How it happened that I stopped watching football

Since the three or four of you who read this blog have put up with my repeated if sporadic outbursts of commentary on football and its potentially fatal perils, it seems only fair to give some explanation of how I came to stop watching the game.
It's actually a fairly recent development.  Until a little more than three years ago I still watched college football.  I had fallen away from the NFL game in a rather gradual fashion -- first taking a pass on the Super Bowl, then losing interest in watching any of it -- somewhere in the initial stream of trauma-related suicides of former players.  For whatever reason it was the suicide of Andre Waters that set me on the course away from the NFL.  I'm not sure why it was him; he wasn't a player to whom I had known any particular attachment.  It might partly have been the knowledge of his reputation as one of the harder-hitting defensive backs in the game; if he had been so dramatically affected by CTE, it was clear that it wasn't just those who received the punishment that were at risk, but those who dealt it out as well.
At any rate, the NFL gradually dropped from my sports-viewing habits, but I held on to college football.  I'm sure that in part I was convincing myself that the danger must have come from the extended years of playing beyond college, therefore watching college games was o.k., or some similar form of rationalization.  While living in Lawrence we actually attended a number of games of the University of Kansas football team.  This was partly because it was frequently cheap -- this is KU, remember, where as good as the basketball team is, the football team is that bad.  We could get tickets as low as $15 a day or two before the game because, well, they were desperate to sell.
After moving to Richmond, we chose not to pay for cable television, which meant that watching games on Saturday afternoon (or all throughout the Thanksgiving weekend, for example) was no longer so easy.  It happened that Florida State, the only alma mater in my background that played football, had a big matchup on the schedule against the University of Oklahoma that fall, and I decided to seek out a sports bar and allow myself to watch this game.
Oklahoma had beaten FSU badly the previous year and this was to be a test of whether FSU was going to be any better this year.  It was apparent pretty quickly, as I recall, that some things hadn't improved.  FSU's primary quarterback was running for his life from the Oklahoma defense.  Still, the game remained close, in contrast to the previous season's blowout.
At one point FSU was close, close enough to try a pass play into the end zone.  The receiver was, if I recall correctly, double-covered, but nonetheless made a game effort, but the hit he received knocked the ball loose.  The pass fell incomplete, and both players went to the ground.
Only the FSU receiver (his name might have been Kenny Shaw, or something similar?) didn't get up. The cliches started to sound about his having his bell rung, and the training staff was quickly onto the field, but it was quite a while before the receiver could finally be taken off safely.
Before all the reaction set in, in the instant after that play, before I had a chance to think or react or be on guard, the thought flashed into my mind:

I wonder how many years of brain function he just lost.

As quickly as possible I paid my bill and left.

Kenny Shaw's in there, somewhere.

For all I know the receiver was fine, and for all I know he got back into the game later.  It mattered little.  I was to horrified to continue.  Not that I had had such a thought, but that the thought was not out of order, in my mind.  And even without having had a course in Christian ethics yet, I was quickly persuaded that I couldn't do that.  If that was what the sport had become, for eighty former players or forty or twenty or two, I couldn't do that.  
About a year ago the satirical site The Onion, which is always at its best when there's an uncomfortable ring of truth in their fake headlines, came up with one that mined a similar vein.  I just beat them to it by two years, and without any intention to be funny.
So, that's how I got to be where I am.  There will be more to say on the subject, by smarter people than I to be sure.  Meantime, I will continue to struggle with the ethical and faithful implications of it all.

Note: here's a video of the play. By any definition I know it seems to be a legal hit, as the contact involved did not seem to be helmet-to-helmet as far as my eye can see (though it's close).  I'm not sure that there is any relevance to that fact where the larger question is concerned. 

Self-policing #FAIL

It's been a few weeks now, but I've been unable to shake the images and sounds of a fairly horrible incident in the Michigan vs. Minnesota football game of September 27.  If you follow the sport you probably heard about it.  (I don't watch football or make it a part of my sports pursuits any more, but obviously I follow stories that happen just in case they supply blog fodder.  Call me a muckraker if you must.)  If you'd like a video reminder, watch this.  I'll be here when you get back.

It created a brief kerfuffle of controversy around the country, and perhaps lasted longer at Michigan, and may have played a role in the impending departure of that university's athletic director.  From what I can tell from a distance, it seems that The Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper, took the lead on the story and helped stir up opinion in the university community, which may just suggest that journalism is more alive on certain campuses than in the mainstream media.  But I digress.

What I want to do, as much for my own understanding as for any future rabble-rousing purposes, is to try to understand what happened on that play.  The number of weeks passed since that game is not an accident; my desire was to let time pass and let the story fade from public prominence (as was inevitable) in order to come to the event with perhaps a more critical eye than might be possible in the heat of the moment.  Fortunately, the video linked above was still available on YouTube (oddly, ESPN doesn't see fit to have it available on their site), and I could actually watch the sequence of events unfold as I had not been able to do before.

With that disclaimer, I would identify at least five moments of failure in this sequence.

1. (0:00) Quarterback Shane Morris is still in the game, despite a pronounced limp and utter lack of mobility.
Now, I know all about how football is supposed to instill toughness (and how I am presumably a namby-pamby wuss because I Never Played The Game and all that BS.  Save me your Neanderthal crap.  All you'll do is convince me even more that I'm right and that you're not a person I should ever trust or respect again) and character and all sorts of other things that are presented as life skills.  But there are two things wrong with this scenario: (1) Morris isn't that experienced, and being down to one functional leg leaves him that much less effective as a quarterback, and this rather smacks of punishing the rest of the team, particularly when Devin Gardner, until recently starter and about as healthy as any football player ever is, is available on the bench.  Yes, I'm actually criticizing the coach, Brady Hoke, for not putting the best team on the field in order to have any kind of chance to win or at least make the game respectable.   Furthermore, (2) Morris's limited mobility makes him a sitting duck, unable to escape from anyone, including your grandmother if she had been on the field.  When you're already hurt, you stand an even better chance of getting hurt more or worse -- plain common sense, folks.  Of course part of the fail goes to Morris, a True Believer in the cult of Play Through Pain, is waving off any attention from the sideline that might result in his being removed.  But mostly, coaching #FAIL.

It takes a couple of minutes on the video to get to...

2. (2:20) Morris, gimping around in the backfield, gets hit by a Minnesota defender, who lowers his head and drives his helmet directly into Morris's face mask.

Credit: larrybrownsports.com

This is an illegal hit, under the label "targeting"; the prescribed punishment is ejection from the current game and suspension from the next game for his team.  Instead the Minnesota defender is only called for a roughing the passer penalty that, ironically, serves to extend Michigan's sputtering drive.  This turns out to be important, because Morris, who now cannot walk a straight line and generally has the demeanor of a crack-addled prostitute in New Orleans at 3:30 a.m., is not removed from the game.  One of his linemen has to hold him up as the quarterback staggers and finally starts to fall.
I briefly considered charging the lineman with a #FAIL, but decided not to.  Had Morris gone to the ground, he would have had to be removed from the game, but in all honesty in his condition the fall might have hurt him worse.  I also considered a general team #FAIL, but I decided to give the benefit of the doubt and take some of the gestures I saw from Morris's teammates as attempts to signal the sideline to replace the quarterback.  So, first a referee #FAIL for not ejecting the perpetrator of the hit, then a coaching #FAIL for not getting the staggered quarterback out of the game.

