The original sin of the Olympic games

So the Winter Olympics have been going on, I hear.  No cable in our house, so I've not been seeing any of this so-called "speed skating" or "curling" or other supposed sports.

Humor aside, there have been some non-sporting headlines hovering about the games in Sochi like so much cigar smoke.  Sochi itself, or its preparedness (or lack thereof) for the event, was making headlines before the games even started.  The whole business of ridiculous sums of money to build an Olympics apparatus out of nothing and for nothing (after the games are gone) would be worth a blog entry to be sure.  (As a reminder, the stadium fiasco in Atlanta reminds us that Turner Field, the apparently untenable home of the Braves, was Olympic Stadium before it was Turner Field.)

The source of some of the earliest headlines in Sochi

The decision to hold an Olympic games in a dictatorship in all but name could have been a subject of discussion, as well as the passing of a noxious set of laws enshrining anti-gay bigotry as law there (Russia was Arizona before Arizona was, I guess) with the Olympic movement seeming to neither notice nor care.  I think, though, the easiest way to address the general ethical smelliness of the modern Olympics might be found in another story, circulating in the last few days, that encapsulates the flawed thinking that lies at the root of all of the above.  And it's not a new thing; in fact, it has been inscribed on the Olympic movement from its very beginnings -- the "original sin" of the Olympic movement, you might say.

As you are hopefully aware, Ukraine has been in turmoil for several weeks, with the past week-plus bringing the tension to a head in violent clashes between protesters and the government of Viktor Yanukovych.  As of yesterday, Yanukovych seems to be out of power with elections for a replacement set for May; of course, Yanukovych sees things differently.  In the meantime, the gag-worthy opulence of Yanukovych's palace has been exposed for all the public to see, a former prime minister and principal opponent of Yanukovych is now out of jail and all set to go for his old office, and the situation is rife with uncertainty.

In the midst of all this, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach gave an interview in which he decided that the high moment of the games was a gold medal by the women's biathlon relay event by the team representing Ukraine.  Bach went on to say that the important thing was that the Ukrainian athletes stayed in Sochi to compete in the games despite the unrest in Kyiv.  (One athlete, a skier, did withdraw from the games, although she and her coach remained in Russia.)

I don't know about you, but I nearly threw up when I read that.

What an athlete chooses to do in the face of such a situation in his or her home country is a choice only that athlete can make, let's get that stated first.  For one thing, we hardly know what the managers or "handlers" of the Ukrainian team are telling them; it's entirely possible they aren't being allowed to go home even if they want to.  Secondly, unless on speaks up, we don't really know what the athletes of Ukraine actually think about the protests; they could all be pro-Yanukovych for what we know.  Thirdly, speaking up at this point could cause trouble or even danger for them, later if not now.

Don't lose focus, kid, you've got a slalom run to make.

But for Bach, what matters is that they stayed in place and kept playing their games like good little servants of the Olympic movement.  All that stuff about people dying back home (possibly friends or -- God forbid -- family members) is unimportant in the face of our games.

This points toward one of the oddities of the Olympic movement: as it has through the years claimed a lofty ideal for itself as transcendent of politics, to the point of making the ludicrous semantic distinction of individual competitors as the participants in the games despite the rather obvious national-team aspect of the games, the games have repeatedly bungled their way into political entanglements throughout their modern history.  At times the games have gotten in trouble for their location (think the 1936 games in Berlin, or the boycotted 1980 games in Moscow), at others for their rank insensitivity to politicized (sometimes violent) events going on around them (the 1972 terrorist hijacking/murder of Israeli athletes in Munich).  The page linked here offers up a number of such entanglements amidst the doping, cheating, and scoring scandals of more routine vintage.

Remember 1972?  The IOC would rather you wouldn't.

But still, the tone of Bach's pronouncements is rather vulgar, pointing to that kernel of corruption at the heart of what is actually called in some sources "Olympism."  The idea that the world needs to stop for two weeks while a bunch of people play games is a bizarre bit of arrogance.  Your human rights are being violated?  Tough, wait 'til after the closing ceremonies to deal with it.  Your own government is cracking down on you?  How dare you protest while the figure skating competition is going on?  There is something very close to idolatry at the core of the Olympic movement, which may have voiced in its origins the notion of a temporary halt to wars in its earliest days around 1900 but has failed to catch on to how that becomes an opportunity for the powerful to oppress the powerless in more recent years.  I'm doubtful of how many protesters in Kyiv got all that excited about a gold medal in women's biathlon relay, being mostly concerned, I'd guess, with not getting killed and with protesting a corrupt government.  Not even murder in 1972 nor 1996 could halt the games' celebration of itself.

