As this is about as much holiday as I have coming up I am allowing myself a slight break this week on the ol' sports-faith-muckraking beat. Rather than a full-fledged blog entry, I'm working on the blog in a different way.
While real-life events virtually never seem to leave me short of material, I also want to open up an exploration of relatively recent literature on sports, which may open up avenues of thought on the intersection I'm trying to patrol. Thanks to some newly-recieved gift cards I'm loading up the ol' e-reader (nook, not Kindle) with some future reading on the subject (in addition to one hardcover received for Christmas as well).
First I'll mention two books already underway:
Sexton, John, with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz. Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game. New York: Gotham, 2013.
Upon first seeing this title a few weeks ago I was rather suspicious. Baseball geek that I am, I'm not a big fan of the more mystical, mumbo-jumbo-ish literature on the sport. Still, I decided I needed to take a look. So far (I'm three "innings" in -- apparently there is a Constitutional stipulation that any book or movie or series on baseball must be divided into "innings" instead of chapters or scenes) the volume (which derives from a seminar the author, president and professor at NYU, teaches on this same theme) manages to steer clear of such indulgences, although barely at times. Decidedly interfaith in scope, the book includes anecdotes and illustrations from the history of baseball, both well-known and more personal in the author's experience, and interweaves meditations on such themes as faith and doubt, "conversion" (leaving one's team behind, or having it leave you behind), miracles, blessings and curses, and other -- not a few of those sound familiar enough to a baseball fan or a theologian, for sure. For now it seems to be a book that can be read as deeply or as simply as one chooses; it can be a full-fledged meditation on how baseball and its impulses might become a starting point for a more overtly metaphysical journey, or it can be rendered as a simple set of sermon illustrations if one so chooses. More, I'm sure, when the book is completed.
Fainaru-Wada, Mark, and Steve Fainaru. League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle For Truth. New York: Crown Archetype, 2013.
Accompanied by the PBS documentary of the same title and filling in many of the gaps necessarily left behind in the brief scope of one broadcast, this book (by the author of Game of Shadows, the most successful exposé of baseball's steroid era so far) lays waste to the NFL's claims of ignorance at the effect of concussions and day-to-day head trauma on its players. It also exposes the creepy turns of those emerging organizations looking to engage in research on the brains of former players, and doesn't flinch from describing in awful detail the degeneration of those lives affected by CTE. A hard read. I'm close to three-quarters done.
Still to come:
Pomerantz, Gary M. Their Life's Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
No, I'm not a Steelers fan, nor have I ever been. But the Steelers, particularly the 1970s dynasty, have the unfortunate distinction of being at the epicenter of the earthquake rattling the NFL, with figures like Mike Webster and Terry Long numbering among the first publicly identified figures to be associated with the CTE diagnosis in the game.
Benedict, Jeff, and Armen Keteyian. The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football. New York: Doubleday, 2013.
Purports to be a look at the ugliness of the college football business, and where all the money goes.
Jackson, Nate. Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile. New York: Harper, 2013.
From the point of view of a former player, not a star, one who took HGH in an attempt to prolong his career, but apparently had enough forethought to seek out ways to spare his brain any further punishment during his career, among other things.
So there's gotta be more, right? Football can't be the only sport needing consideration, can it? So, if you've got any suggestions for books that invite further consideration please send them on. I'm not interested in gloppy homilies about the glory of this or that sport, the first one on the list notwithstanding. The warts can't be avoided if I'm going to get anywhere in this mission to understand where the business of sports collides with the honest pursuit of faithful justice.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Ryan Freel and the sorting point
I have admitted, in this space and others, that I can't really watch football anymore. I just can't. I keep up, to some degree, and I know that my Ph.D. alma mater is in the alleged national championship game for college football's Football Bowl Subdivision, and that the NFL franchise in the nation's capital is having a rotten year, but actually sitting and watching a game is beyond me at this point, when all I can do is wonder how many years that hit took off a player's memory or cognitive function.
I have also admitted, in this space and others, that I'm a big baseball fan.
Therefore, specifically because I know my own biases, I am compelled to devote this column to the first confirmed case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a Major League Baseball player.
Ryan Freel was a utility player. He played for several teams, the Cincinnati Reds for six years and spent shorter terms with the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, and Kansas City Royals. According to his own account, he suffered "nine or ten" concussions across the course of his career, from being hit in the head by pitches or other thrown balls, from collisions with opponents, teammates, bases, walls, and all sorts of other things. A sentence from the ESPN.com report linked above offers a pretty good description:
Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform."
He was the prototypical "scrappy" player, one who didn't necessarily have the natural gifts of other players but hustled relentlessly and played with reckless abandon, without regard for his own body -- a phrase which rings eerily prescient now, after Freel committed suicide one year ago Sunday (December 22).
Like so many football players after their careers ended, Freel's life after baseball was increasingly consumed, apparently, with symptoms like headaches, loss of attention or short-term memory, and swings from depression to explosive emotion, not to mention a family increasingly wondering what had happened to their son, husband, father.
Freel is somewhat of an atypical case for baseball. While players hit in the head by pitched balls can and do suffer concussions -- Justin Morneau (now of the Colorado Rockies), Brian Roberts (just signed by the New York Yankees after years with the Orioles) and Corey Koskie (once of the Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and Milwaukee Brewers) are examples of players whose careers were derailed by concussion-related symptoms -- most of baseball's concussion-sufferers have been catchers. Possibly the most well-known example is Mike Matheny, who actually had to retire from baseball due to ongoing symptoms. Matheny may also offer some hope; he is now manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, taking that job five years after his retirement, and having pretty respectable success in it (the Cards made it to the World Series this year, in case you've forgotten). Possibly the highest-profile catcher to see his career affected by concussion symptoms is Joe Mauer, the All-Star catcher of the Minnesota Twins, who is moving to first base next season (the position occupied by Justin Morneau, when health allowed, until he was traded this past season) in hopes of avoiding any more concussions.
Catchers are easily put in the most situations that might lead to concussions and their complications. In addition to the risks any batter faces of taking a pitch to the head (rare, and frowned upon), catchers also face particular risks associated with the position they play. When a fastball upwards of 90 mph (sometimes even 100 mph or more) tips just slightly off the bat of a major-league hitter, it is physically impossible for a catcher to react quickly enough to keep the ball from slamming into his face mask or helmet, if that's where it's headed. More rarely, the end of a hitter's swing just might slam the bat into the catcher's helmet. These are not intentional; they happen nonetheless.
More dubious is the home-plate collision. If a runner happens to be approaching home plate at about the same time a throw is reaching the catcher in an attempt to get that runner out, a collision is a frequent result. Sometimes a catcher is attempting to block the runner from the plate even though the ball hasn't arrived yet, sometimes the runner is attempting to knock the ball loose from the catcher's mitt or hand. Either way, the result is typically the most violent play in baseball (though a few accidental collisions between fielders come close at times). All the padding in the world can't necessarily stop the catcher from sustaining a head injury in that situation.
Of course, Major League Baseball, like its companion league the NFL, has taken a head-in-sand approach to the issue, moving to deny any responsibility for such injuries and claim that the problem is a distinctly minor . . . .
Wait, what? Actually (and amazingly), MLB has done quite the opposite.
Even before the results of the tests on Ryan Freel's brain were announced, MLB had already taken steps to cut out one of the major contributors to baseball head injury; the elimination of those home-plate collisions. Already MLB had instituted a seven-day disabled list specifically for head injuries -- an opportunity for a player to recover without missing more time than might be necessary if the problem is diagnosed quickly and accurately.
This is frankly mind-blowing. The same league that turned a blind eye to drug scandals in the 1980s and performance-enhancing drug use in the 1990s is actually being shockingly proactive. MLB and its owners can be profoundly corrupt, whether it comes in the form of holding municipalities up for glossy new stadiums or ignoring some of the horrifying practices involved in the development and signing of baseball players from the Caribbean region. In this case, though, there seems to be genuine sorrow when a player like Matheny has to retire, a sorrow which in this case seems to be prompting genuine and surprising willingness to address the problem, even if the rules of the game are affected.
One of my least favorite parables in the Gospels is the so-called parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25:31-46. It is probably familiar to most folks with much church experience at all; the nations are gathered before the Son of Man, who separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, sheep to the right and goats to the left. The Son of Man then praises those on the right (who are now not sheep but "the righteous") for their responses to him when he was in need; feeding the hungry, clothing those with no clothes, visiting the sick or imprisoned. Those on the left, the "accursed," are upbraided and even cast away, for exactly their failure to do those things the righteous did. In each case, the rationale is offered that what you did to "the least of these," you did to Christ.
To me, what has lately jumped out at me about this passage (a troublesome one to me and others) is that, even as a sorting is portrayed at the beginning of the story, the "righteous" and the "accursed" had actually "sorted" themselves well before coming before Christ, by their actions towards those they encountered in need. They fed hungry people or didn't. How we respond to needs, to crises, to harms, to injustices in the world matters. Those responses reveal us. Further, they shape us -- ignoring one injustice or one need makes it easier to ignore the next one.
Grantland writer Brian Phillips penned a column this week pointing towards the particular quality of the sporting year 2013 as one in which the fan's increasing and unavoidable awareness of the corruptions of sports (the CTE horrors of the NFL being only one of many addressed) somehow failed to intersect or connect with the sports watching experience. Baseball had a frankly amazing season, even as the Biogenesis scandal unfolded; the NFL continues to thrive even as the increasing tide of CTE stories vies with murder, bullying, and who knows what else conspire to stain the sport; worldwide soccer is as huge as ever even as it becomes clear that next year's World Cup will take place in a deeply dysfunctional (and yes, fatal) atmosphere. Somehow fans simply keep the two separate. Fans do care, Phillips claims, about CTE and match-fixing and murders and suicides and murder-suicides, but kept watching as if unaffected.
To which I have to ask, how long? How long can the two be held apart from one another? How long can the two go on, coexisting, before the fan sorts himself or herself in among the sheep or goats? Another scripture, Matthew 6:24, points out that serving two masters doesn't work out so well. You end up serving one or the other.
Eventually a fan will serve one master or another; his or her attentions (and dollars, the stuff that actually hits sporting leagues or players where it hurts) will turn away from unrepentant exploitation in sports towards other pursuits, or he or she will keep on watching, less and less fazed by the mounting toll in bodies or brains or children in poverty in the shadow of flashy new stadiums.
I can't help but wonder if we -- not just the NFL or MLB or FIFA or whatever league you care to name, but we -- the people who put down the money to buy tickets or subscribe to cable to get ESPN in its various guises, or buy the merchandise or devote eight Sundays or six or seven Saturdays to tailgating, who buy product X because King James endorses it instead of product Y endorsed by Kobe Bryant, we -- are at a sorting point, slowly aligning ourselves with the sheep or the goats when it comes to the excesses and the abuses that are intricately bound up in the sports-fan experience.
