Weekly Reader: Exclusive/Elite/Premiere

And the Weekly Reader returns...

Do did you hear what Giancarlo Stanton did last night?

In Major League Baseball's pre-All Star Game slugfest, the Home Run Derby, Stanton muscled out sixty-one (yes, 61) home runs across the event's three rounds, crushing the event's previous record by forty or so. Yes, he won, and caused his team some marketing headaches along the way.

Stanton is an interesting case. He's mostly noted as a power hitter, although he's become a pretty decent fielder and outfield arm along the way. He plays for a franchise, the Miami (formerly Florida) Marlins, that has only existed since 1993 (I remember watching on TV as Charlie Hough, the ancient knuckleballer, pitch their first game), yet has two World Series titles and the honor of benefitting from the Chicago Cubs' epic collapse in the 2003 NLCS (seriously, if you're still blaming Steve Bartman at this point you are epically stupid. Bartman didn't give up eight runs and drop everything on the field. Just stop). They are mostly remembered for almost immediately dismantling both of their championship teams in economically-driven "fire sales," having a tightwad owner and his massively jerky son-in-law as a leading team official, having fired Joe Girardi as manager after one season (a season for which he won Manager of the Year, mind you) and thus freeing him to be scooped up by the New York Yankees, seriously bilking Miami-Dade County into building a wildly expensive but admittedly beautiful new stadium, and generally being ill-supported by the nominally "home" fans who turn out to cheer the other team at least as often as the Marlins.

Stanton is also an example of what threatens to become a vanishing breed in Major League Baseball; the scouting find. He wasn't a product of the paid-coaching, travel-team, tournament system that is increasingly becoming the prime conduit for baseball talent, teams with words like "elite" and "premiere" bandied about playing in tournaments that are "exclusive" and "elite" themselves. He, uh, played for his high-school team. How passé.

Andrew McCutcheon of the Pittsburgh Pirates has, at least somewhat by choice, become the current poster boy for the potential loss of access to major league-worthy talent that arises from such a system. If an area AAU coach hadn't wandered over to a field where a skinny 12-year-old kid from a nowhere town in Florida was playing in a youth league game, it's not at all clear whether McCutcheon would ever have been in a position for his evident skills to be seen by people that matter. And let's just say that Major League Baseball would be a lot poorer without the likes of McCutcheon and Stanton, who was found in a rather fluky scouting story himself.

Only so many versions of The Blind Side can play themselves out to find talent. There is a real risk, as the travel-team system becomes more and more entrenched, that access to pro ball becomes a matter of who can pay up and who can't. And that would be deeply troubling, ethically and (dare I say?) theologically.

Other things worth reading this week:

*More on Brianna Scurry, former star goalkeeper for the USWNT, and her chosen role as brain-health advocate for women athletes.

*Syracuse University hires an ESPN executive as its new athletic director, more or less admitting that its athletic program is a content provider for TV. And this relates to the purposes of a university ... uh, well ... I'll get back to you on that one.

*Tim Duncan retired. I feel old. My time at Wake Forest was before his, but not by too much. His team took care of him, which helped him to play as long as he did. Radical concept, that. And if you thought Duncan was all stoic and humorless, think again.

*Speaking of sports that rely on travel and "elite" teams, US Soccer has a spanking new training ground for its elites under construction, in KCK.

*At least one writer is ready for "God Bless America" to be gone from the seventh-inning stretch.

*Jordan Spieth won't play golf in Rio. I hate to be alarmist and all, but really, I can't blame him.

Back in football:

*Roger Goodell shows his tobacco-industry learnin'.

*More college football players are joining in head-trauma lawsuits against the NCAA. At some point somebody's going to have to figure out that they really will need to sue the "university" for whom they played.

*The Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky story is just getting uglier.

*Since retiring, Calvin Johnson, aka Megatron, has been talkative. Concussions and painkillers and not coming back. Oh, my.

*And at least one NFL player has an idea of what players might be able to use instead of those painkillers.

Have at it, folks.

He hits baseballs far. Very far. It would be sad if he were getting broken down in football instead.

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.

Book Commentary -- Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America

Diane Roberts, Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. New York: Harper-Collins, 2015.

More book commentary, while I'm completely blocked on an Ash Wednesday message...for tomorrow.

Have you ever had the experience of hearing a speaker with whose argument you agree, and whose basic points you readily acknowledge as valid and factual, and yet all you can think as they continue to speak is "oh, good LORD, get ON with it already!!"? That's roughly the experience of reading Diane Roberts's Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.

