Christian ethics, the human body, and football

Part of my responsibility in purusing this project is to put forth a coherent ethical response to the ongoing concern of football and the traumatic brain injury associated with it. Amidst the gathering of new stories and accounts of the experiences of former and now deceased players, the inability or unwillingness of football leagues or collegiate conferences to take the issue seriously beyond a basic CYA instinct, and possible changing attitudes among fans or players, I occasionally need to drop back and gather up some of the ethical foundation and procedure behind the project, to try to keep myself from getting too far off track.

So bear with me, please.

I have been reminded of two basic concerns underlying an ethical approach to this question; one concerning the possible audience for such concern, and another pointing to a basic reason why Christian ethics must (in my opinion, humble or otherwise) address the issue.

Note the choice of the term "Christian ethics." That is a significant limitation on whatever comes out of this pursuit. In trying to sort out what kind of Christian ethical position I'm coming from I've come to conclude that based on what I hope to be the outcome of such a project, my target audience is limited to what is theologically called the "body of Christ."

It isn't because I think the opinions and actions of those of other faiths are irrelevant or unimportant -- quite the opposite. It is simply that, in my role as a Christian (specifically Presbyterian) pastor, my most basic concern is to in some way provide spiritual guidance and direction so that the members of the body of Christ (we usually call them "Christians" though I am growing less and less fond of that word in its current state every day) are formed and matured into people who live rightly, more so than trying to direct individual actions so that individuals act rightly.* This might not sound like what you've perceived as the role of Christian ethics (or ethics in general), and there are certainly others who will disagree.

*Here one might look into Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), especially his introductory chapters.

Christian ethical thought has at different times emphasized very different outcomes for the body of Christ -- sometimes emphasizing loyalty to the State as a means of guaranteeing the influence of the Church (and yes, quite a few nominally Christian leaders are clearly taking this approach today); sometimes propagating a canon of law or rules, adherence to which demonstrated one's faith; sometimes emphasizing the rationality of the faith, or its suitability to the improvement of the individual vs. the larger body. By staking out the position I have, I am certianly "showing my bias" -- the importance of community and "body of Christ" over individual supremacy, a preference for formation of habits and even "instincts" to respond ethically to situations that haven't necessarily existed before, rather than prescribing a rulebook and then trying to bend current situations to that rulebook (football is, after all, a relatively recent thing in history, though there are other activities that the Christian ethical response to which will be informative), and others I'm sure I'll hear about.

For the moment, though, the big concern that arises from this is that if my primary concern is with the body of Christ, then what I say should not be considered authoritative over those who do not claim membership in said body. It ain't because I don't care. And if a book or some other product eventually does hit the market, my Jewish or Muslim or agnostic friends (or anybody else) should certainly feel free to buy a copy. <grin> But all of this really does come out of a pastoral and theological foundation, and those who do not partake of such a foundation cannot be bound by my arguments from it.

So the language of this project is likely to get more and more faith-specific -- not with intent to offend, but simply trying to do the only job I can do here.


The second reminder to myself comes in a sideways fashion from the first -- specifically from my job being directed toward the "body of Christ," i.e. the Christian (there's that word again) church. Part of the reason is that I don't believe that followers of Christ, professors of an incarnational faith, can be indifferent to those activities in human existence that regularly and routinely cause harm to the physical body.

We are, after all, followers of a victim of torture. The scourging, whipping, imposition of a crown of thorns, and other abuses visited upon Jesus wouldn't even remotely pass muster under the Geneva conventions today, and I'm pretty sure crucifixion would fall under the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" even for the most zealous defenders of capital punishment (on second thought, maybe not all such defenders). One of the key events in the narrative of Christianity is an act of physical destruction.

Not surprisingly, Christian ethics and doctrine have not typically looked kindly on activities that visit lasting harm on the body (leaving aside for the moment those who hold to soul/body dualisms of some sort, except to say that I'm not one of them). Capital punishment (usually) comes under criticism; abortion is sanctioned; harm to the body through drugs or alcohol or other foreign substances is decried; sports such as boxing have, eventually, fallen out of favor in many Christian circles. It certainly remains possible that football will similarly fall out of favor, although with such virulent attachments to it still in place in some corners of the church that doesn't seem likely any time soon, no matter how much nobodies like me might protest. But it's becoming harder and harder to ignore the degree to which the game produces an awful lot of broken bodies, even if the damage takes five or ten or twenty years to show. That can't be acceptable in an ethic that takes seriously the idea of human beings created in the image of God.  

Here's a case where our ancestors in the faith have provided some thought that can be applied to the modern case, albeit indirectly at best. The criticisms of Tertullian, Augustine, and the like against the gladiatorial combats and contests of the ancient world don't necessarily transfer directly to modern critiques of football (the spectacle of death is not immediate in the NFL, at least for now), but the concerns both about the aforementioned imago Dei and the impact such spectacles had on those who viewed them should not be dismissed. Augustine's account of his unfortunate friend Alypius at the spectacles sounds pretty mild compared to the total besotted intoxication fans display at the modern spectacles on Saturday afternoons (or nights, or now Thursdays or Fridays), or Sundays (or Mondays, or now Thursdays). That infatuation and saturation with the spectacle becomes an unavoidable part of teasing out a Christian ethical response to the seemingly intractable destructiveness of the game on some sizeable number of its players, and has inevitably to be answered and critiqued as part of the process of ethical inquiry.

In short; the destructive quality of football (which seems more intractable and less fixable than in sports like hockey) has to be addressed, but we're going to have to untangle some seriously dubious entwinement of football and religionesque ritual and worship while doing so. And yes, the "i" word (idolatry) is probably going to have to be invoked at some point.

I...I can't even...

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.

Sports and belief systems

You might recall the basis for the name of this blog. Imagine the scene as a befuddled outsider (a yankee, probably) observes how southerners lose their minds over college football and comments on the passions being (for good or ill, quite possibly) like religion, only to have a native respond (a grizzled veteran, preferably) with something along the lines of "son, down here football ain't a religion, it's way more important than that."

Leaving aside the evident truth of the statement (more often than I as a pastor like to think about), and a previous and somewhat jocular blog entry to the contrary, I wouldn't necessarily argue that football, or any other sport for that matter, is a religion. I would easily and quickly argue, though, that sports share many things with religion. Possibly one of the chief similarities is that partisanship to most sports, or to individual teams in particular, seems to involve something like a belief system.

I'm thinking of more than the obvious "my team > your team" sentiment expressed with varying degrees of passion and/or vulgarity by fans, or sometimes with humor as by the t-shirt below, or in the song from Weird Al Yankovic's most recent album (your tolerance for which may be determined by your tolerance for an s-word that rhymes with "ducks").