3. (about next three minutes, not all on camera) The new quarterback, Devin Gardner, gets the team moving with a completed pass and some nifty runs, demonstrating that mobility is a good thing.  Meanwhile Morris is being observed on the sideline.  I'm going to give benefit of doubt and assume those people with him are medical personnel of some sort, although they look an awful lot like coaches (anyone who can identify one way or the other?).  However, whoever they are, the next #FAIL is theirs; Morris's helmet is still on.  If these are the medical personnel with the responsibility to examine Morris to determine his fitness to continue, they have to get his helmet off even if they have to cut off his head to do it.  Yet his helmet remains on.

Get the helmet off already.  Credit: maizenbrew.com

4. (around 5:15) Meanwhile Gardner is moving the team along, with another first-down run, but his helmet pops off.  This is an automatic removal from the game for one play, which is somehow supposed to be long enough to determine if the player who lost his head helmet is fit to continue.  Accordingly Gardner is sent to the sideline.  Of course, because Gardner had just picked up a first down, Michigan still needs a quarterback.
Now the third-string quarterback bestirs himself, ready to enter, but ... no, Morris, still gimpy and groggy, returns.  Thankfully someone had the brains to call only a handoff, but who knows what kind of disaster might have befallen the quarterback even if all he did was trip over a teammate.  At any rate Morris is safely removed and Gardner reinserted, presumably to finish the game.
Gotta go general system #FAIL here.  Nobody got this right -- not Morris, not the medical personnel/coaches attending to him, not the head coach Hoke, nobody.

5. (sometime after the game) Shane Morris tweets "I just want to play football."  Morris #FAIL.  This is not the time to be tweeting anything, aside from perhaps "I'm not dead yet" or some other statement about his condition.
Let us be clear on one thing: football players are STUPID.  No, wait, strike that: athletes are STUPID.  When caught up in the moment of competition a person who might (I'm not totally convinced, but might) be perfectly rational off the field will engage in the most bizarrely dangerous and potentially self-destructive behavior possible, just to Stay In The Game and Play Through Pain and Help The Team.  And they will LIE about their condition to stay in.  The very last person to be trusted to judge the player's viability to continue is the player himself.
Even though it's possible the team might be better off with someone healthy in that spot, this is The Code, and it is inviolable.  Basically the only way to get off the field without having one's toughness questioned is to be paralyzed on the play.  Even then, you better flash a "thumbs-up" sign if at all possible.  Morris is, as a very young man who has no other real purpose in life than to play football (it would seem), bound and determined to preserve his toughness credentials, no matter if he sees you holding up thirteen fingers on your right hand.

What the various failures in this one sequence of action point to is the near-impossibility of football to police itself.  The NFL, which has coaching staffs the size of small armies in the Low Countries, has a slightly better chance of policing things, but their players are even more bound by The Code, and coaches even more monomaniacal about field-marshalling, and doctors still dependent on team or league for their jobs.  Between games the NFL actually seems to be getting serious about policing potential head-trauma vicitms, but the in-game defenses are still shaky.

The NCAA, which just this summer settled its own concussion lawsuit, is on shakier ground.  Some schools have similarly extensive coaching and support staffs, but many do not.  The same problems of accountability and supervision exist, perhaps exacerbated by the intense focus on such programs when Chester from Goober Gap can raise hell on the radio and make the coach's seat even hotter.  The shakiest ground of all may be at the high-school level, where staffs are much smaller, medical personnel might be alone on the field against a coaching staff and stadium full of zealots are screaming for the star quarterback or linebacker to get back on the field.  (Yes, I'm aware that the nervous parents are also probably there, but the zealots in the stands don't care unless the player is lying motionless on the field.)

So, what questions arise from this?

A. Since this blog is mostly about trying to see things from the view of the fan who's trying to remain faithful and still be a sports fan, let's start there.  Can you, from any kind of faithful or ethical point of view, trust that everything possible is being done to safeguard the long-term health of those players you're screaming at on the field?

B. Suppose you want to go to the laissez-faire position that it's on the players themselves if they choose to play, and that Football Must Be Preserved At All Costs (which is apparently becoming increasingly a partisan political position). What does that say about your Christian ethics?  Do we have to go back to the early Christian debates about whether attending the gladiatorial contests was even a viable position for a Christ-follower?  Even if they choose to destroy themselves out there, can you as a follower of the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace, justify watching such destruction of life for your own amusement?
(There is one possible derivative of this position that I will actually agree with, though: nobody who is currently playing in the NCAA or NFL has any business ever filing suit against either entity should they end up with some form of long-term brain trauma.  None whatsoever.  The knowledge is out there, and you are not compelled to play.  It is possible to walk away.  I'm not sure what the cutoff year should be, but by know you are responsible for knowing the risk and, if you insist on continuing to play, being prepared to absorb the consequences should you be one of the lucky 33% (or maybe less if you don't go to the NFL) to face long-term brain trauma as a result.
This frankly has no bearing on the question of the first paragraph of B, but it is worth considering as the sport plays out in the future.

C. Aside from the ethics of watching the game itself, can either an NFL franchise or an NCAA football team be trusted to be ethical in their treatment of athletes?  The NFL is spending tons of money to try to convince you that "they got this."  The NCAA has so many issues right now, it's almost impossible to trust.  But what of the 32 individual NFL franchises, or your beloved SEC football franchise operating in the guise of a university?  Do you in fact seriously believe that the health of all 53 or 85 or 100+ players is truly their greatest concern?  Had the Michigan-Minnesota game above not been televised on one of the ESPNs, do you think the issue would have been raised as forcefully as it was?  If you can, you're a more trusting soul than I.  Not necessarily because I particularly attribute malice to the Patriots or Crimson Tide or whoever, but because it's never been easy to be ethical with dollar signs in your eyes.

This is but one example, that happened to get famous for being nationally televised.  Are you confident there aren't others?  It's one thing to go on about players playing whole games with multiple concussions back in the '60s or '70s, the ignorant age.  We're not ignorant now.  We may choose to be stupid, but we can't be ignorant anymore.  We know what can happen.  Do you have your cutoff number of CTE cases that is too many all prepared?

The short version: can football police itself where the health of its players is concerned?  And can you watch even if it can't?

I have bucketloads of doubt.  And I can't.

Finding (something like) joy in highly imperfect teams

By all means this blog should be a daily affair.

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

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

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

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

All of those should be addressed.

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

Fortunately, other sports have come through for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Side note: RFK Stadium has seen better days

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

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

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

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

Racial resignation: The Atlanta Hawks, the premises of racism, and the church

It happened, perhaps, at an opportune time, when attentions were distracted by many sports stories, not least the Ray Rice case in the NFL.  It didn't go completely unnoticed, but between Rice and other tales of domestic abuse, and then the report of Adrian Peterson's different form of domestic abuse, the story came and went rather quickly, much to the relief of the NBA, no doubt.  That it was worth maybe a week of attention, maybe less, speaks to how strangely the incident was handled; the first that many people heard about it, at least outside of Atlanta, was the report that Bruce Levenson, principal owner of the NBA Atlanta Hawks, was falling on his sword over racially charged comments in an email to other club principals.  Other details trickled out, eventually implicating GM Danny Ferry with making a racially charged statement that may or may not have been quoted from a scouting report from a scout who may or may not have been affiliated with an NBA team other than the Hawks (it finally seems as if he really was reading the words of another, which should set off a whole other set of alarms in the NBA).  By the time any more news threatened to come out, other more twisted news came along in the sports world, and the NBA was spared Donald Sterling Redux.