Roberts is a darling of the NPR crowd and contributor to the likes of Oxford American (vouching for her Southernness cred with a particular crowd) and the Guardian (international credibility). She's a faculty member at FSU (where she also studied, along with a degree from Oxford), after some years at the University of Alabama. And she's a college football addict, the type who tosses around phrases like "these are my people" when talking about college football and its fans. This after conducting a thorough and thoroughly snarky dissection of everything those fans love and represent.

The book is, cleverly, divided into four quarters with a pregame, halftime, and postgame. Each quarter has five chapters organized around a general theme, with the exception of the third quarter, on gender and college football, which inexplicably has only two. The other three quarters touch on the tribal hatreds of college football, religion (read: Christianity) and college football, and race and "Southernness", respectively, although the last chapter of the fourth quarter diverges somewhat into the saga of Bobby Bowden's fall at FSU. (The "halftime" chapter mostly focuses on the hazing/murder of the drum major of Florida A & M University's Marching 100 in 2011, with a few mentions of other band misbehaviors.)

Clearly all of these subjects provide ample fodder for one who wants to take college football apart, and Roberts pulls out all the stops in doing so. She doesn't spare her beloved FSU by any means (the Jameis Winston debacle gets a major airing-out) but plenty of schools get skewered.

For those who know Roberts's NPR commentary or other writing projects, the voice will be familiar. It may come off a bit more strident than in some cases. Possibly this comes, one might suspect, with taking a hatchet to a phenomenon to which one has already declared one's loyalty and unwillingness to give up. The whole tone of going on and on and on gets more than a little annoying.

There are parts of the book that are actually indispensible. It is particularly touching and harrowing when Roberts returns to her experiences tutoring athletes at FSU lo, those many years ago, young boy-men given to arrogance on the field, not always able to live up to that bravado when confronted with things like classes that are beyond their capacity. When the humans who are both at the center of and decidedly at the bottom of the pecking order in college football come into focus, the book is actually compelling.

Of course, there is one issue that Roberts somehow manages to dance around for most of the book's longer-than-it-looks length, one which this blog doesn't allow you to overlook, of course -- the issue which is largely unavoidable in football these days. And yet largely, it is avoided here, or made mostly an object of snark.

It seems that Roberts mostly regards the "concussion crisis" as (a) the ultimate bogeyman that will finally undo the NCAA (possibly, I guess), or (b) the ultimate bogeyman that will take away her beloved college football. Of course Roberts would never be so gauche as to say that directly, but that's about the only thing one can draw from her few comments on the subject. You would think that an academic thinker like Roberts might do more with the brain-trauma issue -- connect it to the racial issue, as more affluent (and frequently more white) players might have the luxury to pull a Chris Borland, while poorer (and frequently blacker) athletes will see themselves with fewer options. But really, Roberts just doesn't seem up to the task of confronting that issue squarely.

But I suppose when one of the key phrases of her "pregame" is "I accept and embrace my Inner Barbarian," and she waxes poetic about being unable to quit the game the way one can't quit a bad boyfriend, that was probably too much to hope for.

[An aside: stepping back from Roberts's tome, this seems like a place to point out a basic ethical principle at play here. For her being a college football addict is an identity, one bred into her over pretty much her whole life. For any Christian, though, this is an excuse, not a reason. From the point of view of this blog (seeking to understand and act on football and its damage to children of God from a Christian-ethical viewpoint), we have to do better than retreating to talk of identity. After all, people who are actually following Christ, or even trying to do so, have a higher identity, do we not? And when that identity (for which the word "Christian" used to be useful before becoming overly politicized) comes into conflict with any of our other human identities, or when those human identities demand of us compromises that cannot be squared with our allegiance to Christ, then which allegiance is supposed to win?]

Finding (something like) joy in highly imperfect teams

By all means this blog should be a daily affair.

It isn't as if there doesn't appear every day some kind of story pointing out the horrors associated with modern professional athletics.  And clearly, there aren't thousands of people out there trumpeting those stories and considering their faith implications in the way this blog means to do.

The NFL has admitted, in a legally binding way, that they estimate about 33% of the players in the game will end up with some form of long-term traumatic brain injury.  One would think this would draw more attention than it has, the idea that as you look at the field on any given play, seven of the twenty-two players involved will end up with Alzheimer's or CTE or ALS as a result of the very activity you are watching, particularly on top of the outcry over the domestic violence revelations about Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson and multiple others.  The collective response to this bit of data was "meh, whatever, pass the salsa." Pro tip, gang: if you say you're angry, but you keep watching/going to games, your anger is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, college football offered its own little horror show when Michigan played Minnesota.  When a Minnesota defender treated Michigan QB Shane Morris as a human piñata (a hit, leading with helmet, that should have gotten the defender ejected, but did not) and the quarterback staggered about like Foster Brooks on a really bad day, not only did the player remain in the game for another play, but returned to play before any kind of medical clearance was given.  The levels of failure in that incident are multiple -- Michigan coach Brady Hoke was guilty, but he was not the only one -- and after a few days protest, that story has obediently gone away.