Nota bene: I do acknowledge that there are plenty of fans who in fact know that such a claim is absolutely untrue for their team, and that in fact theirs is the team Weird Al is making fun of. They're the ones who are absoluely floored by a 6-6 season and a trip to the Independence Bowl, or not actually being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs before Labor Day. Those teams are not that common, and their fans tend to be looked down on by fans whose belief system is governed by one of the few close-to-universal claims, "if you're not a winner, you're a loser." But they do exist, and they are perhaps less verging on literal insanity than most.

No, I'm suggesting that there are somewhat more subtle, and usually unconscious, attitudes or assumptions or beliefs that underlie the fanship of an awful lot of sports followers.

I have no intention of trying to claim these beliefs as universal across sports, aside from the above winner/loser dictum. I'd say that many of the beliefs are particular to their sports, possibly to individual teams or the cities in which they play, and in a few cases to the league (or conference, in college) in which a fan's team plays. So instead I'll point out a few specific cases as best as possible.

Since I'm watching a baseball playoff game right now, its particular character as a very organized belief system jumps out at me, with the particular distinguishing characteristic that much of the game's belief system seems to originate with not fans or coaches, but the players themselves. This claim derives mostly from the particular canon of law, practically Talmudic in its scope, usually known as The Right Way to Play the Game (or in some cases The Unwritten Rules). 

This usually ends up being boiled down to "don't show me up." Anything that the offended party takes as embarrassing to the offended party comes under the ban here -- watching your home run ball leave the yard, flipping your bat after hitting it, any kind of gesture by a pitcher after striking out a hitter, a particularly showboat-ish catch in the outfield, you name it and it can be considered offensive by somebody, and you get condemned as not knowing The Right Way to Play the Game. And then somebody throws at your head, which is somehow construed as The Right Way to Play the Game.

Baseball also seems more prone to particular beliefs about curses than other sports. The lodestar example of this curse obsession is in this postseason, currently tied with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908, and rather than chalking it up to having a lot of bad teams and then having good teams not play well when they did get to the playoffs, a curse about a billy goat became the (ha!) scapegoat. Varying events such as a collapse in the NLCS agains the San Diego Padres in 1984 and the so-called "Bartman game" in 2003 (seriously, people, Bartman didn't choke away eight freaking runs to the Florida Marlins -- who, bitterly to Cubs fans, went on to win the World Series that season), are of course blamed on the Curse of the Billy Goat. I'm guessing that lots of Cubs fans are invoking that curse after being beaten last night by Clayton Kershaw, who is only one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Meanwhile, tonight there are probably Cleveland fans who are wondering about the Curse of Rocky Colavito after tonight's starting pitcher, Trevor Bauer, lasted only 2/3 of an inning after suffering a cut on a finger a few days ago. Since Mike Napoli just hit a home run to give his team the lead against the Toronto Blue Jays, perhaps they're calming down for a moment.

You can read about a whole bunch of other sports-related "curses" here. Other sports do get invoked, and in some cases cities are somehow regarded as being "cursed" across all sports teams.With the Cleveland Cavaliers' NBA championship, the supposed "Cleveland curse" would seem to be gone, with Buffalo and/or San Diego (which has never experienced a major-sport championship for any of its teams) most likely to be regarded as "cursed" even if no specific cause of a curse can be noted.

Most such sports beliefs aren't that elaborate or overtly stated, though. So much of the "belief system" around a sport or team is much more likely to go unspoken, and perhaps to claim much more power for its unspokenness. 

Sometimes that belief is tied up with beliefs outside of sports, such as nationalism. Here football is most prominent, though baseball certainly tries with its "national pastime" nickname. Football has certianly wrapped itself in the flag, both on the pro and college levels, and particularly since 9/11. It has also shown a propensity for direct military display, sometimes funded by the Department of Defense (although NASCAR and MLB also score heavily there).

But perhaps the most insidious unspoken belief in sports, and likely the most unspoken and most powerful, is simple but sinister, and one shared with nationalism at its most base.

My team, right or wrong.

It may have adaptations; my conference, right or wrong (fans of the Southeastern Conference, particularly in football, are Exhibit A here); my league, right or wrong; maybe my sport, right or wrong?

It's the impulse that turns Baylor University and its fans into particularly horrid victim-blamers in the face of accusations of sexual assault against its football players (and Baylor is hardly the only example here, though probably the most egregious of late). My school, right or wrong.

It's the impulse that (along with gobs of cash) makes FIFA one of the most corrupt organizations on earth. My sport, right or wrong. 

It's what allows Atlanta or Cleveland baseball fans, or fans of a whole heap of college teams (Florida State, for example), or Chicago hockey fans, to ignore the inherent insult in making mascots out of fellow human beings (even those who have enough ethical understanding to know better). My team, my school, right or wrong.

And (you knew I was going here) it makes football fans, teams, collegiate conferences, and the NFL unwilling to face just what playing the game has most likely been doing to players for more than a century, even if we only noticed it when Mike Webster died.

And this is why it will be virtually impossible to "fix" football. 

Because my game, right or wrong. 

It has to be the players' fault. Something must be wrong with them. Or the coaches are doing it wrong. Or the helmets are wrong, or the artificial turf is wrong, or anything other than the basic and hard-to-escape observation that when very large and very strong men run into each other at very high speeds and over and over and over and over and over again, the miracle is that such brain trauma doesn't happen to more players. 

It can't be that. My game, right or wrong. 

And thus the game will go on, and people will keep on getting damaged beyond repair, and nobody in the stands will be able to tell. 

And, I guess, nobody will care.

Spectacle and harm

You might have heard that Prince Rogers Nelson, or the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, died today.

The iconic and iconoclastic singer/guitarist/songwriter/cultural lightning rod was found dead today in an elevator (wasn't that somehow part of "Let's Go Crazy"?) at his home/recording studio/complex in Minnesota. In a year with entirely too many musicians slipping off this mortal coil, this one was a cannon shot to the solar plexus for those of us of a particular age.

Prince wasn't without his affections for sports, especially for his Minnesota-based teams. He once wrote a song for the NFL's Minnesota Vikings, took in the NBA's Timberwolves, and threw was has been called an epic concert for the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx after they won their league championship.

But perhaps his most indelible mark in the sporting world was his performance for the halftime show of Super Bowl XLI, in Miami in 2007.* This was the Super Bowl that was unique for more than its particular combination of Roman numerals; it was the one Super Bowl that got rained on, pretty much for the whole game.

