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.
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