If I paid enough attention to the NBA to have a team, the Hawks would probably be it.  Which is to say, the last time I paid attention to the NBA, the Hawks were my team.  They had some epic battles with the Larry Bird Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs, believe it or not, that nobody remembers because all anybody remembers is the epic battles the Celtics had with the Los Angeles Lakers back then.  But then the team got old, and Dominique Wilkins left or was sent packing, and the team slid, not all the way into despair, but into a persistent and seemingly intractable mediocrity that allowed it to make the playoffs or hover on the fringes but never really become a threat to do damage.  Last season was somewhat typical, as they snuck into the last spot in the Eastern Conference playoffs and lasted long enough to put a slight scare into the Indiana Pacers before receding.  It got just interesting enough that I actually slipped into a bar in the Atlanta airport to watch part of one of those playoff games while waiting for a flight.

And there the Hawks sat, largely a peripheral concern in their own city but nevertheless not in real danger of perishing.  A hockey team came and went.  The Falcons actually got to a Super Bowl, then went off a cliff, and have been resurgent of late, enough to be the probable lead dog among Atlanta's pro teams (yes, over the Braves; more on that in a bit).  The Braves owned the 90s, until people got bored with consistent playoff appearances that did not end in World Series wins (hard to believe that a city could get spoiled by one WS win, but it sure looks like that happened in retrospect).  There was a bit of a downturn in the 2000s, but the team has returned to the playoffs of late, though this year may not be included.  Fan interest in the Braves has been maddeningly just short of what a team of such success might hope.  Meantime the city will add a new major league-level franchise in the next few years, as Arthur Blank somehow wrangled an MLS team to play in the new pleasure-palace he managed to finagle from the city for the Falcons, which I suppose guarantees the facility will be used over the summer.

So the Hawks sit, occasionally getting a bit of notice for an unexpected playoff push only to fall away in predictable disappointment.  Big-name players don't come there.  They don't make transcendent draft picks.  They're just...there, until earlier this month, when they got the kind of attention they could really do without.

Now about that Levenson email.  I'm presuming you have clicked above and read it.

It was racially charged, sure.  Racially insensitive, you bet.  Utterly stupid to be writing, of course.

I'm not entirely convinced that it was racist.

I think it was far worse than being racist.

What Levenson does in his email doesn't constitute racial hatred, I think.  It constitutes racial resignation.

To attempt to explain: Levenson cites his wildly off-the-cuff and probably inaccurate calculation about how many black vs. white fans in the stands, in the bars at the arena, on the KissCam (an innovation that needs squelching badly, IMHO).  From that point he immediately begins to ramble about potential remedies to these problems, all driven by the assumption that for the Hawks to be more successful in drawing white Atlantans to Hawks games.

How many fallacies can you pull out of that sentence?

At risk to my future (being a white guy born in Georgia, I should be running from this issue full speed, but as a would-be spiritual leader I am forbidden from doing so), I want to try to pick out the worst things going on in Levenson's mind, evidently, as he rambled out that email.

The short version: I don't think Levenson is a racist, or at least he's no more racist than the average white guy.  He's not a candidate for a white hood and torch.  He was probably never a David Duke kind of guy.

What he is, though, is a white person who accepted the premises of racism as incontrovertible fact.

He accepted that southern whites would not attend events at an arena populated by mostly blacks.  To be sure, there is a subset of southern whites for whom this is true.  Levenson presumed this to be true for 100% of southern whites.  This is not the case.  I don't know the percentage, but it's not 100%.

He accepted the implication that southern whites are a monolithic entity, all thinking and acting the same way.  Not all southern whites dislike hip-hop.  Music sales (such as they are) don't lie.  There are whites out there who do not govern themselves according to the premises of racism.  If that had not been the case in southern history, where would the Clarence Jordans and Millard Fullers of the world have come from?  Hell, where would Jimmy Carter have come from?  Levenson apparently saw no such possibility in the white population he was attempting to court; maybe he needed a history lesson.

He accepted the premise that race is only a black/white issue.  Apparently in Levenson's view there are no Hispanic or Latino or Asian-American or Native American or anything else persons living in the Atlanta area that might be persuaded to attend NBA games, just blacks and whites.  Racism would be very happy for you to see the world that way.  Dichotomy is much easier to manage and control than a truly multifaceted view of a world or a city.

He accepted a perceived "it's us or it's them" demand, and sided with the "us".  Even though he calls the perceived attitudes of his hypothetical whites about Philips Arena and the vicinity "racist garbage," he nonetheless chooses to cast his lot with the "us" whom he perceives as believing that "racist garbage."  He can see no other possibility than to change the promotional mechanics of reaching out to fans to favor those particular whites.  You would think he would realize that, by his own reasoning (flawed as it is), a country concert after a game would chase away black fans to the same degree that a hip-hop concert presumably chases away white fans, yet he sounds like he's on the verge of bringing in (fill in current hot country act here, I have no idea) for a postgame performance.  Apparently that was an acceptable calculation to him.


It would be easy to continue piling on where Levenson is concerned, even as the team is in the process of a highly stage-managed sale.  In the end this isn't where it's most useful to go, I don't think.

For one thing, it actually grieves me a little bit that the Hawks are going to come out of this with the "racist" label attached, while the Atlanta Braves, a franchise with quite a history of racially questionable visual presentation, are getting away with a virtual re-enactment of 1970s-era "white flight" in their impending move to Cobb County (never an example of racial harmony itself) and nobody outside of maybe a few locals is even questioning the racial politics of such a move.

Another point is that the Hawks haven't been all that good.  They usually fall somewhere in the middle of the pack in the NBA, which is not much of a way to get the house packed; doing a better job of building a team might have a bigger impact than anyone thinks.  One might also point out, on the other hand, that Atlanta itself never has been, except for very brief periods, an extremely supportive sports market for sports that don't involve long-term brain damage.

Most of all, though, it's not as if the Hawks are the only franchise guilty of such reasoning.  Even more, sports is hardly the only establishment in society guilty of this reasoning.

The church has, at various times in its history in this country, been hung up on the horns of racism.  The civil rights movement featured an awful lot of clergy in its legacy, a few (but far too few) white.  Whole heaps of clergy were on the opposing side of that struggle, of course.  The struggle over slavery drew clergy and churches into its ugly maw, on both sides of course, and split more than one denomination into pro- and anti-slavery factions.

Keeping with the above warning about false dualism, racially charged rhetoric about Native Americans certainly helped grease the skids for the continuing displacement of indigenous populations into further remote and smaller reservations.  Waves of Irish and Chinese immigrants in the 1800s drew both poison and compassion from Christian clergy.  Even today, some pastors can be heard demanding that unaccompanied migrants be shipped back home to certain death even as other churches provide shelter for those same children.