*Corrected; originally "2012" -- apparently I can't do Roman numerals anymore.

In this story (from The Weather Channel...well, he did sing about purple rain) the story is told of Prince's reaction when NFL foofs checked the weather that morning and folks in charge of the halftime show reported the rain to Prince. His epic reaction: "Can you make it rain harder?"

He of course proceeded to go out and blow the Super Bowl away, rain-slickened stage and all.

What is interesting, in watching the event all these years later, is how little Prince particularly cares to be part of the NFL's spectacle; Prince was a spectacle all by himself, and that year the NFL was fortunate to tag along with a performer for whom a downpour was just an interesting stage effect.

But Prince at the Super Bowl does raise some interesting points about the spectacle that attaches itself to the Super Bowl and other major sporting events (and indeed, to almost all professional and major-college sporting events to some degree). The very idea of a halftime show at a football game points to the degree to which some kind of spectacle has attached itself to that particular game for a very long time. (It might be worth the recollection that, throughout high school and my first two years of college, I was part of that spectacle -- a band geek.)

If you think about it, that's a little bit different from other sports. Most sporting events anymore begin with the national anthem -- a bit of patriotic spectacle, if you will -- but, unless you're in the playoffs, that's about it for a baseball game (unless you count "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" as a kind of spectacle; I could see it, but I think of it as something different.) Basketball games, on the major-college level at least, are increasingly offering some sort of halftime entertainment, which might vary from some sort of musical performer to a juggler or tumbling act or aerial acrobatics -- what might have been called "sideshow entertainment" in the past. Having not been to an NBA game I can't comment on what happens there.

The longstanding tradition of halftime spectacle, though, seems fairly unique to football. This I suppose is fairly sensible, since of the most popular sports going today football has the most in common with the kind of sporting event that used to be called "spectacle."

Yes, kids, it's time to bring in the good ol' Roman Empire and its "spectacles."

I have remarked in previous blog entries on the relative lack of sustained development of theological consideration of the ongoing saga of brain trauma and football; one partial exception is discussed here, and Dr. Hoffman's book is among a rather larger (though still not huge) body of literature that takes on the subject of Christianity and sports more generally. One of the inevitable tropes that appear in such literature is the games and sports of the Roman Empire, events to which are frequently attached the term "spectacle." This emphasizes, beyond the simple physical brutality of the contests (includiating gladiatorial combats and chariot races), the degree to which extra-sporting events accrued around the sporting contests. Of course, in the case of Rome, it might in some cases be that the sporting contests wormed their way into the specacle.

At times the spectacle was overtly religious, in the context of the Roman Empire and its pantheon of deities. Multiple such deities might have been appeased or honored in the ceremonies surrounding the contests, and of course the emperor or any representative of the emperor could expect his own share of adulation as well. (Looking slightly further back in history, much the same would have held true of the Athenian spectacles surrounding the original Olympic Games.)

Of course, the contests themselves were much more immediately harmful to their competitors, and in some cases much more immediately fatal, depending on the whim of the emperor or crowd. Though there are exceptions, we do not expect our competitors to die in front of us at sporting events we attend, and when it does happen the sporting entity in question goes through all manner of soul-searching and procedural review. Even an organization like NASCAR erupts in a paroxysm of new safety measures and guidelines in the wake of a death or major injury on the track (although, with the sometimes highly personal affection for the competitors in that more individual sport, perhaps that's not so surprising).

Nowadays, the adulation of "idols" surrounding our sporting events is rather more discreet as well. While a great deal of adulation seems to be directed at God by some athletes on or immediately off the field, it's not always certain how much that adulation is actually directed at the God revealed in the crucified Christ, the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace. (But that's a discussion for another book, some of which have already been written -- but that's another blog post.) There are plenty of other idols surrounding our sporting events, though, if you look hard enough.

One might think of the corporate sponsors, who now generally have their names spashed on everythign from the stadium itself to the timeouts, not to mention in signs all over the place. (I once went to a minor-league baseball game where the strikeouts were "sponsored by Circle K"; funny, but if Circle K didn't pony up the dough were the pitchers not allowed to strike anybody out?) Perhaps the cheerleaders on the sidelines become objects of, uh, we'll call it "worship" for now although we know darn well it's anything but. The coaches increasingly become figures of a particular kind of adulation. Celebrities who appear in the stands (particularly in Fox baseball broadcasts) might fall in here.

Perhaps even the players themselves, or more specifically the bodies of the players themselves, become these objects of devotion. This is of course particularly ironic in the case of football or other sports in which intense physical damage or harm is the frequent (or possibly inevitable -- yes, that entry again) consequence of the action on the field.

One of the questions that is inevitable is: how much does the spectacle surrounding the game a cover for the destructiveness of the game itself on the bodies of those who play, or how much does the game seek cover in spectacle? Or does the spectacle seek to draw attention to itself by attaching itself to the game?

In this context it's interesting to go back to Prince's halftime show, and to remember why such shows became the norm. In case you don't remember, or you're a little too young to remember, you kinda have to blame Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans for that.

In 1992 Fox (not yet privileged to broadcast the Super Bowl, I guess?) went after the NFL's halftime activities (at that point the most frequent performer for SB halftimes was still the Grambling University marching band, I think, and Up With People was another common guest performer), counterprogramming a strange little halftime called "Winter Magic" with an episode of their sketch-comedy program "In Living Color," starring Carrey and Wayans and others. The counterpunch was effective enough to draw more viewers than the Super Bowl halftime show. (This after the previous year's halftime show had been pre-empted, at least on the air, by ABC News coverage of Operation Desert Storm.) The NFL was going to have none of that; the following year's halftime show featured no less than Michael Jackson, and such major acts has been the trend ever since (with a brief detour into former major acts after sister Janet's exposed nipple).

Clearly in that case spectacle became a means of propping up the game. Or is it that clear? After all, the audience that flipped the channel for "In Living Color" did seem to return to the game right afterwards. But incomplete or distracted adulation of idols apparently doesn't cut it; it seems you are required to stay for the whole worship service.

This is far from a complete survey of the relationship of sport and spectacle, and football is far from the only sport to indulge in it to some degree. (At some point we really need an examination or dissection of the crazy ceremonies that precede soccer matches, especially FIFA-sponsored contests.)  We're not far from another round of the modern Olympics, where sport and spectacle are joined at the hip. But the relationship of sport and spectacle in a sport still grappling with its frequently destructive tendencies towards its players can't be neglected in seeking to sort out the allegiances of those who continue to participate (as fans or supporters) in the game, or the spectacle, or in some combination of both.

