it at all?

You can catch Matt Crossman's interview with the NPR program Only A Game, in which he describes his futile efforts to avoid the NFL for six weeks, or read his longform story on SB Nation about not only the effort, but the motivation as well. ("Longform" is a key word, but it's worth the read.)

It's kind of sad that Crossman, who doesn't explicitly name any faith motivations for his experiment, nonetheless gets thwarted at least once because his minister uses a football story in his sermon. Or because somebody in his Bible study group hands him a commemorative McDonald's cup for the forthcoming Super Bowl. When he has to wonder "if Christianity is the official religion of football," yeah, it's relevant here.

Living in Charlotte, he's beseiged by the Carolina Panthers' success. Finally, the experiment collapses, well short of its original goal; getting through the Super Bowl without even knowing who makes it.

There is something disturbing about how difficult it was to avoid what I'm calling participation in football. Admittedly Crossman's definition is even stricter than mine; he at least made an effort to pull back from corporations that sponsor the NFL, and I don't have anything like enough time even to research that subject. But still, how does twenty-two people running around on the grass (or a concrete floor, for all practical purposes) hitting each other become so pervasive and unavoidable, even as it becomes more and more apparent that it destroys a large number of those who play it?

It's impossible for it to get to that point without a great deal of desensitization among us, the folks who inhabit the NFL- or NCAA-saturated world without protest. To see harm or trauma or even death happen, not just once but multiple times, without reacting or raising up in some kind of protest, leads each harm to register less and less with us. We get numb. And when we get numb to actual death as a result of the games we watch, we have entered the realm of moral harm.

We experience moral harm when we become numb to injustice, to politicians and wannabe politicians demonizing Muslims for political gain, stirring up the beginnings of Brownshirts, and we don't raise up a protest.

We experience moral harm when young black boys get gunned down for playing with toy guns while rabidly armed white men actually shoot police officers and end up unharmed, and we don't raise up a protest.

And hell yes, we experience moral harm, harm to our own moral capability, when another current or former player finds himself on the middle of the freeway with no idea where he's going, or ends up on an autopsy table with his brain showing the telltale tau markers of CTE, or a high school player dies on the field or in the ambulance or in the hospital after a game, and we don't raise up a protest.

The harm runs pretty deep these days.

If you look at it right, it almost looks like an altar...

Do a city's sports franchises troll each other?

So vacations and other travel have disrupted the accustomed writing schedule for this blog. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

In this case, one part of this most recent vacation travel offered me an opportunity to follow up on something that received comment in this blog some time ago. Yes, I got to take a peek at the site where the Atlanta Braves' new stadium (already named SunTrust Park, which I suppose means the bank is ponying up the dough for naming rights at first at least) is being built.

It is in Cobb County, outside (by its own fierce declaration) of Atlanta, wedged into a parcel near where I-75 and I-285 meet. It's not too hard to find, although it's not exactly a direct shot from either freeway.

I even took a few pictures:

A few off-the-cuff observations:

Some of the features suggest the new park will have a lot in common with the team's current home, Turner Field (p.k.a. Olympic Stadium, remember?). Still plenty of time for the look to turn out quite differently, of course. And I have no idea where they're going to put parking. You can see that's not exactly a major thoroughfare running by the site either.

Just for funsies, a few pictures from the decrepit stadium, and the interminable walk thereunto from MARTA:

So anyway, nothing about the views above did much of anything to change the opinions expressed in the earlier blog. The location is going to be a logistical nightmare of vehicles, probably lacking sufficient parking (and of course nobody is going to be taking MARTA to the game, not if Cobb County has anything to do with it). It will be a plague environmentally, not only because of all those cars but also because a spot that actually managed to have some green space to it isn't going to have any green space anymore. Those two freeways are going to be pretty severe before and after games, as if they aren't -- ahem -- challenging already. Some of the secondary roads in the immediate area are either going to have to be expanded dramatically or get overwhelmed dramatically.