In short, the church has a tough time with racial issues.  Even if sport is sometimes caught struggling to remove the beam from its own eye, the church is hard-pressed to say much about it with multiple beams in its eyes.

Though Bruce Levenson apparently might have disagreed, the old saw persists that the most segregated hour in the USA is the hour of Sunday morning worship.  Some of the same premises of racism apply here too, it seems; a church that strings out lots of exuberant gospel music is "black" no matter how many people of whichever ethnic background show up.

I'm probably a typical example to some people.  I don't have a lot of appreciation for "loud" worship. I believe it holds true for me for a typical "contemporary" worship service with a big rock band (which would be described as a more "white" phenomenon, though by no means exclusively so) as much or more so as for any other type of worship.  Still, someone could point to me as an example of a white who doesn't or won't go to a black church if they wanted to do so.  And we again flounder on our own confusion about identity and practice.

I'm bothering with this (believe me, I could still be -- and still will be -- writing about the league that admits that 33% of its players will end up suffering long-term brain trauma) because I still can't avoid the nagging doubt about the church.  What are the unspoken, and thus unchallenged, premises of racism that we more or less accept as incontrovertible fact?  Would "whites and blacks can't worship together" be an example of such a thing, a manifestation of "it's us or it's them"?  Are we too quick to reduce the whole thing to black/white, forgetting a whole world of identity out there (gender as well as ethnic)?

What other premises of racism are out there to which the church submits, consciously or not?  I'm not talking about basic bigotries or obvious mantras of hatred; I'm trying to get at unquestioned assumptions or codes of thought that remain just subliminal enough, most of the time, to avoid being deconstructed for their connections to the unjust structures of the world in which we live.

What are we blindly accepting that would horrify us if we thought it through even a little bit?

Unbelievably timely book commentary: Against Football

Almond, Steve.  Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.  Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014.

Honestly, I couldn't have planned this so well if I'd tried, believe me.
A few days ago I picked up Steve Almond's new book Against Football.  I had to order it.  Strangely enough, neither the big-box bookstore nor the "local" bookstore were carrying it as football season opened.  I can't imagine why.
It had to wait until after a couple of writing obligations (including yesterday morning's sermon), but last night I finally settled down with it.  The first thing I can report is that it's quite brief, only 178 pages.  It is not a lifetime commitment to read the book.
Second, it is not a dense, evidentiary argument in the manner of League of Denial.  It is probably best described by its full title: Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.

By his own description, Almond is a rather pathetic sort about his football.  A former journalist turned author, Almond did a little sports commentary in his day.  That's not the substance of his book, although it does inform his pointed deconstruction of the role football talking heads play in the rationalization and justification of the game's routine brutality.  No, his viewpoint is strictly as a fan, particularly of the Oakland Raiders (adding a different level to the term "pathetic" applied earlier).  The opening chapters of the book establish Almond's bona fides as a fan, from his highly subjective review of the history of the sport's place in American culture.  While quite hyperbole-ridden in its estimation of football's hold on the culture before the 1960s (which does seem to mark the rise of the NFL in particular), he is quite perceptive on its courting of television, corporate culture in general, and even the military.
He touches on the Michael Sam issue, although at the time he was writing Sam had only barely been drafted.  He also goes as far as to suggest that the pervasiveness of football subconsciously encourages a tolerance of greater violence in society, and this is without any reference to Ray Rice at all.  The New Orleans Saints bounty scandal shows up, too, mostly to point out that in the culture of the game, the only "scandal" about it was the fact that it laid bare the stuff the NFL doesn't want you thinking about.  (You don't really think the Saints were the only team guilty of such a thing, do you?) There is of course much to say about concussions and CTE and their continuing march through the ranks of retired players, not to mention former college and high school players as well.  The implicit racism of a whole bunch of white guys running a league with about 70% black players is not ignored (not to mention such unseemly spectacles as the scouting combine and its creepy evocation of the old-fashioned slave market).  The obscenity of stadium-building and subsidizing gazillionaires with public funding of such stadiums is also skewered with righteous indignation, as well as the subversion of academics to football on the college level.  In short, this is not a one-issue rant; Almond is accusing the total culture of football in America and laying the blame at the feet of those most responsible: fans, like himself.  He reserves his hardest criticism for those who see the corruption inseparably woven into the business of football, on all levels, and can identify it as such, but who are unwilling to back up their words with actions.  Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, even President Obama fall into this category, along with Almond himself.
This is potentially where this blog entry gets offensive, and where I fully expect to lose some friends if anybody reads this.
Here's the deal: there is no more pretending that this doesn't apply to you, football fan who claims any kind of moral center.  Especially you preachers and preacher wannabes out there.
Did you get outraged at the Ray Rice news today?  Goody for you.  But if you're still devoting your entire Saturday/Sunday to consuming as much football as you can, you're still complicit.  Condemning an obvious monster is not enough to let you off the hook for supporting the less obvious monsters who run or participate in the game in some way.  The mind-blowing greed of league and ownership, the crippling effects of the game on the bodies and minds of its participants, the mockery of higher education (and even high school education in many cases), the homophobia, bullying (did I mention Richie Incognito shows up too?), and general thuggishness of the insidious Real Man Sport culture, the anesthetizing effect of the game on our own tolerance for violence ... that's on you.
The book is ultimately a gauntlet thrown down on American culture.  Not that American culture is going to go along with it, mind you.  As I noted before, bookstores are not going out of their way to promote the book or even acknowledge its existence.  Somehow I don't see ESPN (or any media with even a token financial interest in football) granting Almond an interview.
Merely acknowledging issues isn't enough, any more than it's sufficient to be outraged at the abuses in Ferguson without doing anything about the implicit racism in your own community, or to get all outraged about Ray Rice's assault on his fiancee without standing against domestic violence among your own congregation.  I've seen plenty of you on social media demanding an end to rape culture, or institutional racism, among other things.  Continuing to tolerate the monstrosity that football has become in American culture makes your words ring hollow.  There, I said it.  It's one of the biggest enablers of what you say you despise.  What are you going to do about it?