RIP Prince. Regrettably, the rain was not purple that night.

Sacking the Temple (A book chapter commentary)

You think I'm extreme? Let me introduce you to Shirl J. Hoffman.

Hoffman (that's a "he," right there with renowned sportswriter Shirley Povich and renowned theologian Shirley Guthrie) is Professor Emeritus of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He has served as the Executive Director of the American Kinesiology Association, and the editor of a notable text in that field, as well as the author of Sport and Religion and the particular object of interest for today's blog, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sport. Prior to his entry into academia he worked as a basketball coach. Hoffman also describes himself as an evangelical of long standing, son of a Baptist minister in western Pennsylvania,

Between all of these elements, Hoffman has become a man with major questions about the current state of sport, and evangelical enmeshment in it.

Good Game is a pretty thick volume, so I'm not going to try to discuss it all in one fell swoop. I will, however, offer up some description and commentary on Chapter 7 of that book, one which (although Hoffman doesn't draw it out as explicitly as possible) has great relevance to the frequent subject of this blog, the destructiveness of football to, in particular, the brains of several people who play it.

Chapter title: "Building and Sacking the Temple."

The chapter, as does the book in general, touches on and reaches across many different fields of encounter between sport culture and evangelical culture (Hoffman is quite specific about his own experience and his audience as a result). Among the topics in the chapter are the fad for "Christian" workout videos and proliferation of elaborate gymnasia in certain large churches; the tendency towards glorification of six-pack abs and such as somehow especially "Christian" as a reversal of long-standing suspicion of the body in Christian culture across the centuries; and the meat of the chapter, the proffering of sport as a way of building the body in such a "Christian" fashion flying in the face of prolific demonstration of sport (particularly highly competitive sports, including on the pro level) as having instead a destructive effect on the body, i.e. "sacking" the temple (the body) instead of building it up.

Those who have followed sports for some time will recognize some of Hoffman's examples; a fourteen-year-old Little Leaguer whose arm broke in two places in delivering a pitch (shades of major leaguer Dave Dravecky, whose own arm-snap was a lot more public when it happened and who also gets a mention in the chapter); the damage of boxing; Mike Webster, Terry Long, and Andre Waters; a litany of bodily injuries as described by former major-league catcher Bob Brenly, not atypical of what many ex-catchers describe; the romanticism of injury (both receiving and inflicting) by former pro footballers like Don Meredith, Michael Strahan (yes, the guy next to Kelly Ripa each weekday morning), and Lawrence Taylor (the guy who broke Joe Theismann); the frequent concussions of the likes of Al Toon, Steve Young and Troy Aikman (who is quoted as incredulously wondering "How in the world could anybody endure this for 10 years?") and former athletes, especially devout evangelicals like Orel Hershiser and Kevin Seitzer (as well as Dravecky) citing their faith as the explicit reason they were eager to push themselves to return from injury (multiple beanings in Seitzer's case).

Football, perhaps the most exalted sport in the evangelical culture Hoffman addresses, doesn't come in for particular exaltation in Hoffman's view. To Hoffman, in particular because of its far more widespread participation and its hold on American culture, football is a "greater threat to health than boxing" (178). Hoffman cites the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research and its implication of football in the greatest number of catastrophic injuries, notes football's responsibility for 68% of the 62,000 high school sports injuries reported annually, and also cites former San Diego Chargers staff psychiatrist Arnold Mandell's experience with the "carnage" up-close.

In short, in Hoffman's words, "[I]t is impossible to overstate football's assault on the dignity of the human body" (179).

This is a serious charge to come from Hoffman, who is quite interested in a theology of the body as a cite of the Imago Dei. The Incarnation, that mystery in which the Divine took on human flesh not as a cheap suit but as a real and concrete identity, is a major source of Hoffman's distress at the destructive nature of modern sport. Frankly, it's hard to argue against the thought. One doesn't need to slip into undue body adulation to find it hard to stomach how much modern sports (not just football, but certainly it stands out) wreaks harm and not help on the human bodies that throw themselves into it.

Though Hoffman does not expand on his concerns about football greatly here (his net is wide enough to cover all sports), his concerns are highly informative when considering the ethical implications of participation in football as a fan/supporter/consumer of sports. He has plenty to say about that too, but that will wait for another time.

Hoffman, Shirl James. Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010.

Damage unseen

My sports fandom sometimes comes with a serious dark side.

Interestingly, it shows itself most often in connection with college basketball. I still consider myself a baseball fan first and foremost, and baseball can leave me heartbroken and frustrated and even angry sometimes, but not really dark in the way of which I speak.

I've become more of a soccer fan of late, and flopping drives me nuts. Fan behavior can get me angry (no, Portland Timbers fans, it is not acceptable to cheer for Sporting KC's goalie to be concussed and to interfere with the trainer trying to examine him by thowing stuff on the field -- I was watching, I saw), and I can be heartbroken over a bad result (the shot hit both posts, really?), but again, not quite the dark side.

But college basketball? Serious dark side.

It showed up last night. The Kansas Jayhawks (KU was my last teaching stop) found themselves in a heated and extended battle with their conference rivals, the Oklahoma Sooners. First Kansas built a big lead; then Oklahoma came back and built up their own big lead. Regulation time ended in a tie. So did the first overtime. So did the second overtime. Finally, in the third overtime, Kansas outlasted Oklahoma 109-106, a score more suggestive of the NBA than the NCAA.

So, plenty of opportunity for frustration, particularly with one Buddy Hield.

Hield is the Sooners' best player. And he's really good. This isn't new, but the performance he turned in last night was next-level stuff. Hield dropped 46 points on the Jayhawks, and did so with some ridiculous shots. And at least after some of those shots I caught myself wondering why one of the Jayhawks didn't body-check Hield into the upper seats of Allen Fieldhouse. Dark side. Not really an acceptable way to think, particularly for a pastor. At least I wasn't with anybody at the time.

This opens up a question about how we relate to sports as "participants" (fans, consumers, whatever you choose to call it) and how that participation affects us. There are many who can watch a game and be largely unaffected by it aside from a basic happiness if their team wins or unhappiness if they lose. I kinda envy them sometimes. But then sometimes I don't. There is really very little like the sheer sense of exhausted exhilaration that comes after a game like last night's contest.