This may require people of faith to make a leap many are not willing to make: to realize that one who may be an exploiter in one circumstance may well be the exploited in another. For example: male athletes have, to put it mildly, a reputation as being sexually active, taking on groupies for pleasure (witness the claims that the late Wilt Chamberlain bedded at least 2,000 women in his lifetime). An athlete who buys a prostitute? Clearly not paying attention to the women waiting in the hotel lobby. By no means does every athlete do so, but many do. When you're on the road, have plenty of money to blow, and plenty of women to enjoy, it's easy to do both.
Exploitative behavior? Sure. But does that make the athlete any less the exploited party when, after years of his league telling him concussions were no big deal, his brain ends up on an examining table in Boston or Pittsburgh? I don't think so. What are those millions of dollars (if they haven't been squandered by then) worth in that case?
Athletes are at a sorting point, too. Are NFL or NCAA players going to stand by and continue to participate in their own brain damage? Just how much are major-league baseball players willing to pump themselves full of chemicals in pursuit of a competitive advantage?
The tricky part is, one of the options requires an active choice. You have to choose to walk away from your sporting passions, or at least to scream like Howard Beale in Network. If you don't, you eventually go numb. Of course, you can choose to let the corruptions pass unobserved, and go numb voluntarily.
Either way, you will go numb, eventually, unless you choose not to.
I have also admitted, in this space and others, that I'm a big baseball fan.
Therefore, specifically because I know my own biases, I am compelled to devote this column to the first confirmed case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a Major League Baseball player.
Ryan Freel was a utility player. He played for several teams, the Cincinnati Reds for six years and spent shorter terms with the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, and Kansas City Royals. According to his own account, he suffered "nine or ten" concussions across the course of his career, from being hit in the head by pitches or other thrown balls, from collisions with opponents, teammates, bases, walls, and all sorts of other things. A sentence from the ESPN.com report linked above offers a pretty good description:
Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform."
He was the prototypical "scrappy" player, one who didn't necessarily have the natural gifts of other players but hustled relentlessly and played with reckless abandon, without regard for his own body -- a phrase which rings eerily prescient now, after Freel committed suicide one year ago Sunday (December 22).
Like so many football players after their careers ended, Freel's life after baseball was increasingly consumed, apparently, with symptoms like headaches, loss of attention or short-term memory, and swings from depression to explosive emotion, not to mention a family increasingly wondering what had happened to their son, husband, father.
Freel is somewhat of an atypical case for baseball. While players hit in the head by pitched balls can and do suffer concussions -- Justin Morneau (now of the Colorado Rockies), Brian Roberts (just signed by the New York Yankees after years with the Orioles) and Corey Koskie (once of the Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and Milwaukee Brewers) are examples of players whose careers were derailed by concussion-related symptoms -- most of baseball's concussion-sufferers have been catchers. Possibly the most well-known example is Mike Matheny, who actually had to retire from baseball due to ongoing symptoms. Matheny may also offer some hope; he is now manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, taking that job five years after his retirement, and having pretty respectable success in it (the Cards made it to the World Series this year, in case you've forgotten). Possibly the highest-profile catcher to see his career affected by concussion symptoms is Joe Mauer, the All-Star catcher of the Minnesota Twins, who is moving to first base next season (the position occupied by Justin Morneau, when health allowed, until he was traded this past season) in hopes of avoiding any more concussions.
Catchers are easily put in the most situations that might lead to concussions and their complications. In addition to the risks any batter faces of taking a pitch to the head (rare, and frowned upon), catchers also face particular risks associated with the position they play. When a fastball upwards of 90 mph (sometimes even 100 mph or more) tips just slightly off the bat of a major-league hitter, it is physically impossible for a catcher to react quickly enough to keep the ball from slamming into his face mask or helmet, if that's where it's headed. More rarely, the end of a hitter's swing just might slam the bat into the catcher's helmet. These are not intentional; they happen nonetheless.
More dubious is the home-plate collision. If a runner happens to be approaching home plate at about the same time a throw is reaching the catcher in an attempt to get that runner out, a collision is a frequent result. Sometimes a catcher is attempting to block the runner from the plate even though the ball hasn't arrived yet, sometimes the runner is attempting to knock the ball loose from the catcher's mitt or hand. Either way, the result is typically the most violent play in baseball (though a few accidental collisions between fielders come close at times). All the padding in the world can't necessarily stop the catcher from sustaining a head injury in that situation.
Of course, Major League Baseball, like its companion league the NFL, has taken a head-in-sand approach to the issue, moving to deny any responsibility for such injuries and claim that the problem is a distinctly minor . . . .
Wait, what? Actually (and amazingly), MLB has done quite the opposite.
Even before the results of the tests on Ryan Freel's brain were announced, MLB had already taken steps to cut out one of the major contributors to baseball head injury; the elimination of those home-plate collisions. Already MLB had instituted a seven-day disabled list specifically for head injuries -- an opportunity for a player to recover without missing more time than might be necessary if the problem is diagnosed quickly and accurately.
This is frankly mind-blowing. The same league that turned a blind eye to drug scandals in the 1980s and performance-enhancing drug use in the 1990s is actually being shockingly proactive. MLB and its owners can be profoundly corrupt, whether it comes in the form of holding municipalities up for glossy new stadiums or ignoring some of the horrifying practices involved in the development and signing of baseball players from the Caribbean region. In this case, though, there seems to be genuine sorrow when a player like Matheny has to retire, a sorrow which in this case seems to be prompting genuine and surprising willingness to address the problem, even if the rules of the game are affected.
One of my least favorite parables in the Gospels is the so-called parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25:31-46. It is probably familiar to most folks with much church experience at all; the nations are gathered before the Son of Man, who separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, sheep to the right and goats to the left. The Son of Man then praises those on the right (who are now not sheep but "the righteous") for their responses to him when he was in need; feeding the hungry, clothing those with no clothes, visiting the sick or imprisoned. Those on the left, the "accursed," are upbraided and even cast away, for exactly their failure to do those things the righteous did. In each case, the rationale is offered that what you did to "the least of these," you did to Christ.
To me, what has lately jumped out at me about this passage (a troublesome one to me and others) is that, even as a sorting is portrayed at the beginning of the story, the "righteous" and the "accursed" had actually "sorted" themselves well before coming before Christ, by their actions towards those they encountered in need. They fed hungry people or didn't. How we respond to needs, to crises, to harms, to injustices in the world matters. Those responses reveal us. Further, they shape us -- ignoring one injustice or one need makes it easier to ignore the next one.
Grantland writer Brian Phillips penned a column this week pointing towards the particular quality of the sporting year 2013 as one in which the fan's increasing and unavoidable awareness of the corruptions of sports (the CTE horrors of the NFL being only one of many addressed) somehow failed to intersect or connect with the sports watching experience. Baseball had a frankly amazing season, even as the Biogenesis scandal unfolded; the NFL continues to thrive even as the increasing tide of CTE stories vies with murder, bullying, and who knows what else conspire to stain the sport; worldwide soccer is as huge as ever even as it becomes clear that next year's World Cup will take place in a deeply dysfunctional (and yes, fatal) atmosphere. Somehow fans simply keep the two separate. Fans do care, Phillips claims, about CTE and match-fixing and murders and suicides and murder-suicides, but kept watching as if unaffected.
To which I have to ask, how long? How long can the two be held apart from one another? How long can the two go on, coexisting, before the fan sorts himself or herself in among the sheep or goats? Another scripture, Matthew 6:24, points out that serving two masters doesn't work out so well. You end up serving one or the other.
Eventually a fan will serve one master or another; his or her attentions (and dollars, the stuff that actually hits sporting leagues or players where it hurts) will turn away from unrepentant exploitation in sports towards other pursuits, or he or she will keep on watching, less and less fazed by the mounting toll in bodies or brains or children in poverty in the shadow of flashy new stadiums.
I can't help but wonder if we -- not just the NFL or MLB or FIFA or whatever league you care to name, but we -- the people who put down the money to buy tickets or subscribe to cable to get ESPN in its various guises, or buy the merchandise or devote eight Sundays or six or seven Saturdays to tailgating, who buy product X because King James endorses it instead of product Y endorsed by Kobe Bryant, we -- are at a sorting point, slowly aligning ourselves with the sheep or the goats when it comes to the excesses and the abuses that are intricately bound up in the sports-fan experience.
This may require people of faith to make a leap many are not willing to make: to realize that one who may be an exploiter in one circumstance may well be the exploited in another. For example: male athletes have, to put it mildly, a reputation as being sexually active, taking on groupies for pleasure (witness the claims that the late Wilt Chamberlain bedded at least 2,000 women in his lifetime). An athlete who buys a prostitute? Clearly not paying attention to the women waiting in the hotel lobby. By no means does every athlete do so, but many do. When you're on the road, have plenty of money to blow, and plenty of women to enjoy, it's easy to do both.
Exploitative behavior? Sure. But does that make the athlete any less the exploited party when, after years of his league telling him concussions were no big deal, his brain ends up on an examining table in Boston or Pittsburgh? I don't think so. What are those millions of dollars (if they haven't been squandered by then) worth in that case?
Athletes are at a sorting point, too. Are NFL or NCAA players going to stand by and continue to participate in their own brain damage? Just how much are major-league baseball players willing to pump themselves full of chemicals in pursuit of a competitive advantage?
The tricky part is, one of the options requires an active choice. You have to choose to walk away from your sporting passions, or at least to scream like Howard Beale in Network. If you don't, you eventually go numb. Of course, you can choose to let the corruptions pass unobserved, and go numb voluntarily.
Either way, you will go numb, eventually, unless you choose not to.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
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/
/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/
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Mandela, fan hope, and desperate churches
Upon the death of Nelson Mandela earlier this week it was almost impossible to get a word in edgewise in social media, amidst the tweets and Facebook statuses of quotation or tribute. This is all well and good and appropriate.
My mind, not surprisingly, went to one of the ways in which Mandela demonstrated an unusually cagey and creative understanding of how to bring people together. There are two different movies -- a documentary, The 16th Man, and a more Hollywood effort, Invictus (with Morgan Freeman as Mandela, also starring Matt Damon), which recount the story of how Mandela, relatively new leader of a still-fractious and uneven South Africa post-apartheid, made a concerted and emphatic display of public support for South Africa's white rugby team as a means of bridging the gap between himself and white South Africans, who ranged from fearful to suspicious to angry, and of nudging black South Africans away from their own suspicions. One can quibble about the long-term effectiveness of the maneuver, but in the moment it was an inspired and savvy move.