Dear NFL

Dear NFL,
As much as I might prefer not to do it, I have to start this letter off with a little bit of congratulations.  You and I don't really speak any more, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't acknowledge your success.  You really have done it.
For a league that seemed very recently to be facing a real and dangerous crisis of image and process, you've done a remarkable job of making that all go away.  I mean, look around.  Is anybody talking about Junior Seau anymore?  Does anyone even remember Mike Webster?  Terry Long, Ray Easterling, Andre Waters, Dave Duerson...gone.  Vanished from the public radar.  That's a most remarkable achievement in exerting your influence.
I have to say I'm particularly impressed with how you've brought your lapdog ESPN to heel.  It was one thing to yank their leash and have them pull away from that partnership with PBS on the Frontline special about that League of Denial book.  Let's face it, Jock Central was always a bizarre fit with those Downton Abbey toffs.  That was never going to last.  But now?  You have them squarely in your place.  You hand them their scripts and they woof them out most obediently.  I suppose the real test will come the next time a well-known former player kills himself or reveals that he's showing signs of CTE on his brain.  But the way you've got ESPN whipped, I'll not be at all surprised if they bury it at the 45-minute mark of the 2 a.m. Sportscenter.
All hail the King.  When it comes to message control there isn't a politician in the country who couldn't take lessons from you.  And the sports landscape?  Well, MLB seems content to rely on regional loyalties and count their piles of money.  The NBA can gain a little bit of traction when LeBron James decides to change teams or when somebody's leg disintegrates, but one of their teams just hired a female coach.  I mean, really, how unmanly is that?  Does anybody even know the NHL exists at this point?  Oh, and remember when everybody thought NASCAR was the Next Big Thing?  Now they have to have a driver run over another driver, literally, to get the kind of attention you get for changing breakfast cereals.  OK, that World Cup business was a bit pesky over the summer, but obviously people who follow that aren't real Americans anyway -- after all, Germany's never won a Super Bowl, right?  So really, with a little bit of backup vocals from your farm system in college football, you rule the cultural landscape.  (And it's really quite sweet how the big boys of your farm system just got their way so that they can make themselves even more like you.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery as they say.  And good for them that they'll have even more freedom to drop the pretense of academics and fulfill their true identity as football factories, supplying talent to you.)
So congratulations, you've won.
Although (and I hate to bring it up) there is going to be one little problem with being the undisputed champion, the top of the heap, the big dog.  Now that you're the only real game in town, every little pipsqueak sportswriter or failed third-team punter is going to have only you to pick on whenever something goes wrong.

Something going wrong

Clearly that writer didn't get his marching orders.  Ray Rice beat his wife like a piñata, and maybe she tried to hit him too, but he made the mistake of dragging her around, Neanderthal-style, where there were cameras to record the deed.  I know, I know, you awarded him the punishment due according to your rules, but darn it, people keep insisting that smacking a woman around calls for more than a two-game suspension, even if Ray Rice is a "heckuva guy."  Next time I'm sure you'll make sure there are no cameras around, but I know it's got to be a pain in the neck to have to deal with all of these wusses who don't understand what it means to be a Real Man's Sport.  I'm sure Bill Simmons will disappear that writer a.s.a.p. -- perhaps he'll have him air-dropped into Donetsk or Mosul on the pretense of a story about soccer in the midst of war or something.  Whatever it takes, I'm sure ESPN will make sure and do your bidding.
But still, this kind of thing is going to happen when you're the undisputed Alpha Dog.  After all, is anyone really going to care if Yasiel Puig throws some woman up against a wall, or if Chris Bosh does, or whoever actually plays hockey?  But when it happens to one of yours somebody is going to decide to pretend they can take you to task over it, whether it's a rogue sportswriter or a two-bit member of Congress, or a preacher without a call writing a blog that nobody reads.
Oh, that brings me to the most impressive part.  You would think the Christian church would have a big problem with you, as a rival for their putative big day of the week, but no.  They're almost as badly whipped for you as ESPN is, even without a cut of your multi-billions of yearly profits.  Churches accommodate their schedules for you, especially when the big game rolls around.  They totally buy into your model of Real Man's Sport, and hold up your players as their role models.  Preachers even use it in their sermons (I know, I saw it several years ago back in south Florida), paint up the platform to look like a gridiron, the whole works.  Damned impressive.
Anyway, back to the little peons who pick on you (which, aside from a few pathetic souls, won't come from the church, I'm sure).  These people who file lawsuits about CTE or painkillers, those ingrates who don't appreciate how you took care of them and allowed them to keep playing a Real Man's Sport even if their bodies didn't want to, well, I'm sure you've got that covered.  A few new seat licenses from that new stadium in Santa Clara or some new pink jersey tops in the online store will take care of that, I'd guess.  But you know, that kind of thing will keep happening.  For a while it was baseball that had to be the cutting edge for all of these social concerns, and sometimes managed to come through (sports integration, hard as it was) and sometimes they fell flat (the cocaine rangers of the 70s and 80s come to mind, but for much of the twentieth century, MLB was the one that led with its chin, and other sports like yours could follow after with much less scrutiny.  But now that you've buried everybody else, you get to be the one to lead.
Michael Sam is your test case.  Does he play, or does your bro base win out and Sam gets quietly cut even if he makes all the plays?  You have your talking heads in place on Sportscenter and other places (nice try, but Tony Dungy isn't going to say anything you don't tell him to say) to provide the media distraction necessary to brand Sam as a media distraction.  How long does it take to pull the trigger?  Or can you actually manage to be a twenty-first century sport after all, even if his existence offends your status as a Real Man's Sport?
Anyway, good luck with all that.  Not that I really mean it, but you have taken over as the hyper-steroidal Death Star of American culture, so I suppose in some sense I have to hope you get it right.  My vocation, presuming I end up called to one, is going to be difficult enough as it is without having to preach against you all the time.   And if I end up with a lot of writing as my life's calling, well, then I'll have to be one of those little pipsqueaks picking on you because, well, you're the Alpha Dog, with no one else to challenge you.  So anyway, good luck with the moral leadership and all that.  Given the tenor of your culture over the last several decades, you're going to need it.

Sincerely,

A Pipsqueak.

Ann Coulter may be on to something

Before I even start let's be clear: Ann Coulter is a troll.  She is humanity, allegedly, at its most venal and corrupt.  It is important for you to understand this to be my opinion of that person.
It is important for you to know that because that is exactly why I believe Coulter might be on to something when she somehow associates the rising popularity of soccer with increasing "moral decay" in the Good Ol' US of A.  (And you should know by now I will not link to that kind of garbage; I'm assuming you've probably heard of it already.)
Here's the deal: soccer actually does, in a way, buck several trends that have usually been associated with the more typical sporting passions that claim popularity in this country.  My evidence is purely experiential and anecdotal; I completely acknowledge this and make no claims for any kind of scientific veracity.  But I see what I see, and that is all I can do.
Around three years ago I went to the first MLS match at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas (it still had the "Livestrong" name attached to it at that point; this was before Lance Armstrong's full and total flameout).  It was SRO.  The franchise had been playing nothing but road matches at that point for weeks (electing not to return to the minor-league baseball park that had previously been their home), and finally getting to cut the ribbon on their new grounds was both relief and windfall for the club.  The match, with the Chicago Fire, ended scoreless, despite several strong runs and crazy long passes and shots that juuuuuust missed.
I spent most of the match walking around, enjoying views not obstructed except for my lack of height (as well as a pretty decent barbecue spot) and generally being surprised by everything.  That experience also formed my first "well...huh" observation about soccer in these here United States:
1) It was the most diverse crowd I had ever seen at a major-league level sporting event, live or televised.
This is not to say that MLB or NFL crowds are lily-white; it is to say that the Sporting crowd defied that particular duality in its diversity.  I did not see any identifiably Native American folk in the crowd, but that's about all that was missing.  Remember, we're talking about Kansas City here, smack-in-the-middle Kansas City.  Where were these crowds at Royals games or Chiefs games?  Also important here is a secondary point:
1a) This diversity of people came to the match together, or at least met at Sporting Park and hung out together at the game.  Baseball games can be diverse, but mostly on a black-white axis and in a more segregated fashion, though not always so and certainly not by compulsion.  I am not smart enough to know whether this is mostly because more of the crowd at baseball games is comprised of family units or if something else is afoot, but such division is usually pretty easy to spot at MLB games, and never more so to me than when at an Atlanta Braves game at Turner Field a couple of months ago.
Possibly a related point:
2) The Sporting Park crowd was young.  I refer to young adults, not children with their parents.  (This was a late start, so I did not expect to see the latter, frankly.)  How much 1, 1a, and 2 relate to and intersect with each other I do not know, but there's something there.
(Note: I haven't been to any MLS matches since moving here, but I have caught a few matches of the local USLPro side Richmond Kickers, and the above points seem to hold at least somewhat in this case as well, allowing for the different demographics of the two cities.)
Stepping away from that Sporting Park eye-opener to another point of a more general nature:
3) This fan base does not particularly care whether the USA has the best national team in the world.