But not all reactions are so joyous. There are those whose dark side goes much further than thinking about hard fouls. Bryan Stow could tell you about that if he were physically able, after being beaten within an inch of his life by two Los Angeles Dodgers fans, apparently for the "crime" of being a San Francisco Giants fan. That represents an extreme that, thankfully, is rarely enacted. Riots at matches or games would fall into the same category, thankfully. (Outright hooliganism, on the other hand, seems more of a case of violence using sports as an excuse, but that is a thought that would take much longer to unpack, on a subject that seems to be much less frequently enacted than in the past.)

There is, as has been alluded to in this blog in the past, nowadays the question of how much responsibility fans of football bear for the ongoing prevalence of traumatic brain injury and CTE in the game. Fans, after all, spend the money that is the lifeblood of the football empire. If the money dries up, there's a real good chance the game dries up. This is a real and challenging question.

But there's another question, related but different, that also has to be faced:

Are we harmed by watching?

Do we get numbed by seeing so many hits, so many concussions, so many subconcussve hits, so many injuries?

Do we damage ourselves by seeking out rationalizations or reasons to absolve ourselves when we watch? "I don't watch for the violence, I watch for the beauty ... " "It's their responsibility if they choose to play, not mine ... " "It doesn't make any difference if I don't watch, I'm just one person ... " "Watching my alma mater is different than watching the NFL ... " "People get hurt playing other sports, are we going to ban them too? ... " "Football is too important a part of our culture, it can't be changed ... " "A lot of players don't end up with this damage so it must be o.k. ..." "Technology will fix everything, they'll come up with the perfect helmet soon ... " and you can probably supply others.

How much do we damage our own ethical framework, our own moral centers, with such rationalizations in the face of undeniable damage to the bodies and brains of more than enough players to fill a team?

Does it do harm to us? Do we at least have the basic fortitude to pursue the question without hesitation?

(to be continued)

In this case, not the specific "brain trauma" I'm worried about...

Overreaction?

I'm not a parent. At this stage of my life it's not going to happen. So, I don't ever have to answer the question of whether I'd allow or encourage a son of mine to play football, at any age. (Frankly, if we'd ever had kids we'd be far more likely to nudge them towards music, which has its own character-building virtues.)

That doesn't stop me from wondering at the thought processes of those who either do have to make such decisions, or those who are in the professional medical position to do so. The former number has occasionally included some famous individuals, even football players, who have chosen to encourage their male children towards other pursuits.

I can only imagine that's a hard position to be in. One might think of, say, coal miners or factory workers who imagined themselves to be working in those fields so that their sons didn't have to do so (although I imagine there were also plenty who expected their sons to follow in their footsteps), but that's not quite the same thing. Playing Pop Warner football or even high school ball doesn't necessarily lead to an NFL career. I suppose there's a greater chance that playing Pop Warner or high school might be more likely to produce a desire to play in the NFL, but the Rolling Stones have the answer to that.

I have to imagine that it's a particularly challenging time to be a medical professional where this subject is concerned, though. By this time it's hard to imagine doctors being completely blind to CTE and its effects on individuals long-term. Even most NFL players don't stay in the game for twenty years, a la Mike Webster, but not all former NFL players who manifested the disease were that old -- think of Paul Oliver, who was only 29 at death, with advanced CTE. Chris Henry was only 26 when he died, also with CTE manifest in his brain; Adrian Robinson was only 25 when he committed suicide this past April, also showing the telltale markers of CTE. Advanced age isn't mandatory.

Of course, even younger players can manifest signs of potentially debilitating brain trauma, without having concussions, as this study among others reminds us. That study focuses on players in college, and not exactly football factories at that.

Fine. Just walk away after high school, right? Hmm...that might not even work out for the best. Even as that study insists that science can save us all, it also reminds that these things do start to show up in young players, and that concussions aren't required to do the damage. The particularly chilling part is that even an offseason doesn't always provide enough time for the traumatized brains to recover. And yes, even a few who didn't play beyond high school have ended up severely traumatized, apparently.

Even at the youngest levels these kinds of brain injury really can occur, in many different sports. One neurosurgeon/Pop Warner parent puts his opinion in writing here.

In "walking down the stairs" through these various age brackets and their potential for harm, I have to admit that I'd have a hard time with the idea of a child of mine playing football. If anything I'd be concerned that (despite the obvious genetic handicaps he'd bring to the game) he might be good at it. Do I then have the nerve to be vigilant about monitoring his brain health? Do I have the nerve to say "that's it, no more" if a young boy of mine suffers a concussion, as Dr. Powers says he will do above?

But as noted, I'm not a parent, so I'll never have that decision to make.

Anyway, it turns out that one of the doctors depicted in the movie Concussion (not a major character in terms of screen time, but an important one to the plot), discussed in the previous post on this blog, is now at work at the large state university in the town where I now live, and the local paper took note of that in today's edition. It's an interesting interview, in which he recalls the initial results and the pressure applied by the NFL (he was a co-author on the study the NFL demanded to have retracted).

And yet, at the end of that article, this physician pronounces those parents who decide to steer their children from football to be guilty of overreaction.

"Understandable overreaction," to be sure, but overreaction. Geez, how charitable of you.

It's pretty unlikely I'll ever meet the man (I am nobody, after all), but if it ever were to happen I'm not really sure I'd be interested in any long conversation with him. My contribution to the conversation would likely be kept to a question:

What would it take for you to decide that such a choice wasn't an "overreaction"? Dead children?

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...

The void

So, as you might have noticed if you have ever spent a lot of any time on this blog, there are some concerns about the long-term health effects of all those hits football players take.  And a significant part of this blog's concern is to try to determine just what the role of the fan, particularly the fan who also professes to be a follower of Christ, in responding to this sensitive issue and possibly forcing leagues or teams or programs to be accountable for how the athletes under their charge are treated. One hopes not everyone has to come to the conclusion I have reached, but the one thing on which I will insist is that, to confront this issue with anything like integrity, no options can be off the table. To presume that football must continue in basically the same form in which it currently exists -- or even that it must continue to exist at all -- is to abdicate responsibility.

With that in mind, it is challenging and a bit depressing to look into the literature in the fields of theology, Christian ethics, or pretty much anything vaguely related, and discover that ... there's not a lot out there. Not on the specific question of football brain trauma; I can of course acknowledge that it's still somewhat early in the process of understanding the issue. No, to be honest, there's not a lot out there on the general ethics of sports and injury, period, that might provide a foundation for addressing the contemporary issue.