We of course could point to the way a big-time college football program can corrupt the entire justice system of not only a large university, but an entire city.  We could point to the insuperable disconnect between the idea of a university -- learning, ideas, mental growth and all that -- being fronted by a game that destroys the very capacity to engage in those things at all, in a nonzero portion of its players.  We could also talk about the increasing public sentiment that college players ought to be free to profit from themselves or their image or such, selling autographs and the like.  We could talk about how the NFL, with all of its other public sins yet unatoned, will pursue to the death a player who dares wear the wrong headphones on the sideline or in a postgame press conference.

All of those should be addressed.

But I am not an automaton.  And I'm certainly not a professional blogger or columnist.  Sometimes I need to have fun with sports, even amidst all the other garbage.

Fortunately, other sports have come through for me.

I've made no secret of my baseball fandom.  And that sport, vexing though it is with its insistence on forced, non-inclusive patriotism in the middle of the seventh inning, has come through for me.

First, in person: on the last weekend of the season, taking advantage of cheap nosebleed seats and my lack of scheduled activities, I made it to Washington for a game for the first time this season, just as Nationals pitcher Doug Fister threw a three-hit gem of a game against the Miami Marlins.  (Mind you, this would get upstaged a couple of days later when Jordan Zimmermann threw a no-hitter on the last day of the regular season, but I wasn't there for that.)  It was a joy to see, even if I have no particular reason to care for the Nationals other than that they're the closest team to where I currently live.*  Excellent pitching (albeit against a badly weakened team -- the main reason I had ordered that ticket was the hope to see Giancarlo Stanton of the Marlins crush something, but he was out for the season by then), a few fine defensive plays, enough hits -- all in all a great game at which to be a spectator, on a bright, not-too-hot late-September afternoon.

You get an interesting view from the nosebleed seats on the third-base side at Nationals Park.

*Note: by my normal measure of such things the Nationals would be "my" team under the "Take me out to the ballgame" clause, which urges the fan to "root, root, root for the home team."  However, in my current state of suspended animation, I have not, during my time in seminary, thought of the Richmond area as "home," simply because I never thought of it as permanent in any way.  If I do end up remaining in the area, then it's likely that my allegiances will shift their way more or less by default -- I inevitably end up rooting for the "home" team.  (This is why I can never move to New York or Boston.)  But for now, about the only formal marker of "home"-ness I have is the fact that as far as the Presbyterian Church (USA) is concerned, I'm under the care of the Presbytery of Northern Kansas and First Presbyterian Church in Lawrence is where my membership lies, which gives me the excuse to follow the Royals this postseason.  More on that below.

With the end of the regular season and the beginning of the playoffs, I got my first reminder of why I put up with all the other stuff; sometimes, in a way that doesn't involve violence or destructive injury, a sporting event will give you something that pretty much nothing else on earth can do; the surprise of imperfect teams playing almost perfectly.

The aforementioned Kansas City Royals faced the Oakland A's in the AL wild-card game, for the right to get crushed by the Angels, the team based Anaheim with Mike Trout and Albert Pujols.  The Royals, as you might have noticed, haven't been good for a while.  They won the World Series in 1985 and were apparently so overwhelmed by the experience that they haven't even made the playoffs since, until this year.  Many of those non-playoff teams were also non-winning, non-competitive, and even non-watchable.

I actually wrote about the Royals in one of my earliest blog posts, more than three years ago, on the occasion of the MLB debut of one Eric Hosmer.  He was, as much as anything, the sign; good things were coming, even to a team so downtrodden as the Royals.  Others followed after, like power-hitting third baseman Mike Moustakas, catcher Salvador Perez, pitcher Danny Duffy, outfielder Wil Myers.  Trades added players like shortstop Alcides Escobar, outfielder Lorenzo Cain, and in the most controversial of trades, pitchers James Shields and Wade Davis, for whom Myers and pitcher Jake Odorizzi and others were given up.  Myers promptly won the AL Rookie of the Year award last year and helped the Tampa Bay Rays, one of my previous home teams, get into the playoffs.  Meanwhile the Royals made some noise in 2013 but fell short of the playoffs, although they did achieve their first winning record in ten years.  Guys like Hosmer and Moustakas, despite all that promise and hope, struggled at times, Moustakas even to the point of being demoted to the minors earlier this year.

Very seldom do you see a team go "all in" as the Royals did with this trade.  Shields, the major piece -- an established and successful starting pitcher -- would only be under team control for two years.  After this season he becomes a free agent, and the low-budget Royals are extremely unlikely to be able to keep him.  After Shields and promising youngster Yordano Ventura, the remainder of the starting rotation is o.k. at best, although the bullpen is strong.  In short, the pressure on the Royals in that wild-card game was perhaps stronger than for most franchises.