To me it seems that Mandela (who was apparently a boxer in his younger days) grasped something about the effect of sports and sports fandom that has, at times, the power to be good. By no means does it always work out that way, but there are times that a sporting event has (at least in the short term) transformative and unifying powers that the church only wishes it could experience.
Whatever else may be true about a sporting event, it's unpredictable. You might think that just because the Yankees are perennial powers and, say, the Royals are not, the Yankees should always beat the Royals; still, on any given day, the Royals might just beat the Yankees. This glimmer of hope, no matter how unlikely the upset or how little it might matter in the grand scheme of life (or even in the grand scheme of a sporting season), makes a game an opportunity for a particular kind of bonding in hopes of that unexpected outcome, that small shining moment.
That bonding can cut across lines that would prove uncrossable outside the stadium (including, quite often, in the church). The flaming lib and the Tea Partier unite over that unbelievable double play or no-look pass and thunderous dunk, without worrying about political affiliations. It's temporary, to be sure, but it's not any less striking for that. If it happens enough times, maybe it turns out to be less temporary after all.
No, it doesn't always turn out well. Fans can turn ugly, seemingly at the drop of a hat. Maybe the ultimate manifestation of this (aside from online flaming done under the cowardly cover of anonymity) is the post-championship riot. Bizarrely, this is often the work of the winning team's fans. I don't understand where this comes from; is it a consequence of forgetting that you didn't do a damn thing to help your team win? Or something like that cowardice of anonymity, giving the weak-minded permission to behave like an ass because they're part of a crowd?
Still, I have to acknowledge that I've felt that strange passion, that sweep of hopefulness and despair and then unexpected hope again, even if it was a meaningless late-season game for a last-place team. The unexpected connection has power, no matter how small it may be. It has that momentary effect of exaltation, of something like joy; and if it urges the fan on towards the experience of real joy, so much the better. Even today, as the only person in the whole sports bar watching and trying to will Sporting Kansas City to the MLS Cup win (and they did win), I could see the sellout crowd at Sporting Park (some of whom would probably terrify me in real life) and take on some form of shared passion.
Mandela picked up on something, from who knows where, and found a way to break down a little bit of mistrust in a deeply divided and mistrustful nation. Of course, it helps that the rugby team did cooperate by winning the championship. One has to suspect, though, that Mandela might have felt he didn't have a whole lot else to work with at the time, and made a play with what he had available.
What, then, is the church's excuse?
Too often, it seems, the church teeters towards resembling the more hopeless or even destructive effects associated with fandom. We get tribal, sometimes destructively so. We look at declining attendance numbers and disappearing societal status and plunge ourselves (active verb) into despair. Despite being the faith tradition that sings "my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus's blood and righteousness," we tend to act as if our hope is built on something less, something far, far less.
This leads, circling back around to sports, to some odd intersections between faith groups and games. One Christian tradition will, in a bizarre way, somehow cling to the hope that because our quarterback is better, our church style must be better. Or we transfer our religion-like passions onto the playing field (remember where this blog gets its title: "football isn't a religion, it's way more important than that"). Feats of physical strength take the place of spiritual humility and wisdom (does anybody else remember the "Power Team"?). More effort is put into displays of religious zeal than in practice of that zeal. Writing as the second week of Advent approaches, I can't help but see some parallel in the impatience of many churches or Christians with the waiting and anticipation implicit in that liturgical season and the horribly impatient stance of so many fans for their team (Cubs fans excluded, I guess). Win. Now. Or Else.
I have to suspect that Mandela was not so naive as to think a rugby championship was going to "heal" South Africa, that there was much hard and painful work left to do (and still is even at his passing). The church isn't going to be reformed (in the manner of Calvin's reformata et semper reformanda) by quick fixes or feats of strength, any more than the Seattle Mariners are going to win the World Series just because they signed away the Yankees' second baseman. The work is hard, but we have a hope that is so much more than any earthly hope. If a mere rugby team could work for Nelson Mandela, why in the world are we in the church so poor at acting like we have an even greater hope?
My mind, not surprisingly, went to one of the ways in which Mandela demonstrated an unusually cagey and creative understanding of how to bring people together. There are two different movies -- a documentary, The 16th Man, and a more Hollywood effort, Invictus (with Morgan Freeman as Mandela, also starring Matt Damon), which recount the story of how Mandela, relatively new leader of a still-fractious and uneven South Africa post-apartheid, made a concerted and emphatic display of public support for South Africa's white rugby team as a means of bridging the gap between himself and white South Africans, who ranged from fearful to suspicious to angry, and of nudging black South Africans away from their own suspicions. One can quibble about the long-term effectiveness of the maneuver, but in the moment it was an inspired and savvy move.
To me it seems that Mandela (who was apparently a boxer in his younger days) grasped something about the effect of sports and sports fandom that has, at times, the power to be good. By no means does it always work out that way, but there are times that a sporting event has (at least in the short term) transformative and unifying powers that the church only wishes it could experience.
Whatever else may be true about a sporting event, it's unpredictable. You might think that just because the Yankees are perennial powers and, say, the Royals are not, the Yankees should always beat the Royals; still, on any given day, the Royals might just beat the Yankees. This glimmer of hope, no matter how unlikely the upset or how little it might matter in the grand scheme of life (or even in the grand scheme of a sporting season), makes a game an opportunity for a particular kind of bonding in hopes of that unexpected outcome, that small shining moment.
That bonding can cut across lines that would prove uncrossable outside the stadium (including, quite often, in the church). The flaming lib and the Tea Partier unite over that unbelievable double play or no-look pass and thunderous dunk, without worrying about political affiliations. It's temporary, to be sure, but it's not any less striking for that. If it happens enough times, maybe it turns out to be less temporary after all.
No, it doesn't always turn out well. Fans can turn ugly, seemingly at the drop of a hat. Maybe the ultimate manifestation of this (aside from online flaming done under the cowardly cover of anonymity) is the post-championship riot. Bizarrely, this is often the work of the winning team's fans. I don't understand where this comes from; is it a consequence of forgetting that you didn't do a damn thing to help your team win? Or something like that cowardice of anonymity, giving the weak-minded permission to behave like an ass because they're part of a crowd?
Still, I have to acknowledge that I've felt that strange passion, that sweep of hopefulness and despair and then unexpected hope again, even if it was a meaningless late-season game for a last-place team. The unexpected connection has power, no matter how small it may be. It has that momentary effect of exaltation, of something like joy; and if it urges the fan on towards the experience of real joy, so much the better. Even today, as the only person in the whole sports bar watching and trying to will Sporting Kansas City to the MLS Cup win (and they did win), I could see the sellout crowd at Sporting Park (some of whom would probably terrify me in real life) and take on some form of shared passion.
Mandela picked up on something, from who knows where, and found a way to break down a little bit of mistrust in a deeply divided and mistrustful nation. Of course, it helps that the rugby team did cooperate by winning the championship. One has to suspect, though, that Mandela might have felt he didn't have a whole lot else to work with at the time, and made a play with what he had available.
What, then, is the church's excuse?
Too often, it seems, the church teeters towards resembling the more hopeless or even destructive effects associated with fandom. We get tribal, sometimes destructively so. We look at declining attendance numbers and disappearing societal status and plunge ourselves (active verb) into despair. Despite being the faith tradition that sings "my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus's blood and righteousness," we tend to act as if our hope is built on something less, something far, far less.
This leads, circling back around to sports, to some odd intersections between faith groups and games. One Christian tradition will, in a bizarre way, somehow cling to the hope that because our quarterback is better, our church style must be better. Or we transfer our religion-like passions onto the playing field (remember where this blog gets its title: "football isn't a religion, it's way more important than that"). Feats of physical strength take the place of spiritual humility and wisdom (does anybody else remember the "Power Team"?). More effort is put into displays of religious zeal than in practice of that zeal. Writing as the second week of Advent approaches, I can't help but see some parallel in the impatience of many churches or Christians with the waiting and anticipation implicit in that liturgical season and the horribly impatient stance of so many fans for their team (Cubs fans excluded, I guess). Win. Now. Or Else.
I have to suspect that Mandela was not so naive as to think a rugby championship was going to "heal" South Africa, that there was much hard and painful work left to do (and still is even at his passing). The church isn't going to be reformed (in the manner of Calvin's reformata et semper reformanda) by quick fixes or feats of strength, any more than the Seattle Mariners are going to win the World Series just because they signed away the Yankees' second baseman. The work is hard, but we have a hope that is so much more than any earthly hope. If a mere rugby team could work for Nelson Mandela, why in the world are we in the church so poor at acting like we have an even greater hope?
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Onward, Christian nose tackles
By golly, I keep finding vindication.
No less a source than the august Christian Century featured not one, but two blogs on the subject of football this week, specifically on the Richie Incognito issue (addressed in this blog here). First, one Arthur Remillard, a religious studies professor at a school in Pennsylvania, took up the issue, decrying a culture of "muscle men" in the NFL (placing Incognito in that category) and lamenting the lack of a genuine "warrior culture" in said league, by means of some "wait, what?" exegesis on a verse from 2 Samuel and a call for a culture that "prizes achievement and teamwork but not at the expense of human dignity." Today Carol Howard Merritt took up the theme, questioning how a supposed "warrior culture" dedicated to "the protection of the weak and the advancement of all righteous causes" really fits into football at all, and questioning how the violence of the sport can be thought of as redemptive or palliative at all.
I wonder if the two might be talking past each other a little bit. To be clear, Remillard is criticizing Incognito's apparent behavior towards Jonathan Martin. Still, I have to admit I find the gorefest of 2 Samuel 2 an odd place to appeal for a cure for a "muscle-headed" locker room culture. Who exactly are the "weak" in football -- I mean, in the game itself? Is this some back-door way of calling Peyton Manning or Tom Brady a sissy? I can't quite see how the concept fits into the on-field nature of football.
Remillard also cites a British publication (nineteenth-century vintage? I have not been able to find it) which speaks for the "muscular Christianity" of that era in claiming that "a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into submission, and then used for the protection of the weak." Now the initial clause there seems to be a variant reading of Paul's claim in 2 Corinthians 9:27 that "I punish my body and enslave it," but Paul does so not for any "protection of the weak," but "so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified" (NRSV) in an extension of the running metaphor employed in previous verses. (Paul also notes that "athletes exercise self-control in all things," an assertion that looks downright comical in light of the decided lack of self-control found among numerous athletes on road trips, or where PEDs are concerned.) Paul has very different ideas about "the weak" in this passage than his nineteenth-century "muscular Christianity" appropriators seem to understand.
Off the field, who is "weak" in connection to football is laceratingly clear at times, and their lack of protectors is largely ignored or brushed aside.