Football, of course, has its history of fatalities in the game, well before the modern concussion-brain trauma wave with the attendant premature deaths and suicides. Things were bad enough in Teddy Roosevelt's day that he more or less called a summit to demand changes in the game to make it less fatal. Of course, at the time the fatal consequences of these injuries were much less separated from the immediate injury; players died on the field or soon afterwards from those injuries.  While that still happens even today, it is mostly restricted to high school players. Occasional debilitating injuries can happen in the NFL or NCAA, the type that result in paralysis, for example, and the occasional death resulting from practice in extreme heat (see Stringer, Korey) also occurs, although teams are at least a little quicker to recognize those hazards and act accordingly, although it doesn't necessarily happen until after a player like Stringer dies.

No, part of the challenge here is that the fatal consequences can be years separated from the immediate blow or blows that led to the brain deterioration. This opens up a more challenging ethical front to consider. However, there isn't necessarily a very strong foundation of dealing with injury and its long-term consequences from an ethical point of view.

Players in many sports have experienced injury that had adverse effect on their future health. Sometimes it was almost comical, unless you were the one suffering the effects. Legend has it (emphasis on "legend") that pitcher Carl Hubbell, one of the aces of the game back in the 1930s, had his arm so affected by his use of the screwball that in his later life his left arm hung by his side with palm facing outward, instead of inward like most folks. (No, there's no photographic evidence out there.) Football players like Earl Campbell end up in wheelchairs or walkers with raging arthritis or other physical decimation. Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, in the years before his death in 2002, had to have both knees replaced and ended up with his once-strong right arm virtually unusable. Other such stories abound. 

You would think this might draw ethical or theological notice. Apparently not.

Leland Ryken, in his 1987 monograph Work & Leisure in Christian Perspective, wrote: 

            The criterion of physical and emotional health also sets boundaries for legitimate leisure pursuits. Some physical recreations simply have a bad track record for injuries. Boxing, professional wrestling, football, and perhaps skiing fall into this category. Devotees of such sports will not like my negative comments but the relative likelihood of injury in such sports is a moral issue.

Note that date: 1987. That's well before the broader world even began to have a clue about CTE. Give the man some credit for speaking out on the subject early, and speaking on the more general tendency for football to maim its players.

I don't know if Ryken's personal popularity or friendships took a hit after that publication, but there were not a whole lot of other authors taking up his concerns in the intervening years. Some general ethical or philosophical writing did examine sports injury generally, but mostly in the sense of its psychological impacts on the injured athletes. Some writing on pain as a component in physical training for athletes also pops up here and there, frequently in response to the kind of ecstatic embrace of pain one finds in pop-cultural consideration of athletics ("no pain, no gain") or the pain embracing biographies or autobiographies of athletes such as Lance Armstrong (although one may have to read that one a bit differently in retrospect). These ethical considerations focus on the athlete and his or her relation to pain, and largely do not deal with the fan's response or responsibility in the face of such injury.

Now, with a more insidious long-term threat having come to the fore, Christian thinkers seem to be having trouble coming to grips with it. Shirl James Hoffman, a kinesiologist who has of late in his career turned to the questions of Christian faith and sport, has touched on the issue slightly in his Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports, and Tom Krattenmaker does also in Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks Into Pulpits and Players Into Preachers. However, as you might guess from the respective titles, their primary interests are elsewhere; namely, in examining the uncomfortably close embrace of the church (its more evangelical precincts, primarily) and sports (most often football). That theologically suspect union is probably a factor in reluctance to look too closely at the brain-trauma issue, to be sure, but it is still a different subject.

On a more popular level, I can point you to two articles in The Christian Century. In one, Rodney Clapp desperately tries to reconcile his zeal for football with its more destructive contemporary results, and resorts to the hoary cliche that it's not the violence that he loves (notwithstanding the impossibility of separating whatever it is he loves about football from the violence). In the other, almost a year later, Benjamin Dueholm is somewhat more direct in facing up to what his article's subhead calls "the moral hazards of football." Even here, though, Dueholm is not strictly focused on the concussion-brain trauma issue -- he also casts a net over the then-current "bounty" scandal of the New Orleans Saints  -- but to his credit, he does cast at least some glance into the comments of early Christian writers such as Tertullian and Augustine, thus opening to a consideration of the moral hazards of entertainments not just on the on-field participants, but those in the stands as well.

So at minimum it seems safe to say there is some space for trying to look at this issue from the theological/ethical/philosophical point of view, and with the fan's particular place in the economy of injury at the forefront. In other words, I can't find a good reason to give this up.

Direct head-to-head contact. It doesn't seem to be going away, so neither can ethical inquiry...

Sports as vocation? Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, and...Frederick Buechner?

OK, this is some pretty epic God-trolling.

The Green Bay Packers defeated the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday, 27-17. This was a rematch of last season's NFC Championship game, in which Seattle won to get to the Super Bowl. After that game Russell Wilson, quarterback of the Seahawks, apparently engaged in a fairly typical bit of "jock theology" by attributing the Seahawks' victory to God.

It's pretty common to hear such utterances, and not just in sports. I didn't watch the Emmys Sunday night, but I would not be shocked if something similar were uttered once or twice there, as happens during other awards shows or ceremonies. Not every athlete does so, by any means, but plenty do.

What was unusual in this case was that another player, Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, offered a dissent to that theology. On a radio show he does in Milwaukee, a few days after that game, Rodgers took issue with Wilson's quote, and offered his own opinion: God really didn't care about the outcome of a football game. God would certainly care about the players on the field, but didn't choose sides. Wilson later doubled down on his claim, saying "I believe God cares about football. I believe God cares about everything he [sic] created." On which day of creation was that, I wonder?

Presumably the dust settled afterwards, after Wilson had to deal with the notion that apparently God wanted the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl. Then, after Sunday's rematch, Rodgers pulled out the needle. During his mandatory press availability after the game, Rodgers answered a question and then tacked on this: "And then getting help from God. I think God was a Packers fan tonight, so he [sic] was taking care of us."

Zing.

There's really no other possibility here: Rodgers, no atheist himself, was needling Wilson. I've not heard any word of a response from Wilson. Perhaps Rodgers was also nursing a reaction to the preseason injury to Packers receiver Jordy Nelson, which was declared an act of God by the Detroit Lion who delivered the hit. (Full disclosure: this blog has cited Rodgers as a sports good guy before.)

You're probably not surprised my position, though not exactly aligned with either, falls a lot closer to Rodgers's than Wilson's. God certainly cares about the players on the field, and grieves any injuries on the field as much as God grieves a cancer diagnosis or casualties of war. But God rooting for one team or the other? Seems highly unlikely. Something similar was once expressed by columnist Rick Reilly (quite possibly the only thing he ever got right), in a column framed around an unexpected return by Jesus to serve as a closer for the Cincinnati Reds. In the fictional press conference after, Jesus offers the advice what we, fans or athletes, should "please stop praying for wins. Put yourself in my position. If your kids were playing each other, who would you root for?"