They won, of course, with multiple comebacks and despite some, er, interesting managerial choices.  Then they swept through the Angels as if destined to do so, with more freaky extra-inning wins.  And now they've won the first two from the Baltimore Orioles.  The team that couldn't hit homers this season has a slew of them so far in the playoffs.  They've made crazy diving catches in the outfield (mostly Lorenzo Cain) and gotten enough hitting to shake off their unusually shaky performances from Shields and Ventura.

This is about as imperfect a team as you will find.  They play defense well, they have good speed, and they have a strong bullpen.  Other than that, there's really very little to suggest that this team has any business in the postseason at all, much less that they should be unbeaten in six games so far.

I am not one who likes to stretch metaphors too far, but darn it, the Royals are living out the whole idea of great things being accomplished through most imperfect human vessels.  They've been very lucky, no doubt.  But they've done things right when they've had to do so, and so far they're riding a wave of good feeling and hope the likes of which have not been seen in Royals country in decades (three of 'em, to be precise).  If you ever needed to be reminded that the perfect doesn't always win, the Royals are your bunch.  And if you want to theologize about God being able to do great things through us highly imperfect humans, they're your sermon illustration.

The Royals and baseball, though, haven't been my only source of sporting enlightenment of late.  For only the second time in my life I attended a Major League Soccer match, when Sporting Kansas City traveled to Washington to play DC United.  This was the Friday a week after the Nationals game, which meant I was getting to know US Highway 301 rather well.

I'd been to one league match before, the first one played at Sporting Park, a match that caused me to realize I actually liked this game and should probably follow it more closely, and which also aligned me to Sporting KC.  Though they have to come and play in DC at least once a season, every occasion before this one had conflicted with some immovable object on my calendar.  Finally this match came along free of schedule conflicts, and when the franchise came looking for area fans to comprise a supporters section, I grabbed a couple of tickets (although in the end my wife did not go due to cruddy weather and upcoming vocal obligations).

Side note: RFK Stadium has seen better days

This was a new experience for me.  The whole idea of a supporters section is to be visibly and audibly in support of the team, in this case the visiting team.  Sporting KC's staff coordinated the tickets for the group, and even sent staff members to be with the group and help keep a potentially unruly group of complete strangers together, to the point of arranging a security escort into the stadium as if we were a bunch of old-fashioned English hooligans.

The match ended in a scoreless draw, and aside from some harmless banter there was no trouble between us and the DC United fans.  (The only one I spoke to directly mostly wanted to gush about how good Sporting is, with which I agreed except for the then-current losing streak.)  I chanted and sang and clapped and even ended up in a picture on Twitter with a bunch of people I've never seen before and probably will never see again.  And yet, for that two hours, we were a unit, pulled together from diverse places (some actually drove from KC to be at the match) and pull for the common cause of the night.

There is some kind of mystery to that.  It doesn't always work out that way.  Interactions between opposing fans can get violent and tragic.  But when it comes to our team, it's amazing how quickly strangers can pull together, whether for the country in something like the World Cup, or for a team located too far away for any game other than this one.  Would that we could tap into that mystery for the bigger things in life.

I'm sure that soon enough I'll be unable to restrain myself from flaying the latest stupidity about football or the latest semi-racist NBA owner or whatever.  For now, I'm enjoying the imperfect perfection and the mystery of it all.

The football beatitudes

Blessed are the arrogant in spirit, for theirs is the SportsCenter sound bite.

Blessed are those who gloat, for they shall be revered.

Blessed are the proud, for they will inherit a place in the starting lineup.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for attention, even though they shall never be filled.

Blessed are the steroid cheaters at heart, for the worst they shall receive is a four-week vacation.

Blessed are the painmakers, for they shall be called the greats of the gridiron. 

Blessed are those who are mildly criticized for mouthing off; for theirs is the television analyst's chair when they have to retire.

Blessed are you when people fear you and speak in hushed whispers of your brutality and physical prowess for your own gratification.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in the Hall of Fame; for in the same way they remembered those players before you fondly when they could no longer remember their own careers.  

Blessed?

*Yes, obviously many of these same things could be said or adapted about athletes in other sports (I will get to ARod, eventually), but hey, I'm just trying to get into the spirit of the Super Bowl, okay?

Way more important than what?

A headlines roundup/linkfest in rant form:

/rant begins/

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

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

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

More important than getting through high school?

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

More important than having a functional country?

More important than being yourself?

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

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

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

More important than, basically, life?


/rant ends/

/for now/