December 1, tomorrow as I write this, is the one-year anniversary of a murder-suicide involving an NFL player. While the event drew a great deal of media coverage at the time, one won't necessarily hear much about it aside from this uneven ESPN article, which makes clear that the Kansas City Chiefs, the team for which Jovan Belcher played at the time he killed his pregnant girlfriend and then himself, are not entertaining thoughts about the event at all. Indeed, the team has imposed an omertà on the event that would make the Mafia blush with shame. Kasandra Perkins is not allowed to register on the radar of the Chiefs.
I guess, in the broader, off-field scope of the game, Kasandra Perkins would count as "the weak."
Merritt cannot separate the violence inherent in the game on the field from the violence of the culture that consumes the game as entertainment, and points to the lack of celebration of those who practice peace. This is an eminently good and even pastoral concern. The historian in me (or perhaps it's the hymnologist in me) can't help but observe that English-speaking Christianity has a long way to go to undo a couple of centuries' worth of damage done by its popular theology, i.e. its hymnody.
Consider this list:
"Am I a soldier of the cross?'
"Arm these thy soldiers, mighty Lord"
"God is keeping his soldiers fighting" (an old Salvation Army hymn)
"Onward, Christian soldiers"
"Soldiers of Christ, arise"
"We are soldiers of Christ"
That is an incredibly selective list, limited by the presence of the world "soldier" or some variant thereof (and only a limited selection of those hymns). Because Net Hymnal doesn't include it, the list doesn't cite "Soldiers of Christ, in truth arrayed," the "seminary hymn" of my previous school of record that I don't talk about anymore. And that list doesn't include such gems as the World War I-vintage "Over the top for Jesus," apparently seeking to generate an image of Christ vaulting out of some trench in France.
My point (and I do have one) is that the Christian church -- mainline, evangelical, you name it -- has been marinating in hymns bristling with warfare imagery for quite a long time, and such imagery as reinforced over and over again for decades or even centuries is going to color the way Christians look at the culture around them. Football plays into that warfare mindset in a way no other sport can match. Consult George Carlin's classic baseball-vs.-football routine for a quick reminder of how that works. "Aerial assault." "Bomb." "Field general." Linemen struggle in "the trenches." It was pretty much inevitable that a church that has a long track record of "Onward, Christian soldiers" is going to be attracted to the warlike cadences of football, and it's not going to stop just because a few mainline denominations stop singing those hymns.
I doubt Remillard and Merritt are really as far apart as they seem; nobody is nominating Richie Incognito as Christian Century's Man of the Year. What I fear is that the church has eyes that are so colored with our own fascinations (present or past) with the imagery of battle that it may not be able to see with clarity the inherent problems with a sport that is both so intrinsically violent and so proud of its violence. We may be so caught inside our own history that we cannot find the voice or the words to speak to the degradations practiced by player upon player, or visited upon players in their retirement years as brains fail and lives unravel, or upon spouses or girlfriends or children suffering physically or emotionally. We just may not be able to find a place to stand to speak with integrity when confronted by the Richie Incognitos or Jovan Belchers or Kasandra Perkinses or Junior Seaus that trouble our religion-like fandom. And we may end up mute in the face of a thing that looks awfully, tragically like injustice.
No less a source than the august Christian Century featured not one, but two blogs on the subject of football this week, specifically on the Richie Incognito issue (addressed in this blog here). First, one Arthur Remillard, a religious studies professor at a school in Pennsylvania, took up the issue, decrying a culture of "muscle men" in the NFL (placing Incognito in that category) and lamenting the lack of a genuine "warrior culture" in said league, by means of some "wait, what?" exegesis on a verse from 2 Samuel and a call for a culture that "prizes achievement and teamwork but not at the expense of human dignity." Today Carol Howard Merritt took up the theme, questioning how a supposed "warrior culture" dedicated to "the protection of the weak and the advancement of all righteous causes" really fits into football at all, and questioning how the violence of the sport can be thought of as redemptive or palliative at all.
I wonder if the two might be talking past each other a little bit. To be clear, Remillard is criticizing Incognito's apparent behavior towards Jonathan Martin. Still, I have to admit I find the gorefest of 2 Samuel 2 an odd place to appeal for a cure for a "muscle-headed" locker room culture. Who exactly are the "weak" in football -- I mean, in the game itself? Is this some back-door way of calling Peyton Manning or Tom Brady a sissy? I can't quite see how the concept fits into the on-field nature of football.
Remillard also cites a British publication (nineteenth-century vintage? I have not been able to find it) which speaks for the "muscular Christianity" of that era in claiming that "a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into submission, and then used for the protection of the weak." Now the initial clause there seems to be a variant reading of Paul's claim in 2 Corinthians 9:27 that "I punish my body and enslave it," but Paul does so not for any "protection of the weak," but "so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified" (NRSV) in an extension of the running metaphor employed in previous verses. (Paul also notes that "athletes exercise self-control in all things," an assertion that looks downright comical in light of the decided lack of self-control found among numerous athletes on road trips, or where PEDs are concerned.) Paul has very different ideas about "the weak" in this passage than his nineteenth-century "muscular Christianity" appropriators seem to understand.
Off the field, who is "weak" in connection to football is laceratingly clear at times, and their lack of protectors is largely ignored or brushed aside.
December 1, tomorrow as I write this, is the one-year anniversary of a murder-suicide involving an NFL player. While the event drew a great deal of media coverage at the time, one won't necessarily hear much about it aside from this uneven ESPN article, which makes clear that the Kansas City Chiefs, the team for which Jovan Belcher played at the time he killed his pregnant girlfriend and then himself, are not entertaining thoughts about the event at all. Indeed, the team has imposed an omertà on the event that would make the Mafia blush with shame. Kasandra Perkins is not allowed to register on the radar of the Chiefs.
I guess, in the broader, off-field scope of the game, Kasandra Perkins would count as "the weak."
Merritt cannot separate the violence inherent in the game on the field from the violence of the culture that consumes the game as entertainment, and points to the lack of celebration of those who practice peace. This is an eminently good and even pastoral concern. The historian in me (or perhaps it's the hymnologist in me) can't help but observe that English-speaking Christianity has a long way to go to undo a couple of centuries' worth of damage done by its popular theology, i.e. its hymnody.
Consider this list:
"Am I a soldier of the cross?'
"Arm these thy soldiers, mighty Lord"
"God is keeping his soldiers fighting" (an old Salvation Army hymn)
"Onward, Christian soldiers"
"Soldiers of Christ, arise"
"We are soldiers of Christ"
That is an incredibly selective list, limited by the presence of the world "soldier" or some variant thereof (and only a limited selection of those hymns). Because Net Hymnal doesn't include it, the list doesn't cite "Soldiers of Christ, in truth arrayed," the "seminary hymn" of my previous school of record that I don't talk about anymore. And that list doesn't include such gems as the World War I-vintage "Over the top for Jesus," apparently seeking to generate an image of Christ vaulting out of some trench in France.
My point (and I do have one) is that the Christian church -- mainline, evangelical, you name it -- has been marinating in hymns bristling with warfare imagery for quite a long time, and such imagery as reinforced over and over again for decades or even centuries is going to color the way Christians look at the culture around them. Football plays into that warfare mindset in a way no other sport can match. Consult George Carlin's classic baseball-vs.-football routine for a quick reminder of how that works. "Aerial assault." "Bomb." "Field general." Linemen struggle in "the trenches." It was pretty much inevitable that a church that has a long track record of "Onward, Christian soldiers" is going to be attracted to the warlike cadences of football, and it's not going to stop just because a few mainline denominations stop singing those hymns.
I doubt Remillard and Merritt are really as far apart as they seem; nobody is nominating Richie Incognito as Christian Century's Man of the Year. What I fear is that the church has eyes that are so colored with our own fascinations (present or past) with the imagery of battle that it may not be able to see with clarity the inherent problems with a sport that is both so intrinsically violent and so proud of its violence. We may be so caught inside our own history that we cannot find the voice or the words to speak to the degradations practiced by player upon player, or visited upon players in their retirement years as brains fail and lives unravel, or upon spouses or girlfriends or children suffering physically or emotionally. We just may not be able to find a place to stand to speak with integrity when confronted by the Richie Incognitos or Jovan Belchers or Kasandra Perkinses or Junior Seaus that trouble our religion-like fandom. And we may end up mute in the face of a thing that looks awfully, tragically like injustice.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
The Pope agrees with me!
If you thought it was a dubious enterprise for me to start blogging about sports and faith, the joke's on you! I just got a big-time ally on my side! No less than Pope Francis agrees with me!
No, not exactly, but he did make an interesting statement on the subject of athletes and exploitation to a group of officials connected with the Olympics. It was not at all inconsistent with the public profile the Pope has projected so far, but perhaps issued in a venue to which some might not pay attention.
What I find interesting (and sympathetic) about the statement is that Pope Francis kept his focus on the potential for exploitation of the individual athlete in the name of profit, to state it simply. The Olympics "movement" was an interesting realm into which to venture, as one in which high-stakes commercialization and potential profit for individual performers in the form of endorsement deals is a recent development, in my lifetime at least (I'm not that old). Given the tone of his remarks, I'd imagine the Pope could have a field day with the system of intercollegiate athletics in the United States (just think how many people are attending or watching college football games as I write this on a Saturday afternoon) and its labyrinthine rules about financial benefits mostly being denied to the athletes (once described as "student-athletes," mirroring the "amateur ideal" that used to rule the Olympic movement, in theory) participating in sports that move dumpster-loads of money around. Talk about a system that "reduces athletes to mere trading material," to borrow Francis's words.
This is not a plea for paying college athletes. I have a dumpster-load of doubts that any such system can be achieved with anything like equanimity and justice in the divine sense. For example, somehow I doubt that the field hockey team, even a national-championship level team, is going to benefit much from a system of paying collegiate athletes. American systems of remuneration just don't work that way. While athletes may well be easily exploited by large financial systems in just about any sport (read this long-form piece on the financial travails that beset most boxers to get an idea of such systems at their worst, abetted by the athletes' own failings in that case), athletes are also capable in some cases of playing the system. What are the chances that Johnny Manziel, just to take one example, will be at all content with receiving the same stipend as a reserve point guard on Texas A&M's women's basketball team? I'm not seeing it. From there you get into quagmire pretty quickly. And if Alex Rodriguez (and his agent, Satan) aren't engaging in a massive game of playing the system right now, you can eat my hat.