But Rodgers's position--God cares about the players, not about the score--does raise some questions itself. If God really doesn't care about results, the idea of playing football (or any other sport, to be clear) for a living gets a little weird (and the whole business of collegiate athletics even stranger). Clearly we humans care, an awful lot, about who wins and who loses. We care to a degree that ginormous sums of money are spent on watching the games, either live in person or on television; millions upon millions of dollars are spent on identifying ourselves with our chosen teams by clothing or furniture or car flags or what not; millions are spent (legally or otherwise) betting on who will win or lose; billions are spent on facilities in which to play the games, billions on the rights to televise the games, billions on the right to advertise during the games.

Needless to say, those billions could do a lot of good applied elsewhere.

Add in the degree to which these games inflict harm on the human body, that thing that was (unlike football, Russell Wilson) created by God and created in the image of God, and after a certain point it's hard not to wonder: is playing sports really a good vocation?

Having introduced that word, "vocation," I now turn to an unlikely source: novelist and essayist (and Presbyterian pastor) Frederick Buechner. Buechner is one of those rare theologically-inclined writers that both evangelicals and mainliners can both appreciate, and is eminently quotable. In fact, one of his most widely quoted essays touches on the very concept of vocation, and what constitutes a real vocation, a "work a person is called to by God."* One sentence is most commonly cited, but I'd like to invoke the larger passage for the context it provides:

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren't helping your patients much either.Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.  (Originally published in Buechner's Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC)

There's a lot to unpack in this, to be sure. That last, bolded sentence is the one most people quote, and it's stellar to be sure. But taken without the previous context, I fear it loses a bit of its punch. One can talk about meeting the world's "deep hunger," but not all hungers fall into the category of need, as Buechner describes in the previous paragraph.

Where does the role of athlete fall vocationally by such a description? One presumes the athletes who participate in their respective sports take joy in doing so, or hopefully are able to walk away if not. We know, of course, that not everybody finds themselves in work that brings anything close to that kind of fulfillment, and even the most joyful vocations are also royal pains on occasion. But presumably, the athlete on some level plays for the joy of doing so.

But what about the other half of that equation? I don't believe it's all that hard to argue that there is a deep hunger for what the athlete offers. But does hunger truly equal need here? Does the world really need football, or soccer, or baseball or basketball or rugby or lacrosse or curling?

It certainly can offer good things. I still maintain there is a particular thrill, the thrill of truly not knowing how the particular drama before you will end, whether the Hail Mary pass or the long fly ball will be caught, that doesn't truly have an equal in other fields of human endeavor. Reading a new book provides the uncertainty, but it is a singular endeavor, not a communal one. A new play or a new musical work may provide that communal thrill, but frankly those don't come along that often (and after a few times you know how Henry V or Beethoven's Ninth end). Every game is new. Just because Team A has won all their games and Team B has lost all theirs doesn't prevent Team B from beating Team A. The slap-hitting shortstop can drive the ball out of the park; the backup quarterback can lead the game-winning drive.

But does this hunger rise to the level of need? And does the increasing baggage of the destruction of human bodies weigh against sports (football in particular to be sure, but all sports to some degree) as a vocation, as a meeting of the world's need?

We don't get to skirt the question.

Do we need sports?

*Of course Buechner's is not the only possible description of vocation, but other such definitions will likely raise similar questions.

Now be nice, boys...

Hallowed ground

As has been alluded in early posts, the title of this blog alludes to a saying that was heard in precincts where I was born and raised (south Georgia, remember), typically spoken about football but applicable to other sports in other parts of the country. It would serve as a response to charges that folks in those parts treated football like a religion. "Football ain't a religion," would come the response. "It's way more important than that."

The saying itself belies the degree to which many of the rituals that accrue around sports have a quasi-religious nature, and are certainly performed with a fervor that surpasses the religious devotion of many if not most of the faithful. This does in fact hold true for many sports beyond football; I'd even suggest that soccer, with its supporter groups and elaborate pre-game ceremonies, might be even closer to religious ritual in its practice. Having been a couple of different times to matches as part of a visiting supporter's group for Sporting Kansas City I noticed at least two different ways in which the experience paralleled that of attending a new church for the first time: strangers bonded quickly around a common passion, and I didn't know all the songs.

It may be that the most intriguing or disturbing manifestation of this particular devotion is in the request, or occasionally the attempt, to dispose of the remains of a devoted fan on the team's playing field.

The impetus for this reflection is this feature piece from the Washington Post, reflecting on the phenomenon as it attaches to college football fields, particularly in but not limited to the Southeastern Conference. A recent example of the phenomenon is featured in the article, in which the infamous 2013 Iron Bowl, the one in which Auburn defeated Alabama on a miracle-like final play (again with the quasi-religious stuff!). In the crush after the game an unknown fan surreptitiously deposited the cremains of another (presumed) fan on the turf, near the sideline. A tweeted picture of the discolored turf can be found in the article.

And there's the rub; cremated remains aren't particularly good for athletic turf.

College football teams as a rule have rules against such a thing, for that very reason. As a turf expert at Auburn notes, the cremains burn pretty much any plant, including that lovely green turf your athletic heroes tread upon.  Obviously this doesn't stop these particularly single-minded fans, who don't seem to mind doing damage to the field they so revere.

My preacher-mind goes a few different directions here: (1) to see such devotion directed towards a very human and very flawed (to the point of corrupt, far too often) institution (as opposed to the One we are charged to proclaim, the only One truly worthy of such devotion) only points out just how far the church has fallen, and how little impression it evidently makes upon a segment of the population that is frequently presumed to be quite religious (but then, we knew that already); (2) the author of this book probably has nightmares about this sort of thing; and (3) we've all known church members like that, the type whose seeming outward devotion masked a near-maniacal urge to control or to impose their will upon the church/program. At minimum, after all, this is a kind of trespassing and (one could argue) vandalism. Why do you want to do that to your favorite team?

This article also appeared in the local paper, with an interesting super-headline: "SEC: Where Sports and Religion Meet." Now I hate to break it to you SEC partisans, but this phenomenon hardly began with you. The aforementioned sport of soccer also has enough of an issue with this practice that English clubs actually have established guidelines for the practice (if you're a fan of Blackburn Rovers you're in luck; Chelsea, not so much), and fans of the Argentinian club Boca Juniors can actually buy burial plots in a cemetery dedicated for players and fans of the team; you can be buried among your club heroes.