Waiting for the US-Germany match at Power & Light District in KC

Check that: they do want to have the best team in the world, but they know it's not there yet and are hanging on anyway.
Here's where a lot of people get a bit mystified.  We are virtually the only country in the world where American football (you know, the one with the pads and CTE) is played.  Baseball might just be more popular in the Caribbean, Korea, or Japan than it is in the US by now, and it's making surprising headway in Europe, but despite somehow failing to win the World Baseball Classic so far, most would agree that the gravitational center of the sport is still here.  Basketball is about as "American" as a sport can get, in that we actually can point to a place and date and person for its invention in this country; that said, the moment US teams started getting beat at the Olympics we suddenly found it convenient to release NBA stars to play there, insuring that we won't lose another Olympics for quite a while.
We're not winning the World Cup any time soon.  Even the coach gets this.  The US team is certainly better than it's been in a long time and seems to be improving tremendously in recent years, but put us in a regular rotation with Brazil, Argentina, Germany, etc. at their best and we're going to take our beatings.  This does not bother soccer fans in the US, many of whom (traitorous pigs that they are) openly root for other countries, and others of whom get that the US has a long ways to go and are in for the long haul (I place myself here, for what it's worth).
This kind of thing infuriates some people.  They are baffled and angered when thousands of people gather in large public spaces in Chicago or Kansas City or other oh-so-American cities and live and die with each cross or header or save.  That's not American.  What's wrong with them?  
I could (and may yet) write a huge number of posts about the ethical failings of the World Cup and its overseer organization FIFA (an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel, to be sure): the feckless waste of resources on stadiums that will go unused after the Cup is gone; the deplorable state of Brazilian infrastructure ignored in the quest to put up said stadiums; the complicity of ESPN and like media in steadfastly pretending these things are not true and that many Brazilians have not protested these things, just to name a few.  Still, there is something stunning about the way that the sport and its banner event have managed to wear down American resistance and carve out a pretty substantial swath of allegiance and impact not just within my lifetime, but within my adult lifetime.  It's a different demographic, with different ideas about how the world works and a decided lack of interest in perpetuating old stereotypes and rules.
Of course this is going to tick some people off.

Help wanted: understanding "professional" youth baseball

The local minor-league team, the Richmond Flying Squirrels, is an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.  A few weeks ago, the local fishwrap ran a feature on the Giants' policies concerning the protection of the young pitching arms they hope to have ready to step in if Madison Bumgarner or Matt Cain can no longer carry the load someday.
It is an interesting read from a pure baseball-geek point of view.  For example, the question of pitch counts for young arms isn't a new one.  Most organizations mandate a fairly strict monitoring of the number of pitches a young guy can throw in a game.  This was, however, the first time I'd seen a policy about the number of pitches a pitcher can throw in an inning.  It's not unfounded; there has been a decent bit of research suggesting that pitches thrown under greater stress -- in a tight situation in a game, for example -- take more out of an arm than those thrown in less stressful situations.  An inning where the pitch count has gotten as high as 30 is almost by definition going to include some high-stress pitches.  So all in all that part of the article seems pretty sound.
What got me stressing comes later in the piece.  Bert Bradley, the Giants' minor-league pitching coordinator quoted much in the article, reveals in some of his comments a bit of what's going on among some young ballplayer wannabes and presumably their parents, something that makes me break format for this blog and look not at the fan relationship to sports through faith filters, but to ask questions about those who are more directly participants in the whole enterprise.
For those not following baseball much this year, what's wrong with you?  Aside from that, one of the larger stories in the sport this year is the number of extremely good young pitchers (including the closest thing I have to a man-crush in professional sports) missing in action due to the necessity for Tommy John surgery, a procedure in which a tendon from another part of the body is moved to the arm in order to replace a torn or otherwise damaged ligament there.  It's been enough of a concern to draw a statement from the American Sports Medicine Institute offering a potentially scandalous suggestion to pitchers: don't throw so hard, at least not all the time.

*Sob* *Sniff*

Bradley, in the Richmond article, wonders about two different problems; young players throwing curveballs too young (his response to parents asking about their kids learning such a pitch at age 11 -- "not from me he won't" -- is priceless, and his his advice for a young pitcher not to throw curves until they can shave is pretty cool too) and players playing too much baseball, and specifically pitching too much baseball.
I'm not sure which angle about this phenomenon bothers me most.  Is it the determination that the only thing that matters about your 11-year-old son is that he be groomed for professional baseball?  Or is it doing so in a way that makes the kid less likely to get there?  Or is it the idea of "professionalizing" youth sports?  Having kids pitch so much as ten-, eleven-, or twelve-year-olds that their arms don't ever get to rest?  Somehow this seems to miss the points of kids playing games, you know, playing games.

How long is this arm going to last?

Here's where I have to ask help.  I'm not a parent and won't be one.  Somebody explain to me the appeal of this -- the somewhat "professionalized" baseball travel teams, playing through what used to be called an "offseason," kids throwing so much they end up needing Tommy John surgery before they get out of high school.  What's the appeal?
I was no athlete at any point of my life (everyone who has seen me try is allowed to nod knowingly at this point), but I did put out an effort.  I never much played football, but I did at least try to play basketball or softball in their appropriate seasons (soccer hadn't hit at that point, and hockey had no hold that far south), and moving from one to another was, well, part of the progress of time -- "basketball season" was followed by "baseball season" (or softball for me; I really wasn't good).
So I need the help of you parents.  What is exactly the point of such endeavors?  I'm not being facetious; I really want help understanding the motivation for the perpetual baseball thing.
Is it the kid's choice, or the parents'?
What kind of expenditure is involved, and what is the expected return?  What is the child supposed to get out of it?  What is the benefit to their development as a human being?
And why in the hell would you have your child throwing curveballs at age eleven?  That's been a no-no since I was a kid.
What is the ethic behind this?  What is the developmental thing that can only be gained this way?  What is the gain versus loss versus playing a different sport, or actually getting homework done (or, heck, I don't know, going to church on Sunday? Had to get that one in there, seminary graduate that I now am) or reading a freaking book or who knows what?
So I need comments.  What is the point of making your child's baseball something a lot more like a professional endeavor?  Or is that what it is -- is this really what the child's idea of fun looks like now?