Of course, the athletes are not the only potential victims of exploitation in any system. The previous post on this blog delved into the machinations behind the Atlanta Braves' sudden announcement of a move to suburban Cobb County (Part 2 of that post is still going to come). Stadiums of course don't build themselves, and at least for now Cobb County is apparently on the hook for about two-thirds of the projected costs of construction. While I'd be deeply pleased if those Cobb County politicians who ran this deal to get the team were going to reach into their own pockets to pay the county share, I'm not holding my breath. Somebody is going to pay for it, whether it be Cobb residents in the form of whatever taxes are imposed, or visitors to the area in the form of hotel taxes or meal taxes. I suppose it is possible that Cobb is the ultimate suburban paradise with no poor people, no hunger, no struggling schools and underpaid teachers and such, but I've never heard anybody describe it that way. Somebody is going to get stuck with it.
Indeed the whole system of remunerated athletics depends on somebody being willingly stuck with it. Collegiate athletes at least get the chance at a (quite expensive these days) college education as part of their deal, though an awful lot of them seem to find that unimportant. Pro athletes take on a lifetime of pain in many cases as the payoff for their years of participation (and I'm not even talking about the CTE issue in football); playing any sport at a high level extracts a toll on even the healthiest of athletes. Fans get, I suppose, an outlet for emotional investment, a sense of tribal identity, a steady diet of unscripted drama with the ending unknown, or an experience potentially shareable by the whole family, among other things. If either party decides the price is too high, they do have the option of walking away, or (as fans) not walking up in the first place, i.e. not buying tickets or merchandise or watching games. (Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays excel at the former.)
Still, I applaud Pope Francis for recognizing the impact of commercialized sport and its moral implications in society. Perhaps I'll talk to him about a guest blog post in the future.
No, not exactly, but he did make an interesting statement on the subject of athletes and exploitation to a group of officials connected with the Olympics. It was not at all inconsistent with the public profile the Pope has projected so far, but perhaps issued in a venue to which some might not pay attention.
What I find interesting (and sympathetic) about the statement is that Pope Francis kept his focus on the potential for exploitation of the individual athlete in the name of profit, to state it simply. The Olympics "movement" was an interesting realm into which to venture, as one in which high-stakes commercialization and potential profit for individual performers in the form of endorsement deals is a recent development, in my lifetime at least (I'm not that old). Given the tone of his remarks, I'd imagine the Pope could have a field day with the system of intercollegiate athletics in the United States (just think how many people are attending or watching college football games as I write this on a Saturday afternoon) and its labyrinthine rules about financial benefits mostly being denied to the athletes (once described as "student-athletes," mirroring the "amateur ideal" that used to rule the Olympic movement, in theory) participating in sports that move dumpster-loads of money around. Talk about a system that "reduces athletes to mere trading material," to borrow Francis's words.
This is not a plea for paying college athletes. I have a dumpster-load of doubts that any such system can be achieved with anything like equanimity and justice in the divine sense. For example, somehow I doubt that the field hockey team, even a national-championship level team, is going to benefit much from a system of paying collegiate athletes. American systems of remuneration just don't work that way. While athletes may well be easily exploited by large financial systems in just about any sport (read this long-form piece on the financial travails that beset most boxers to get an idea of such systems at their worst, abetted by the athletes' own failings in that case), athletes are also capable in some cases of playing the system. What are the chances that Johnny Manziel, just to take one example, will be at all content with receiving the same stipend as a reserve point guard on Texas A&M's women's basketball team? I'm not seeing it. From there you get into quagmire pretty quickly. And if Alex Rodriguez (and his agent, Satan) aren't engaging in a massive game of playing the system right now, you can eat my hat.
Of course, the athletes are not the only potential victims of exploitation in any system. The previous post on this blog delved into the machinations behind the Atlanta Braves' sudden announcement of a move to suburban Cobb County (Part 2 of that post is still going to come). Stadiums of course don't build themselves, and at least for now Cobb County is apparently on the hook for about two-thirds of the projected costs of construction. While I'd be deeply pleased if those Cobb County politicians who ran this deal to get the team were going to reach into their own pockets to pay the county share, I'm not holding my breath. Somebody is going to pay for it, whether it be Cobb residents in the form of whatever taxes are imposed, or visitors to the area in the form of hotel taxes or meal taxes. I suppose it is possible that Cobb is the ultimate suburban paradise with no poor people, no hunger, no struggling schools and underpaid teachers and such, but I've never heard anybody describe it that way. Somebody is going to get stuck with it.
Indeed the whole system of remunerated athletics depends on somebody being willingly stuck with it. Collegiate athletes at least get the chance at a (quite expensive these days) college education as part of their deal, though an awful lot of them seem to find that unimportant. Pro athletes take on a lifetime of pain in many cases as the payoff for their years of participation (and I'm not even talking about the CTE issue in football); playing any sport at a high level extracts a toll on even the healthiest of athletes. Fans get, I suppose, an outlet for emotional investment, a sense of tribal identity, a steady diet of unscripted drama with the ending unknown, or an experience potentially shareable by the whole family, among other things. If either party decides the price is too high, they do have the option of walking away, or (as fans) not walking up in the first place, i.e. not buying tickets or merchandise or watching games. (Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays excel at the former.)
Still, I applaud Pope Francis for recognizing the impact of commercialized sport and its moral implications in society. Perhaps I'll talk to him about a guest blog post in the future.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Stadiums, race codes, and cold hard cash (Part I)
For a blog that isn't going to get out of the double digits in readership any time soon, the major sports sure do seem to be competing very hard to get included in it.
It isn't as if the NFL has done anything to relinquish its hold on the questionable-ethics crown in American sport. The Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin story continues to splay out in ugly fashion. A random drug bust or two also broke out during the week. One player got caught on video engaging in Asian stereotyping, which couldn't feel good to the NFL after the preseason outcry over video of a different player dropping n-bombs. While the deaths of two different high school players due directly to injuries sustained on the football field are not strictly NFL stories, and should not be objectified as such, you can bet the NFL was unhappy to see them happen.
However, basketball jumped into the fray, and in a way guaranteed to cause a fluster among commentators. An NBA player took to Twitter to drop some of his own n-bombs, and announced to the world that such n-bombs would continue as a part of the "culture" (shades of Incognito/Martin, or shades of hip-hop?) that made it o.k. And hockey made its bid to get included as well, with an NHL player offering up the kind of twisted logic -- in which the thuggery of the NHL with its more-or-less endemic brawls on the ice somehow makes the sport safer (one wonders what Derek Boogaard would say, were he still around to address the issue) -- that reminds you the NHL has its own head-trauma issues.
But one of the main sub-motivations of trying to develop a blog on this subject is the conviction that sports are not extraordinary in their plunges into the depths of human failure. They are, at their worst as well as at their best, reflections of our own worst and best, and sometimes projections of our worst and best. Sometimes our own failings actually bleed over into how sports are run. While college football fandom would be an easy target, and I'm sure will eventually make its way into this blog, this is the week for me to prove I won't spare my favorite sport. Thank you, Atlanta Braves, for the chance to prove that.
In case you didn't hear, the Braves managed to let loose a surprise announcement that at the end of their current lease at Turner Field in the city of Atlanta, the team would be decamping to the suburbs, in a stadium in the northwest suburbs of Cobb County.
If you're thinking "hey, wait, Turner Field isn't that old, is it?" you are correct. Formerly the principal stadium for the 1996 Olympics, Turner Field isn't as old as most of my seminary classmates. Apparently, however, the Braves look at Turner Field and see an inaccessible dump: they claim that the facility needs something like $250 million in improvements, is inaccessible to public transportation, and doesn't have enough parking. Oddly, though, the cost of a new field will be between two and three times that amount (though Cobb County is apparently going to foot the bulk of that), will be completely inaccessible to public transportation*, and will have even less parking.
*more on this later
There is not much around Turner Field; that much is true. The area has not developed. How much the city of Atlanta is to blame I will leave for others to decide. But one unavoidable element of the story involves folks who aren't going to be able to go to games out in Cobb County quite so easily, undevelopment around Turner Field or no.
Turner Field isn't quite on top of a train stop for MARTA, the city's metro system, but there is one about a mile's walk away. There are fans, evidently, for whom that walk isn't a big deal, high crime potential or not. However, those fans won't have that option with the new location, because the MARTA system doesn't reach to Cobb County.
This is by design. Cobb County's design, not MARTA's.
Indeed, one of the apparent conditions for Cobb County to pursue this stadium deal (at least in the eyes of a certain party chairman in Cobb County) was that the move wouldn't be accompanied by a MARTA expansion.
This is Atlanta we're talking about, or particularly the city/suburbs divide. The race issue was going to come up.
Anyway, to the point of this blog:
1) The Braves are a business. They apparently believe that they will better serve their fan base by moving to this suburban location to the north, calculating that they'll gain enough to offset any loss of fans from, frankly, any other part of the Atlanta area -- not just the city proper. No sane person is going to drive from, say, Jonesboro to a game in Cobb County. If they want to make that calculation, that's their prerogative, and moral/ethical judgments don't necessarily apply.
2) What Cobb County is thinking, I'm not sure. The last linked article notes that the same pol is adamant that Cobb County citizens won't pay higher taxes to fund this new stadium.
Hmm. So, where is that $400+ million going to come from? Just how does Cobb County plan to pay for this? Oh, so they're pledging tax revenues after all, you say? Should be fun to see how this plays out.
As always this is going to raise the question of just what is going to get de-funded to pay that amount? Or how much are Cobb County taxes going up? Or do they resort to the old trick of getting others to pay for it, in the form of fees on things like hotel stays or restaurants? I have no plans to stay in a hotel in Cobb County any time soon, at least.
3) Here is where I'm going to get agitated: this stadium plan and location is going to be an environmental nightmare. And that, in this world, is damned immoral.
At the juncture of two of the busiest freeways around one of the highest-traffic cities there is, this is going to introduce a heck of a lot more traffic. Just what the world needs, more emissions. Is the memo not getting through? POLLUTION IS BAD. I don't care whether you believe in human-influenced climate change or not (which at this point is about like saying you don't believe in gravity or basic physics), POLLUTION IS BAD. So Cobb County, already a traffic nightmare (and believe me, they aren't all driving Priuses or electric cars), is going to add even more traffic to the mix eighty-one times a year. Any way we can just build a dome over the county so they can keep all that extra pollution to themselves?
As if the American addiction to cars (and frequently large and inefficient ones at that) weren't bad enough in emission terms, now we're just going to add to it. What kind of psycho handles traffic planning in Cobb County? The 75/285 area is a nasty, congested mess under the best of circumstances; how do you possibly plan to avoid making traffic snarls (and the emission that comes with them) any less problematic?