What was interesting, though, was a series of billboards seen around Atlanta, including very near the Braves' stadium site. They were promoting one of the other sports franchises in the city, the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks have already appeared in this space before, first a little more than a year ago in the wake of a racially-charged scandal in the team's front office, and more recently (and more briefly) in the wake of Thabo Sefolosha's acquittal in New York City. In between the team had an interesting and surprising season, by far their most successful ever, before falling in the playoffs (at least to some small degree affected by Sefolosha's absence due to that broken leg). 

Their season is just underway, of course, and they're off to a decent start. What I found interesting, though, was the slogan they chose to promote themselves in and around Atlanta, including even that billboard near the new Braves' stadium:

TRUE TO ATLANTA

OK, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but are the Hawks throwing shade at the Braves?

I mean, is somebody not being true to Atlanta?

So this slogan apparently dates to last year, in the midst of the scandal and renaissance season, and appears to be continuing into this year (or at minimum nobody's taking down the billboards). As the letter notes, the franchise also endeavored to get into bridge-building and greater community involvement, as well as, you know, being a good team. Given the long-term mediocrity in which the Hawks had been mired, one doesn't necessarily have to read the slogan as shading others. But to brand yourself as being "True to Atlanta" is hard not to read as suggesting that somebody else is being untrue to Atlanta, particularly when nestled up next to the suburban stadium one of the other franchises is building in their re-enactment of 70's-era white flight. 

Perhaps my sensitivites are more acute on such a subject in the wake of the announcement of the team seeking to become Atlanta's fourth major-league franchise, in Major League Soccer. 

MLS franchises have taken to being extremely responsive to their fan bases, regarded as a necessity in building a franchise in a far less extravagantly funded league than the longtime four major sports leagues in this country. In the case of the Atlanta MLS franchise that included actually leaving the naming of the franchise up to that fan base (via surveys and focus groups). The name chosen by the fans was...

Atlanta United FC.

In case you don't follow soccer all that closely, this is a bit like an NCAA athletic program choosing the name Bulldogs, Eagles, Tigers, or Wildcats. It's rather common. It's a formula used by a lot of programs around the world, from the lofty Manchester United Football Club to any number of other lower-level clubs. Even in MLS this will be the third team to use the "United" label, after currently-existing DC United and fellow expansion club Minnesota United FC (which is currently playing in the second division NASL and due to move up at the same time as Atlanta United FC or soon after). Across the four divisions of US soccer, Atlanta will be the twentieth team to use "United" as the predominant element in its name.

So, why so formulaic a name?

At least some fans responded with a fairly literal read of the name; Atlanta as a city that needs uniting. And at least one fan cited the aforementioned "True to Atlanta" slogan as an example. (The team itself puts forth its explanation here.)

Uniting a city is a pretty tall order for a sports franchise, even if is a lofty and noble idea. Sports fandom, though, is by its nature tribal, and tribal things have a pretty strong tendency to be at least as exclusive as inclusive. Since in most cases there's only one franchise per city for each sport (cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago being exceptions sometimes), that isn't necessarily as prominent a problem (collegiate affinities, on the other hand...). But it can still touch off some identity politics among fan bases that may or may not overlap. 

If the Braves weren't decamping to the 'burbs (and to those particular 'burbs) none of this would be remotely noteworthy. But they are. And that two of the city's other franchises are at the same time seeking to tie themselves ever more closely to the city that the Braves have evacuated feels like something is going on. I don't live in Atlanta and don't plan to anytime soon or ever, and aside from occasional interest in the Hawks I don't follow the city's teams (and no, I won't be jumping ship to Atlanta United FC; Sporting KC is still my team, even from half a country away). But I can't help but  wish that the baseball team would have to call itself the Cobb County Braves (but that's just me being contrary; I hate the Angels using the city name of Los Angeles too), and I can't help but wonder how this stew of loyalties and identities is going to play out, and just how much some of these franchises are going to be able to keep their promises.

An aside: how do we care about athletes?

Having started to put together some of the more basic questions about watching football in the previous two posts, this moment might be useful for an aside on a subject that is pretty important to this whole enterprise, but which is asked amazingly seldom.

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