What games show us about ourselves

We don't have cable.  We keep a Netflix account so we can watch mostly British shows and some old Star Trek shows, and my annual anniversary gift is a subscription to mlb.tv, plus we have a whole heap of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, so our entertainment needs are plentifully met in our house.
There are losses, though.  I don't get to see The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.  I didn't expect to find that such a loss, mind you.  To me, Fallon was the guy who kept cracking up during Saturday Night Live sketches, and one of the perpetrators of one of the worst semi-baseball-ish movies of my lifetime, Fever Pitch.  (I would go so far to say that that particular movie was the one that convinced me not to be such a completist about baseball movies -- it's o.k. to miss some of them.)
Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I'm starting to think I might be missing something.  Having Idina Menzel sing "Let It Go" accompanied by The Roots playing children's classroom instruments was inspired and will be hard to top.  Another of his stunts, though, while funny in so many ways, makes me think a bit about how we treat our sports heroes.
Robinson Cano, longtime second baseman for the New York Yankees, made his first appearance in New York recently with his new team, the Seattle Mariners.  Fallon convinced Cano, who signed a crazy megabucks contract to make the move, to go out into NYC and get booed before he even took the field.  Watch the video here.  Go on, I'll wait.
You've seen it?  No cheating, now.
Now you've seen it?  Good.
You see what happens.  Fallon's lackey persuades each jaded cynical New Yorker to boo at the big glossy photo of Cano, which some do with more vehemence than others.

Booooooooooooo!

When they turn to boo again, all of a sudden Cano's there.

Boooo -- oh, hey, Robinson Cano!

In not one case does the fan continue to boo.  Some react with a bit of shock, one with something that looked like fear -- "oh, crud, he's gonna kill me" -- and some manage to slip seamlessly from booing into glad-handing and merriment, which would seem a little psychotic to me if the whole situation weren't so lighthearted from the outset.
None of the fans really hated Robinson Cano, when facing him in the flesh, no matter how angry their sentiments might have been when Cano signed that contract.  About the meanest thing any of them managed to say to him in person was to hope he played well, but didn't win, which is about as fair a wish as can be made for a player whose team is playing against yours.
Interesting how suddenly being face-to-face with Cano made such a difference.
Of course, Fallon's little experiment isn't exactly scientific.  The passerby involved were specifically being encouraged to "boo" the Cano picture, which is not at all like being in a stadium in the heat of the moment.  Still, the difference between anonymity and presence does show up rather strikingly.
Of course, I'm not entirely sure that booing in the stadium is the best example of how anonymity liberates the lesser impulses within.  While you can still get some serious demonstrations at the ballpark or arena, it usually takes something more than leaving for a fat contract to get them to happen for more than a few at-bats.  The Internet, on the other hand...
Of course, that doesn't apply just to sports.  Perhaps it reaches its worst depths on the subjects of politics or religion.  Maybe this is a case where fan behavior at games should have been a warning to us all, rather than being the end-all of human depravity.
The fat contract itself, of course, would be a worthy topic of discussion.  But as always here, I'm a bit more fascinated with the ethical choices fans make, and what degree the Christian faith tradition (I'm certainly not qualified to speak from any other perspective) can or should inform that choice.
That said, I'm not going to be as down on one good boo as you might expect.  Note that: one good boo.  You've expressed your disappointment with, in this case, Cano's choice to leave with one good lusty boo; fine.  Now move on.  Get back to cheering for the players who are actually still on your team.
Which to me makes it interesting that none of the fans in the Fallon clip, given the opportunity to ask Cano directly why he could leave the Yankees, did so.  Most turned basically into fumbling starstruck fans when confronted with Cano's presence.  Either (1) these are raging hypocrites, or (2, the more charitable option and the one I'm taking for now) they really don't hate Cano, even for leaving their team; the boo is more of a societal expectation than a genuine measure of hurt or anger.  Then again, the in-stadium experience is likely to be rather different.
It's as if they know it's really not right or ethically justifiable to disparage a player (who is, after all, a human being) that way.  Being in a crowd in the bleachers provides a nice little mask of anonymity and distance from the offending player, so that moral twinge is harder to feel.
Still, based on totally unscientific observation (i.e. watching sports for many years), I can't help but feel that in-crowd behavior is not nearly as awful as it used to be.  (Outside the stadium, on the other hand, it can still be horrific, as Bryan Stow can tell you, or maybe his family can on his behalf.)  I suppose that may be tested this coming NFL season if Michael Sam makes the St. Louis Rams roster. I'd also notice that this characterization probably does not apply to European soccer.
Still, there's something there that should have been a warning, a source for concern rather than an occasion for jokes about Philadelphia fans booing Santa Claus.  It's not always about the game.  Sometimes it's about what the game shows us about ourselves.

No luck finding an out

So the NFL Draft is ongoing as I write.  All the big hype went to the first round last night, with unseemly levels of outrage and angst over who got drafted when or didn't get drafted until or didn't get drafted at all, having to wait for the indignity of being drafted in the second round.  Horrors.
In the meantime I must report that, alas, I found no ethical way back into football.
Yes, I actually used my final paper for my spring ethics class to find a way to follow football as a fan -- not so much for myself, but as an exercise that might be of some comfort to others.  I couldn't find it.
Some basic details:
1) Tertullian and Augustine basically mocked me for even asking the question.  While there were others of antiquity who expressed their horror/disgust/general rejection of "the games" as a general phenomenon (no, their scorn was not limited to the gladiatorial contests; pretty much any competition was repulsive to them), those two were the most extensive in their denunciation of the games and their deleterious effects -- on the competitors to be certain, but most especially on those who watched those contests.  Augustine in particular wrote of his acquaintance Alypius, who seems to have been turned into a stuporous drooling lump by the sight of the games.  Tertullian was particularly scornful of even the attempt to justify viewing the games, or for that matter the theater.  There isn't, on the other hand, much of any attempt in early Christian thought to address those games in anything like a positive way, despite the occasional encouragement towards physical wellness in the form of metaphors like Paul used from athletic endeavor.  Let's be clear that the point is not to equate football with the gladiator contests.  Even as there is a great deal of disfigurement involved in the modern game, it doesn't actually kill people -- at least, not immediately.  Long term?  Well, we've covered that ground.
2) Shockingly, I didn't find any kind of ethical comment on the First Deadly Age of Football.  That, as sports buffs recognize, relates to the earlier days of the game, when President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to demand changes to the game in 1905 after a number of deaths due to on-field injuries.  Perhaps it was Teddy's response that short-circuited any response from the Christian ethicists of the day, but I frankly was surprised to find nothing commenting on the game and its particular destructiveness at that point.  (There were comments from earlier, in the late 1800s, but they tend to react against sports more generally -- baseball as much as football -- and for general roughness of character as much as physical harm, if not more.)  NOTE: if you know of any comment from that particular period specifically on football and hits physical harms, please let me know!
3) There has been a decent amount of comment on sports more generally as a part of society and culture, and Christian reaction to/embrace of it.  These sometimes seek to explore Christian participation in sport, while others specifically explore fanship and its relation to Christian thought and behavior.  As most of them were written before the severity of football's brain-trauma crisis became clear, most of them do not address the subject.  One exception is Shirl Hoffman's Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor U. Press, 2010), which acknowledges some of the earliest cases of CTE to gain publicity but situates CTE within a broader range of injuries related to football.  Still, though, the most prominent publication on the subject remains in the secular sphere, with the bellwether volume League of Denial as the most prominent book to address the subject.
4) Specific comment on football and CTE is only starting to leak out, in smaller but more widely accessible media such as journals and blogs.  One example of the latter can be found here, in which a Virginia pastor comes down on the side of giving up the sport.  The journal Christian Century has taken to a good bit of comment on football in its blogs and some articles, and some of those address the specifics of the CTE issue and Christian response.  Benjamin Dueholm can't abide it anymore, while Rodney Clapp still tries to find a way to enjoy the sport.  Clapp's position is rather unimpressive: because the violent aspects of the sport are not those he enjoys, he takes it as acceptable to continue to follow the sport.  Dueholm is less sanguine: he rigorously pursues a more stringenly ethical course, noting that (in a real money quote) "social ethics, especially Christian social ethics, does not wait upon the letter of the law or defer to the judgments of 22-year-old men when deciding which things should be embraced and which things shunned."
And therein is the challenge.  Even the question of looking for loopholes becomes an ethical problem.    As long as this cloud hangs over the sport -- one in which lives have already been lost, and others irreparably (so far) damaged -- any following of the sport is going to be, at best, tainted with a form of ethical guilt.  No matter how flashy the spectacle, no matter how much characters like Johnny Manziel or Richard Sherman or others are ready and willing to jump up and distract you and me from the physical destructiveness of the game, giving it our allegiance is never going to be less than problematic at best, and quite possibly (quite likely) unethical as well.
Sorry, folks.  I tried.