This is thoroughly justifiable from the point of view of a faith that emphasizes the need for humans to be good and just stewards of creation. (And please don't embarrass yourself by bringing up the burn-it-up drivel of the likes of Mark Driscoll; you'll tell me nothing about a genuinely faithful few of creation stewardship, and nothing good about yourself.) Apparently the regional dysfunction between Atlanta and its suburbs (whether you chalk it up to old attitudes that never die or not) is going to lead to a fairly profane ecological cock-up. When any other sane sports franchise wants to get near rapid transit, the Braves are running away from it (and for the Cobb-and-rob crowd among you, I've taken the train to games in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and I'm still alive, so shove it). And yes, for this, they can justifiably be held morally responsible as much as Cobb County.
(PART 1: PART 2 TO COME)
It isn't as if the NFL has done anything to relinquish its hold on the questionable-ethics crown in American sport. The Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin story continues to splay out in ugly fashion. A random drug bust or two also broke out during the week. One player got caught on video engaging in Asian stereotyping, which couldn't feel good to the NFL after the preseason outcry over video of a different player dropping n-bombs. While the deaths of two different high school players due directly to injuries sustained on the football field are not strictly NFL stories, and should not be objectified as such, you can bet the NFL was unhappy to see them happen.
However, basketball jumped into the fray, and in a way guaranteed to cause a fluster among commentators. An NBA player took to Twitter to drop some of his own n-bombs, and announced to the world that such n-bombs would continue as a part of the "culture" (shades of Incognito/Martin, or shades of hip-hop?) that made it o.k. And hockey made its bid to get included as well, with an NHL player offering up the kind of twisted logic -- in which the thuggery of the NHL with its more-or-less endemic brawls on the ice somehow makes the sport safer (one wonders what Derek Boogaard would say, were he still around to address the issue) -- that reminds you the NHL has its own head-trauma issues.
But one of the main sub-motivations of trying to develop a blog on this subject is the conviction that sports are not extraordinary in their plunges into the depths of human failure. They are, at their worst as well as at their best, reflections of our own worst and best, and sometimes projections of our worst and best. Sometimes our own failings actually bleed over into how sports are run. While college football fandom would be an easy target, and I'm sure will eventually make its way into this blog, this is the week for me to prove I won't spare my favorite sport. Thank you, Atlanta Braves, for the chance to prove that.
In case you didn't hear, the Braves managed to let loose a surprise announcement that at the end of their current lease at Turner Field in the city of Atlanta, the team would be decamping to the suburbs, in a stadium in the northwest suburbs of Cobb County.
If you're thinking "hey, wait, Turner Field isn't that old, is it?" you are correct. Formerly the principal stadium for the 1996 Olympics, Turner Field isn't as old as most of my seminary classmates. Apparently, however, the Braves look at Turner Field and see an inaccessible dump: they claim that the facility needs something like $250 million in improvements, is inaccessible to public transportation, and doesn't have enough parking. Oddly, though, the cost of a new field will be between two and three times that amount (though Cobb County is apparently going to foot the bulk of that), will be completely inaccessible to public transportation*, and will have even less parking.
There is not much around Turner Field; that much is true. The area has not developed. How much the city of Atlanta is to blame I will leave for others to decide. But one unavoidable element of the story involves folks who aren't going to be able to go to games out in Cobb County quite so easily, undevelopment around Turner Field or no.
Turner Field isn't quite on top of a train stop for MARTA, the city's metro system, but there is one about a mile's walk away. There are fans, evidently, for whom that walk isn't a big deal, high crime potential or not. However, those fans won't have that option with the new location, because the MARTA system doesn't reach to Cobb County.
This is by design. Cobb County's design, not MARTA's.
Indeed, one of the apparent conditions for Cobb County to pursue this stadium deal (at least in the eyes of a certain party chairman in Cobb County) was that the move wouldn't be accompanied by a MARTA expansion.
This is Atlanta we're talking about, or particularly the city/suburbs divide. The race issue was going to come up.
Anyway, to the point of this blog:
1) The Braves are a business. They apparently believe that they will better serve their fan base by moving to this suburban location to the north, calculating that they'll gain enough to offset any loss of fans from, frankly, any other part of the Atlanta area -- not just the city proper. No sane person is going to drive from, say, Jonesboro to a game in Cobb County. If they want to make that calculation, that's their prerogative, and moral/ethical judgments don't necessarily apply.
2) What Cobb County is thinking, I'm not sure. The last linked article notes that the same pol is adamant that Cobb County citizens won't pay higher taxes to fund this new stadium.
Hmm. So, where is that $400+ million going to come from? Just how does Cobb County plan to pay for this? Oh, so they're pledging tax revenues after all, you say? Should be fun to see how this plays out.
As always this is going to raise the question of just what is going to get de-funded to pay that amount? Or how much are Cobb County taxes going up? Or do they resort to the old trick of getting others to pay for it, in the form of fees on things like hotel stays or restaurants? I have no plans to stay in a hotel in Cobb County any time soon, at least.
3) Here is where I'm going to get agitated: this stadium plan and location is going to be an environmental nightmare. And that, in this world, is damned immoral.
At the juncture of two of the busiest freeways around one of the highest-traffic cities there is, this is going to introduce a heck of a lot more traffic. Just what the world needs, more emissions. Is the memo not getting through? POLLUTION IS BAD. I don't care whether you believe in human-influenced climate change or not (which at this point is about like saying you don't believe in gravity or basic physics), POLLUTION IS BAD. So Cobb County, already a traffic nightmare (and believe me, they aren't all driving Priuses or electric cars), is going to add even more traffic to the mix eighty-one times a year. Any way we can just build a dome over the county so they can keep all that extra pollution to themselves?
As if the American addiction to cars (and frequently large and inefficient ones at that) weren't bad enough in emission terms, now we're just going to add to it. What kind of psycho handles traffic planning in Cobb County? The 75/285 area is a nasty, congested mess under the best of circumstances; how do you possibly plan to avoid making traffic snarls (and the emission that comes with them) any less problematic?
This is thoroughly justifiable from the point of view of a faith that emphasizes the need for humans to be good and just stewards of creation. (And please don't embarrass yourself by bringing up the burn-it-up drivel of the likes of Mark Driscoll; you'll tell me nothing about a genuinely faithful few of creation stewardship, and nothing good about yourself.) Apparently the regional dysfunction between Atlanta and its suburbs (whether you chalk it up to old attitudes that never die or not) is going to lead to a fairly profane ecological cock-up. When any other sane sports franchise wants to get near rapid transit, the Braves are running away from it (and for the Cobb-and-rob crowd among you, I've taken the train to games in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and I'm still alive, so shove it). And yes, for this, they can justifiably be held morally responsible as much as Cobb County.
(PART 1: PART 2 TO COME)
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Lament for Ray Easterling*
Just killing time with our eyes to the skies
Waiting on Science our Savior
--Chagall Guevara, "Murder In the Big House"
You knew, if you decided to play football extensively, your body was going to pay a price.
The examples were out there. Earl Campbell, once the most punishing running back in the league, barely able to walk. But it wasn't as though football was the only sport that exacted a physical toll on its participants. Baseball pitchers who could no longer lift the pitching arm to comb their hair, basketball players with incredibly painful knees, hockey players with more dental work than teeth. But you knew, if you decided to play football, you would pay a physical price.
Nobody told you that you'd lose your mind, or could.
Of course, on one level, you had already lost your mind, just to play the game, or perhaps given it away. Don't think. React.
Don't ask questions. Just get along. (Ask Jonathan Martin.)
Don't be too smart. Fit in. (Ask Chris Kluwe.)
Again, nothing you couldn't experience in any locker room in any sport. Possibly taken to greater extremes in the football locker room, if only because of the sheer numbers compared to other sports, but unique only in degree, not kind.
But nobody told you that you'd lose your mind.
That you would lose your mind and your quarterback, your fellow cornerback or linebacker or center, wouldn't. How is this fair? You worked as hard as they did. Harder, even. You were the one who wasn't quite as fast or wasn't quite as big, so you had to hit extra hard, hustle extra hard, play with even more reckless abandon. You had to go twice as hard to be half as noticed. And now, this, while that other guy keeps making even more money by being on TV and talking about football.
Nobody told you that the family you never got to know while you were playing would end up being strangers to you before you got to see the children grow up. Nobody told you that, even as your fingers were growing too gnarled to tie your shoelaces, you'd also forget why you were putting on your shoes in the first place.
You are asked if, knowing what you know now (when you can remember), if you would do it all again. You say yes. Of course you say yes. You do remember the cheers, the crowds, the thrill. That much you remember. That is the only thing that is real anymore. All else is a fog, a shade that comes and goes, as fixed as a mist and as graspable as a shadow. Good days, bad days.
What do we owe these who lost their lives, if only slowly, by timed-release manslaughter?
What do we owe the Tony Dorsetts and Mark Dupers, who now know that their own brains are also corrupted in like manner, whose own memories are uncertain and being lost, who forget where they're driving to and how to get there mid-trip? Surely we owe more than a GPS and a suicide hotline?
Maybe, at some point, we shut the hell up. The word is used here very theologically; the hell of self-justification, the hell of denial, the hell of saying "it used to be worse in Teddy Roosevelt's day," the hell of thinking it's only a few (as if one isn't too many), the hell of thinking "I am only one person so it doesn't really matter." Building more and more walls between us and the God we claim to worship so that God can't see us adoring these other gods, doing our damnedest to avoid thinking about it that way, or thinking of how many of you have been consumed so far.
Maybe we quit uttering blithe nonsense about how technology will fix the problem, newer and better helmets will save the day, and we can go on in our mindless adoration of the violence and flash without having to think about this. No technology will save you now. Technology might make clear what happened to you, and might rescue you just a little for your loved ones, who can at least take whatever meager solace comes from knowing that that wasn't really you. You are gone, beyond the salvation of any new helmet, your memory paid off by a league following the moral compass of Big Tobacco (deny deny deny, pay off what you can't deny).
Maybe we utter a Prayer of Confession. Merciful God, we have sinned against you and your children in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and done, and done and done and done and continue to do… . We keep on consuming it, if not in the stadium itself then at home in front of the wide-screen idol, fortified in our rituals with buckets of junk food and beer. We don't believe we can be redeemed, and we don't want to be even if we can.
But maybe, at some point, if we have some humanity about us, for you and your fifty-some brothers we know lost for the entertainment of others . . . maybe we mourn.
*Note: Ray Easterling played for the Falcons back in the '70s, when I was growing up in middle Georgia; he lived most of his life in Richmond, where I live now, until killing himself in 2012. That's why his name was chosen for this lament; any number of other names could have been used, and no particular biographical claim is intended.
Waiting on Science our Savior
--Chagall Guevara, "Murder In the Big House"
You knew, if you decided to play football extensively, your body was going to pay a price.