In the States baseball has also inspired such acts of devotion, with Wrigley Field in Chicago a particular object of such passion. It's not hard to guess why, in a way; the team is notorious for its extended championship drought and the long-suffering fans who have waited literally all their lives for a Cubs World Series win, so you can imagine those fans wanting to "be there" when it finally happens. Not surprisingly, more than a few Cubs fans have copped to scattering remains on the warning track or somewhere else in the park, occasionally without particularly trying to be sneaky about it. At least one former player was also supposedly meant to have his cremains scattered there, and a dispute has arisen over the intention of another Cubs great to be similarly scattered there (there was a quote from him many years ago, but no official documentation of such wishes in his case).

You can probably guess I find the practice a little distressing. At least in the case of Wrigley Field, though (or most of those hallowed SEC and other gridirons), there's the logic of scattering those ashes on, well, grass or dirt. I can't quite understand the thought of one devoted fan of his local team who got somebody to dump his ashes on the field of his local team, the Toronto Blue Jays, last year.

The Blue Jays play in the Rogers Centre. It used to be known as the SkyDome.

As most old domes do, that field has artificial turf.

Think about that one.

Addendum: a more detailed post on the subject and the compelling power of stadiums and such places for many devoted fans. 

The official Auburn Turf Team image of the 2013 Iron Bowl ashes (@AuburnTurf)

God hates Jordy Nelson!

In writing an issue-oriented blog, and trying to keep to some kind of consistent schedule, there are days when it can be challenging to decide what particular aspect of the topic to address. Hmm, I just hit the CTE issue *again* last time...it's too soon and a little too ghoulish to write about the IndyCar fatality...haven't hit basketball in a while... .

And then there are days when a topic falls into your lap, or drops out of the sky and slaps you around a couple of times until you give in.

The NFL preseason is underway, which means key players are already getting injuries that will keep them out for part or all of the upcoming season. This is not new; it happens every preseason, to the point where some people wonder if preseason games are all that good of an idea, if perhaps the preseason should be abolished or at least shortened.

The part I missed, though, is that apparently God is the one choosing which players will get hurt.

Introducing the theological stylings of Glover Quin, a safety for the Detroit Lions, after a play in which his tackle on Green Bay Packers receiver Jordy Nelson left the latter player with a torn ACL and likely to miss several weeks of play. You will see Quin's words:

But as part of the answer, Quin also said "God had meant for Jordy to be hurt."

That was on Monday. After that touched off an agitated reaction in the media (social and otherwise), some media member on Tuesday came back with a question about that answer; a "did you really mean what you said?" moment. Quin responded with classic "I'm sorry you got offended" patter:

Quin clarified his comment Tuesday, saying he didn't believe he said anything that would have caused a backlash, but "obviously, it upset a whole bunch of people."

OK, then. One can already observe that Glover Quin has a pretty insular religious outlook, if it didn't occur to him that such a remark -- that God had it in for Jordy Nelson this season -- might tick some people off.

More:

"I feel like injuries are going to happen, same way Jordy got hurt," Quin said Monday. "I hate that Jordy got hurt, but in my belief and the way that I believe, it was God had meant for Jordy to get hurt. If he wouldn't have got hurt today, if he wouldn't have played in that game, if he wouldn't have practiced anymore and the next time he walked on the field would have been opening day, I feel like he would have got hurt opening day.

So this is less a theology than a recapitulation of the Final Destination movies, then?

I'm being somewhat flippant here only because otherwise I'd be swearing a lot. This isn't Christian theology. I say that in the sense that it, so far as it is a theology, is completely uninformed by the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is not Christian because there is nothing Christlike about it. Trying to connect this particular theological position to anything Jesus ever said or did will result in your lying.

It's a very self-serving position, in that it allows Quin to bear no consequences for his actions. It's not wildly different in that respect from reaction after another hit on a quarterback over the weekend, in which the Baltimore Ravens' Terrell Suggs blasted Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Sam Bradford after he had handed the ball off to a running back, specifically diving at Bradford's surgically repaired knees. (By all means click on those links and enjoy the kabuki theater of dueling coachspeak. Harry Frankfurt would have a field day.) If Quin is really feeling full of himself he can simply claim he was God's instrument for administering the required injury to Nelson. At any rate, he can't be blamed.

(Just so we understand each other, Glover, if in twenty years you can't remember your own name and get lost trying to go to the bathroom, we're to assume that's just what God meant to happen to you?)

I'm not naive; Glover Quin is hardly the only person in the world who holds some variant of this belief. It will, however, get a little extra push from its having been uttered by an NFL player, even a rather anonymous one like Quin. And there isn't a preacher in the country with enough pull to refute it, no matter how correct the preacher might be (and yes, there are plenty of preachers who will preach exactly the same thing).

God was not up in heaven plotting how to tear Jordy Nelson's ACL, any more than God was plotting how to kill Justin Wilson on Sunday at Pocono raceway, or Mike Webster after his NFL career. It's ghoulish and hateful to suggest otherwise, particularly when your actions played a part in the injury (like it or not).

If this seems a little personal to me, well, it is, to some degree. It was just three years and a day ago that I came out of my anesthetic fog after a colonoscopy to be told by the gastroenterologist that I had cancer of the rectum. By Quin's articulated theological position, God was going to do that to me at some point or other. God is Quin's agent of suffering, by his own admission.

Now I'll concede a lot of things about that cancer experience (for the uninitiated, I've been clean for a couple of years now). I'll concede that my experience of cancer was pretty mild, compared to some (I'm reminded of this frequently in my current vocation). I'll concede that I was in a pretty good place to be treated for it. And I'll even concede that it probably worked out better that it happened to me while a student at seminary than if I had still been in my previous career as a college professor; in retrospect I doubt I'd have been able to carry that load all that well, while I got through that year at seminary o.k. partly due to a lot of help and being too stupid to know what I wasn't capable of doing.

So, I've had some brush with traumatic illness, and there wasn't a headhunting safety or linebacker around to blame. (For what it's worth, according to my oncologist at the time, the most common risk factor for rectal cancer -- as opposed to colon or colorectal cancer -- is ... a family history of cancer.)

And the notion that God did that to me, again, has nothing of Christ in it. It might have some badly interpreted Paul in it (no, that old saw about "all things work together for good" does not mean it was good for me to have cancer, or for Jordy Nelson to have his ACL ripped; God will work through the bad circumstance, but that doesn't make the circumstance good or God-caused), but no Christ.

But thanks to Glover Quin, that's the theology, that's the view of Christianity that somebody out there is going to take in today.