Sterling, Silver, Tarnish

Wow, so many possible subjects to blog upon.  The most obvious one, and most current, wins out though.
So the NBA has grabbed not only sports headlines, but news thunder as well.  The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a longtime scumbag named (or renamed) Donald Sterling, was handed a lifetime ban from the NBA along with a $2.5M fine, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver also let it be known he would seek from the rest of the NBA's owners a move to force Sterling to divest himself of the team altogether.
There has been enough comment on this to choke a herd of elephants, but I will try to add a small amount of worthwhile stuff to the fire.

Dude has another business, you know.

1) The description of Sterling above as "longtime scumbag" is not accidental.  If you've followed this story much you've learned, if you didn't already know, that Sterling has had legal issues as a landlord/slumlord, including federal suits that were either dropped or "settled," i.e. bought off, hinging on discriminatory practices by Sterling against various minority groups.
This has begged the question: why were those explicit examples of raging bigotry not important enough to provoke action from the NBA, but these most recent words set the world on fire?
This isn't a unique spot.  I can't help but recall the Chick-fil-A kerfuffle from a few years ago; Chick-fil-A had been giving plenty of money to anti-gay groups for some years before head honcho Dan Cathy made some impolitic remarks to a reporter, but large-scale outrage didn't get going until that interview got published.  It would appear that actions do not, in fact, speak louder than words.
Some caveats: a) Adam Silver is a new commissioner, so we can't necessarily assume Silver wouldn't have acted differently in the past, or that former commissioner David Stern would have acted the same way as Silver has in this situation; b) this is a different NBA than a few years ago -- whereas Michael Jordan didn't dare speak out on anything lest his advertising revenue get dinged, current players are more likely to voice opinions even in non-basketball matters, as witness the LeBron James-led Miami Heat hoodie protest in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder.  To a great degree the NBA has far outstripped the NBA, NHL, and (as much as it pains me to say) MLB, which Jackie Robinson might not even recognize anymore.  (I would contend that MLS may well be near the NBA in terms of the overall progressiveness of its players and management, which would set it apart not only from its fellow American major leagues but especially from its European counterparts.)

2) Embarrassing ownership isn't new; ask anyone who remembers Marge Schott with the Cincinnati Reds.  That ended up being a difficult, drawn-out spectacle for MLB, but ultimately the owner, prone to say embarrassing things about her players and unpleasantly nice things about the Nazis, was eased out of the game.  The swiftness + severity of the NBA's action is the new thing here, and it is striking indeed.

3) As usual, a great deal of confusion about the First Amendment has followed in the wake of this action.  As far as I know, Sterling will continue to have the right to vote in federal, state, and local elections, and can continue to express repugnant opinions to anyone he chooses (although he might want to be more alert to the presence of recording devices).  The NBA, which like most sports leagues exists in a murky realm between business conglomerate and private club, is free (even more so than most leagues, so specific is its governing document) to take action against any owner who brings harm to the league, including removal if need be.  Considering the degree to which American courts have been ratcheting up corporate power over employees of late, saying that Sterling somehow got jobbed is a raging act of hypocrisy unless you're basically picketing the Supreme Court daily on behalf of less oppression of workers.

4) All of this happened during the NBA's playoffs, which would be an excuse for most leagues to sweep it all under the rug until after the finals (or longer if possible).  I haven't followed the NBA in years, not since Dominique Wilkins left the Atlanta Hawks (save for a short period around the Miami Heat's first (pre-LeBron) NBA championship, when I was living in West Palm Beach), and yet I found myself drawn to a Pacers-Hawks playoff game in the airport the other day, before all the Sterling mess had really hit.  That this all got settled before it had the chance to become a festering boil on the league's showcase event makes it yet again more impressive.

5) The NBA, by a large margin, includes more African-American athletes by percentage than its other major-league sports.  One suspects that another league would not have reacted so swiftly and decisively (it's impossible to conceive of the fossil known as Bud Selig doing anything decisively in MLB), again with the possible exception of MLS.  But then, we don't know that for sure.

All in all, it's a mixed bag at the moment.  While there is some satisfaction on seeing action taken, it's still hard to stomach that this particular scumbag's actions over the course of decades -- actions that directly made people's lives worse -- weren't enough to draw a peep from the NBA.  People could not get housing, or were harassed about their race or ethnic origin for decades -- not powerful people, but folks who don't have a lot of other people in their corner.  While I appreciate that Magic Johnson's feelings were probably hurt by Sterling's words, there is no way Johnson was as hurt by Sterling's words as any number of tenants in Sterling's slum dwellings.  Yet our hearts bleed for Johnson, or Chris Paul or Blake Griffin, but we pretend those black and Mexican and Korean tenants don't exist, much less that their plight is worth our concern.
The least of these, folks.  These are the ones Jesus wanted us to be concerned about and to speak for because their voices were not heard.  I'm pretty sure that Magic Johnson can take care of himself.  Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and others have a certain amount of clout themselves; even a hint of a game boycott had the potential to bring the league to its knees.  We're ready to rally against Sterling because of words, but he and his ilk can practice raging injustice with impunity, at the cost of a few million dollars at worst -- chump change to his like -- and we yawn if we react at all.
I can't help but think this incident, even it has come to a far more satisfactory ending than most thought possible, points again to one of our worst practices where sport and faith again fail to intersect, or perhaps intersect in the wrong way.  Where is our outrage, and why does it show up in places where it's not inappropriate, but perhaps not as needed, and fail to show up where it is absolutely needed and where Jesus demands that it appear?
It's hard not to conclude (in a phrase that could probably be appended to every entry on this blog) that sports matters too much.