The examples were out there. Earl Campbell, once the most punishing running back in the league, barely able to walk. But it wasn't as though football was the only sport that exacted a physical toll on its participants. Baseball pitchers who could no longer lift the pitching arm to comb their hair, basketball players with incredibly painful knees, hockey players with more dental work than teeth. But you knew, if you decided to play football, you would pay a physical price.
Nobody told you that you'd lose your mind, or could.
Of course, on one level, you had already lost your mind, just to play the game, or perhaps given it away. Don't think. React.
Don't ask questions. Just get along. (Ask Jonathan Martin.)
Don't be too smart. Fit in. (Ask Chris Kluwe.)
Again, nothing you couldn't experience in any locker room in any sport. Possibly taken to greater extremes in the football locker room, if only because of the sheer numbers compared to other sports, but unique only in degree, not kind.
But nobody told you that you'd lose your mind.
That you would lose your mind and your quarterback, your fellow cornerback or linebacker or center, wouldn't. How is this fair? You worked as hard as they did. Harder, even. You were the one who wasn't quite as fast or wasn't quite as big, so you had to hit extra hard, hustle extra hard, play with even more reckless abandon. You had to go twice as hard to be half as noticed. And now, this, while that other guy keeps making even more money by being on TV and talking about football.
Nobody told you that the family you never got to know while you were playing would end up being strangers to you before you got to see the children grow up. Nobody told you that, even as your fingers were growing too gnarled to tie your shoelaces, you'd also forget why you were putting on your shoes in the first place.
You are asked if, knowing what you know now (when you can remember), if you would do it all again. You say yes. Of course you say yes. You do remember the cheers, the crowds, the thrill. That much you remember. That is the only thing that is real anymore. All else is a fog, a shade that comes and goes, as fixed as a mist and as graspable as a shadow. Good days, bad days.
What do we owe these who lost their lives, if only slowly, by timed-release manslaughter?
What do we owe the Tony Dorsetts and Mark Dupers, who now know that their own brains are also corrupted in like manner, whose own memories are uncertain and being lost, who forget where they're driving to and how to get there mid-trip? Surely we owe more than a GPS and a suicide hotline?
Maybe, at some point, we shut the hell up. The word is used here very theologically; the hell of self-justification, the hell of denial, the hell of saying "it used to be worse in Teddy Roosevelt's day," the hell of thinking it's only a few (as if one isn't too many), the hell of thinking "I am only one person so it doesn't really matter." Building more and more walls between us and the God we claim to worship so that God can't see us adoring these other gods, doing our damnedest to avoid thinking about it that way, or thinking of how many of you have been consumed so far.
Maybe we quit uttering blithe nonsense about how technology will fix the problem, newer and better helmets will save the day, and we can go on in our mindless adoration of the violence and flash without having to think about this. No technology will save you now. Technology might make clear what happened to you, and might rescue you just a little for your loved ones, who can at least take whatever meager solace comes from knowing that that wasn't really you. You are gone, beyond the salvation of any new helmet, your memory paid off by a league following the moral compass of Big Tobacco (deny deny deny, pay off what you can't deny).
Maybe we utter a Prayer of Confession. Merciful God, we have sinned against you and your children in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and done, and done and done and done and continue to do… . We keep on consuming it, if not in the stadium itself then at home in front of the wide-screen idol, fortified in our rituals with buckets of junk food and beer. We don't believe we can be redeemed, and we don't want to be even if we can.
But maybe, at some point, if we have some humanity about us, for you and your fifty-some brothers we know lost for the entertainment of others . . . maybe we mourn.
*Note: Ray Easterling played for the Falcons back in the '70s, when I was growing up in middle Georgia; he lived most of his life in Richmond, where I live now, until killing himself in 2012. That's why his name was chosen for this lament; any number of other names could have been used, and no particular biographical claim is intended.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Incognito no more: bullying in the NFL and elsewhere
Seriously, NFL, you shouldn't have.
Not even a week ago I struck out on this foolish errand of blogging about sports stories and where Christian faith intersects with them (or, as the subtitle above suggests, doesn't). Somehow the NFL saw fit to christen my efforts with stories that could probably give me a year's worth of fodder if I were so inclined. Slow down, NFL, somewhere along the way this blog needs to get around to baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer, the Olympics, collegiate athletics, youth travel teams, etc. Quit hogging the oxygen.
Rest assured that the ongoing story of football's struggle with the increasing awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) will get into this blog. For now, this Rick Reilly column will provide an intermediate reflection. I've been bothered by this for a while now, as this post from my original blog will hopefully suffice to demonstrate. The recently released book League of Denial is loaded in my Nook reader and I'm working my way through it when my academic reading allows (which, admittedly, isn't often), and I did watch the Frontline documentary. The news of apparent diagnoses of living former players such as Tony Dorsett will get attention, and sometime soon, hopefully.
But it's impossible to look away, like a gruesome road accident, from the mess involving the Miami Dolphins this week. The improbably named Richie Incognito is temporarily (one presumes) suspended from the team for the apparent bullying of a teammate and offensive line-mate, Jonathan Martin. If the transcripts of the phone calls from Incognito to Martin, the tweets and other contacts, are true, we know at least that Incognito is not at all above using racial epithets to inflict pain, that he doesn't know when to quit, that he's a monstrous freeloader, and that he has some of the most disgusting fantasies about how to treat another human being ever put to electronic preservation. Martin, on the other hand, has come off pasted with adjectives ranging from "intellectual" to "soft" to "weak" or worse, depending on which former coaches or teammates you hear. We've been indulged with stereotypes about football players from Stanford (Martin) as too "thoughtful" for the apparent cesspool of ignorance that is the NFL, as compared to the Nebraska (Incognito) types (thereby proving that cheap and dishonest stereotypes can be fabricated for pretty much any differentiation between human beings you can imagine). We've had the all-important pronouncement (from the Dolphins' general manager no less) that Martin should have slugged Incognito, as well as all manner of other nonsensical blather from other Dolphins personnel with the requisite circling of the wagons around the besieged Incognito. We've had a funny takedown in true Man Up fashion of the whole Man Up culture perceived as the root of dysfunction, and the requisite invocation, in so many words, of the hoary and threadbare cliche that You Will Never Understand Because You Never Played The Game, from someone I'm not sure ever played the game (as if "understanding" would in any way render Incognito's words and actions as morally pure or ethically justifiable). I'm not quite sure whether this constitutes genuine irony or something else, but the only place on sports media behemoth ESPN's web empire that has genuinely managed to engage in questions about what this sorry debacle says about manhood and sports comes from espnW, typically that niche of the site dedicated to women's sports.
By now you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering when the whole faith issue gets blended in. Or, if you know your British or American church history, perhaps you've already put it together. Either way, the sad truth is that the church in particular has been, frankly, part of encouraging this particular sports culture for a while now, at least a century and a half.
The Apostle Paul (or deutero-Paul if you're into that sort of thing) was occasionally prone to drop in athletic metaphors in exhorting readers or hearers to live into their calling in Christ -- "press on toward the mark" in Philippians 3:14, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race" in 2 Timothy 4:7, and others. (There is also the injunction to "glorify God in your body" in 1 Corinthians 6:20; I have to wonder if 300-lb. offensive linemen were really what Paul had in mind.) From that slim start the church has made a veritable if sporadic cottage industry of equating physical fitness with spiritual piety. For our purposes it is probably sufficient to point to the Victorian-era vogue for "muscular Christianity" (make of it what you will, to the degree you trust Wikipedia) as a genesis for the modern entanglement of the church with sport as a means to manliness. If some of its earlier advocates saw "muscular Christianity" as a means to protect the weak, its later manifestations (particularly in the US) didn't necessarily carry over that concern; rather, it became something of an opportunity for pride (as most any kind of spiritual striving can do), a near self-parody in the hands of a group such as the PowerTeam (anybody else out there remember them?), and the launching pad for such evangelical celebrity athletes as Tim Tebow or Jeremy Lin. It lives on to some degree in modern organizations like Athletes in Action or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, in benign or positive ways as far as I can see. To some degree, indirectly it becomes a cudgel in the hands of neo-Calvinists such as John Piper or Mark Driscoll.
Where, then, will the church's witness come from when bullying -- an act increasingly found unacceptable in society more broadly -- rears its vicious head in the most popular of American sports? Are we waiting for the currently team-less Tebow to speak ex cathedra? When bullying (under the supposedly more harmless guise of "hazing") ends up with children taking guns to school, drunken frat boys plunging from balconies, or marching band members (!!!) beating their drum major to death, can an evident bully like Incognito (a man with some serious self-control issues in his past on the field) simply wait for this to "pass" and get off the hook without provoking some manner of self-examination among the faithful who also get their entertainment from the game? Or do we engage in some sort of tortured attempt to teach our kids that bullying is wrong, but we're still going to go drop bucketloads of money to go watch the bullies play?
One more ESPN columnist, in one of those fanciful "stories from the future" columns writers resort to occasionally, speculates that the events of the most recent week in the NFL -- the Incognito/Martin scandal, plus the Dorsett story, an avalanche of injuries and the scary health issues faced by a pair of coaches -- will mark the beginning of the end of the NFL if not the game of football. I think Mr. Fleming overestimates the conscience of the American football fan. Am I wrong?
I don't think so.
Not even a week ago I struck out on this foolish errand of blogging about sports stories and where Christian faith intersects with them (or, as the subtitle above suggests, doesn't). Somehow the NFL saw fit to christen my efforts with stories that could probably give me a year's worth of fodder if I were so inclined. Slow down, NFL, somewhere along the way this blog needs to get around to baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer, the Olympics, collegiate athletics, youth travel teams, etc. Quit hogging the oxygen.
Rest assured that the ongoing story of football's struggle with the increasing awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) will get into this blog. For now, this Rick Reilly column will provide an intermediate reflection. I've been bothered by this for a while now, as this post from my original blog will hopefully suffice to demonstrate. The recently released book League of Denial is loaded in my Nook reader and I'm working my way through it when my academic reading allows (which, admittedly, isn't often), and I did watch the Frontline documentary. The news of apparent diagnoses of living former players such as Tony Dorsett will get attention, and sometime soon, hopefully.
But it's impossible to look away, like a gruesome road accident, from the mess involving the Miami Dolphins this week. The improbably named Richie Incognito is temporarily (one presumes) suspended from the team for the apparent bullying of a teammate and offensive line-mate, Jonathan Martin. If the transcripts of the phone calls from Incognito to Martin, the tweets and other contacts, are true, we know at least that Incognito is not at all above using racial epithets to inflict pain, that he doesn't know when to quit, that he's a monstrous freeloader, and that he has some of the most disgusting fantasies about how to treat another human being ever put to electronic preservation. Martin, on the other hand, has come off pasted with adjectives ranging from "intellectual" to "soft" to "weak" or worse, depending on which former coaches or teammates you hear. We've been indulged with stereotypes about football players from Stanford (Martin) as too "thoughtful" for the apparent cesspool of ignorance that is the NFL, as compared to the Nebraska (Incognito) types (thereby proving that cheap and dishonest stereotypes can be fabricated for pretty much any differentiation between human beings you can imagine). We've had the all-important pronouncement (from the Dolphins' general manager no less) that Martin should have slugged Incognito, as well as all manner of other nonsensical blather from other Dolphins personnel with the requisite circling of the wagons around the besieged Incognito. We've had a funny takedown in true Man Up fashion of the whole Man Up culture perceived as the root of dysfunction, and the requisite invocation, in so many words, of the hoary and threadbare cliche that You Will Never Understand Because You Never Played The Game, from someone I'm not sure ever played the game (as if "understanding" would in any way render Incognito's words and actions as morally pure or ethically justifiable). I'm not quite sure whether this constitutes genuine irony or something else, but the only place on sports media behemoth ESPN's web empire that has genuinely managed to engage in questions about what this sorry debacle says about manhood and sports comes from espnW, typically that niche of the site dedicated to women's sports.
By now you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering when the whole faith issue gets blended in. Or, if you know your British or American church history, perhaps you've already put it together. Either way, the sad truth is that the church in particular has been, frankly, part of encouraging this particular sports culture for a while now, at least a century and a half.
The Apostle Paul (or deutero-Paul if you're into that sort of thing) was occasionally prone to drop in athletic metaphors in exhorting readers or hearers to live into their calling in Christ -- "press on toward the mark" in Philippians 3:14, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race" in 2 Timothy 4:7, and others. (There is also the injunction to "glorify God in your body" in 1 Corinthians 6:20; I have to wonder if 300-lb. offensive linemen were really what Paul had in mind.) From that slim start the church has made a veritable if sporadic cottage industry of equating physical fitness with spiritual piety. For our purposes it is probably sufficient to point to the Victorian-era vogue for "muscular Christianity" (make of it what you will, to the degree you trust Wikipedia) as a genesis for the modern entanglement of the church with sport as a means to manliness. If some of its earlier advocates saw "muscular Christianity" as a means to protect the weak, its later manifestations (particularly in the US) didn't necessarily carry over that concern; rather, it became something of an opportunity for pride (as most any kind of spiritual striving can do), a near self-parody in the hands of a group such as the PowerTeam (anybody else out there remember them?), and the launching pad for such evangelical celebrity athletes as Tim Tebow or Jeremy Lin. It lives on to some degree in modern organizations like Athletes in Action or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, in benign or positive ways as far as I can see. To some degree, indirectly it becomes a cudgel in the hands of neo-Calvinists such as John Piper or Mark Driscoll.
Where, then, will the church's witness come from when bullying -- an act increasingly found unacceptable in society more broadly -- rears its vicious head in the most popular of American sports? Are we waiting for the currently team-less Tebow to speak ex cathedra? When bullying (under the supposedly more harmless guise of "hazing") ends up with children taking guns to school, drunken frat boys plunging from balconies, or marching band members (!!!) beating their drum major to death, can an evident bully like Incognito (a man with some serious self-control issues in his past on the field) simply wait for this to "pass" and get off the hook without provoking some manner of self-examination among the faithful who also get their entertainment from the game? Or do we engage in some sort of tortured attempt to teach our kids that bullying is wrong, but we're still going to go drop bucketloads of money to go watch the bullies play?
One more ESPN columnist, in one of those fanciful "stories from the future" columns writers resort to occasionally, speculates that the events of the most recent week in the NFL -- the Incognito/Martin scandal, plus the Dorsett story, an avalanche of injuries and the scary health issues faced by a pair of coaches -- will mark the beginning of the end of the NFL if not the game of football. I think Mr. Fleming overestimates the conscience of the American football fan. Am I wrong?
I don't think so.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Oh, yes, it matters
Today in Boston they had a parade. Not on
account of some civic holiday or victory in a war or any such, no. The
parade is being held because a baseball team that plays primarily in Boston won
four games in a series designed as a best-of-seven format, against a team that
plays primarily in St. Louis. I say "that plays primarily in"
because, of course, the teams don't "belong to" either city in any
legal sense, nor in a residential one (most players scatter to warmer climes in
the offseason), nor indeed in any other sense besides the fact of playing a
majority of their games in that city, except for what might be called the
"heart" sense. Thousands of citizens in Boston claim the Red
Sox as "their" team, even their "home" team, and go to
sometimes mind-boggling lengths to demonstrate their loyalty to that team.
On occasion, as was the case this year with the Red Sox and Boston in the
wake of the Marathon bombing, the team actually draws closer to "its"
city than is typical of the hired mercenaries that professional team sports
players are, for all practical purposes. Still, viewed in the abstract,
it's an odd thing, even if has become a tradition stretching over decades.
In other parts of the country, thousands upon
thousands of individuals are descending upon cavernous coliseums and smaller-scale
gridirons in large cities and college towns and even smaller towns to watch
dozens of huge boys slam into each other at frightening speeds wearing layers
of armament, seeking touchdowns and glory. Some of these individuals (or
"fans," which may or may not bear relationship to the far scarier
word "fanatic") perhaps attended the colleges or universities hosting
these games today; many did not. This after many of these same folks
crowded into high school stadiums for football games last night, and before
many folks will trek to one of thirty-two stadiums designated for use by
professional football teams playing in a league that rakes in cash in
unimaginable fistfuls, some small pittance of which cash goes, after much legal
gnashing of teeth and years of garish denial, to the men whose minds were
broken by their participation in the game, or in many cases to their survivors,
a league with the power to snap its fingers and cause ESPN (a rather large
financial player in sport itself) to run contritely away from a documentary on that subject by
two of its own best investigative reporters.
A not-small number of fans tuned into football of a
different sort today, the kind that actually requires feet on the ball more
routinely, broadcast from England or other points in Europe. They were
probably spared the sound of any racially-based taunting from fans in the
stands towards players of obvious non-European origin. Some fans of that
sport will take in the playoffs in the domestic league tonight.
Other fans will turn out for games in the NBA or
NHL, two seasons just getting started as baseball ends and football nears the
homestretch. Fans of college basketball await season-opening games in
just a few days. Players will play, fans will scream and cheer and groan
and maybe boo and maybe worse. Some players will be injured. Many
will watch games at home, singly or in groups. Rivers of alcohol will be
consumed. And billions of dollars, insane amounts of money, will change
hands.
Some teenagers or even younger kids spend virtually
all year playing a single sport, the whole concept of "seasons" going
out the window, in an effort (I presume?) to improve their chances of getting a
college scholarship or going pro. Kids skilled at tennis or other
individual sports uproot their entire lives to enroll in and live at
"academies" in nice sunny places to pursue that sport virtually
full-time. This latter is pretty old-hat by now. In high schools
and colleges, being "on the team" has moved far beyond a
get-out-of-school-free pass or anything so small; it has almost evolved into license to rape. And the only word in
that last sentence I regret is "almost."
Frederick Buechner, in The Alphabet of Grace,
sagely observed that "where your feet take you, that is who you are."
Others have made note of the power of money to reflect the priorities of
those who have it and spend it. These facts alone, in my opinion, are
quite sufficient justification to hold up the world of sports, those who play
it and those who watch it and those who own it, up for critical scrutiny from a
perspective informed by faith, theology, doctrine, belief, or whatever
religious buzzword you choose. It is a powerful, lucrative, and pervasive
societal presence. To pretend it is beneath consideration, somehow an
abstraction from the "real" business of living as Christ-followers in
God's world, is as insanely wrong-headed as an uncritical opportunistic embrace
of sport as a vehicle for marketing faith, or particular varieties of it.
The title of this blog is taken from a remark I
remember well from my south Georgia childhood, something like this:
"Football is not a religion. It's way more important than
that." The remark, or some variant of it, was usually delivered
tongue-in-cheek even if it shouldn't have been, even if it should have been
uttered flatly as an unexceptional statement of fact. There are of course
many who take in sporting events for whom it is far less than that, an
occasional escape or diversion. Still, the money changes hands, and
that escape may be implicated in more brain damage, or the sham of the
"student-athlete" or funds for a ballpark instead of schools, or who
knows what yet-undiscovered shame or scandal. Where our feet take us is
who we are, at least to some degree, and our money reveals our love.
I am a fan, particularly of baseball, somewhat of
college basketball, increasingly of MLS soccer (awaiting Sporting Kansas City's
playoff match tonight). These days I can't make myself watch football
without wondering how many years are being taken off lives with every hit, but
I keep up enough to follow conversations during the week. I haven't
really followed the NBA closely since Dominique Wilkins left the Hawks, but
again, I do keep up. If you doubt my bonafides, I'd invite you to
investigate my t-shirt drawer, or drawers; more baseball t-shirts than I can
count, major and minor leagues, including eight just from spring training sites
in Florida, some of which are no longer in use, as well as a Sporting KC
t-shirt and one from the Kansas Jayhawks' national championship back in 2008, and
a few assorted Florida State shirts.
I'm also a seminary student hopefully graduating in
May and hopefully headed towards a pastorate somewhere, with an itch to write.
Between the two, I just don't think the role sports plays in the world can be ignored by people of faith. I'm not arrogant enough to think that
I'm the perfect person to do it (I can't wait until somebody attacks me over
presuming to speak on the subject when I Never Played The Game), but I'm
arrogant enough to think that somebody needs to speak to it, and
I'm expendable enough that I might as well hold the fort until bigger names and
smarter thinkers than I get around to it.
Hence, a new blog. My other
blog is still in existence, and I'll still write on it as often as
possible. Where that one is a bit more personal, I'm naive enough or
arrogant enough to hope that this one might go somewhere. For now,
it starts small, as I work out the kinks (and finish seminary!). I have a
heap of ideas but would not mind suggestions.
Do I expect to change the world? Hah. I
don't even expect to change your mind. But I do expect you to think about
it, at minimum, and be ready to ask questions sometimes; to question assertions
that somehow rule out a course of action when a problem seems intractable.
Is football scrambling brains? Don't tell me that football can't be
curtailed or eliminated if no other solution is found. Don't tell me that
superstars can't be suspended for cheating (this means you, Alex Rodriguez).
Don't tell me can't, ever, when it comes to sports and their
scarring of society, no matter how much good they might sometimes do or how
much enjoyment they bring.
Because if we ever accept the word
"can't" when addressing the ways sports becomes a blemish on
society, the church should just fold up and disappear just as surely as it
should if it ever accepts poverty or prejudice or any other societal ill you
name as intractable and gives up screaming for justice.
At least, that's what I think.
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