This becomes inhuman in such a case.  The basic fact of injustice isn't going to be solved by playing games, but the degree to which the games themselves become a means for the perpetuation and/or papering over of injustice -- whether by repressive governments using them as a propaganda smokescreen as in 1936 or 2008 or even this year) or by the horrors visited on a city's poor and oppressed in preparation for the games (looking at you, Rio) or by simply being tone-deaf as Bach to the unrest in Ukraine -- should cause anyone connected with them to blush with shame if nothing else.  But the games go merrily on, congratulating themselves for the fact that Vladimir Putin didn't openly arrest any gay athletes during the event itself.  Avery Brundage makes chummy with Adolf Hitler, IOC members get rich off potential host cities, political careers get launched (looking at you, Mitt Romney), and the games ultimately end up being, in terms of real justice in the world, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Hey, we're getting both the World Cup AND the Olympics!  But that means your home has to go.

The self-perpetuation of the games requires, apparently, making nice with the not-nice.  For an athlete who presumably just wants to compete against the best opponents out there, or the staff delegated to work with those athletes, it requires its own set of compromises, whether going back into the closet, being turned into a corporate shill just so you can get the equipment you need (and sometimes one in order to be the other), or pretending your home country isn't in flames.  That these are at all necessary for what is supposed to be this grand celebration of sport and international brother/sisterhood yada yada yada...the Olympic movement ends up looking and smelling like a big ol' idol that demands its tribute.

Are fans the worst part of sports?

It has happened again.  An incident of bad athlete behavior is in the news.  And an accompanying incident of bad fan behavior is not.

If only this were the worst of it.

An incident over the weekend at a basketball game in Lubbock, Texas got Marcus Smart, star point guard for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, suspended for three games for shoving a Texas Tech fan in the stands.

So Smart's the real sports thug now, right, replacing Richard Sherman?

What Smart did was, well, not smart.  You don't go into the stands.  You don't let the fans get to you. Those are almost mantras for athletes.  You can never win in that situation.  All the public outrage and sanctimonious tut-tutting about privileged athletes and "thugs" is going to come down on you.  The fan, typically, will remain anonymous, and most likely go untouched no matter what that person said to provoke the reaction from the athlete.  You can't win.

According to Smart, the fan, one Jeff Orr of Waco, Texas, used a racial slur against Smart.  Orr, naturally, denies it, the fans around Orr claim to have heard no such thing, and Texas Tech has conducted its no-doubt thorough investigation and concluded that no racial slur was used by anyone.

Right.

Let us, for the moment, presume that Orr is telling the truth.  NO n-words happened.  Not saying I believe it, but for now let's go along.

One of the more interesting sidelights to come of this is the reaction of a number of former Big 12 opponents of Texas Tech, who remember this same guy talking trash years ago.

So what we have is a grown man, who takes extreme measures even to go to Texas Tech games (Waco and Lubbock aren't particularly close cities), and who has made a reputation for yelling vulgarities at twenty-year-old athletes.

Pardon me, but why in hell am I supposed to think of Orr as the offended party here, even if he didn't use the n-word?  Apparently this person works as an air-traffic controller.  I pray to God I don't ever have to enter Waco airspace when he's working.

In seriousness, why in the world does a supposedly civilized culture not hold the likes of Jeff Orr (or Robin Ficker, the borderline-psychotic heckler who made a nationwide reputation for himself at Washington Bullets games years ago.  The first line of his Wikipedia page calls him an "American attorney, real estate broker, political activist, and sports heckler."  Apparently he was also a member of the Maryland House of Delegates for a few years.  My opinion of Maryland just cratered) up for as much public shame as the country can dish out?  Why would such a person be trusted with any  position of authority?  Why indeed would any such person be approached with anything other than raised eyebrows, a wary "uhhh, yeahhhhh....riiiiight," and as wide a berth of safety as possible?

For all that, Smart's experience (even if we flip the previous presumption and assume Orr did really drop the n-word) can't really rank with the most vile example of fan abuse in my lifetime, at least.  The victim of that one was Steve Kerr.

If you remember Kerr it's most likely as the guy who made three-point shots on Michael Jordan's bulls teams.  Kerr played his college ball at the University of Arizona.  One evening during warmups for a game at rival Arizona State, Kerr was going through his shooting drills when he (and pretty much everybody in the arena) started hearing some of the most disgusting fan behavior ever:

"P-L-O! P-L-O! P-L-O!"

"Hey, Kerr, where's your dad?"

"Go back to Beirut."

You see, Kerr's father was Malcolm Kerr, an academic who was assassinated in 1984 in Beirut, while serving as president of the American University in Beirut.  (In fact it was an organization called Islamic Jihad, not the PLO, that claimed responsibility for the assassination.)

So, the best and brightest of Arizona State University pulled up an intense tragedy in an opposing player's life from four years before, and used it to taunt that player before the game even started.

Kerr, as it happens, responded "the way you're supposed to respond."  After being shaken during the warmups, he recovered enough by game time to drop six three-point shots on the Sun Devils as Arizona put a twenty-eight point decimation on Arizona State.

The notion that such behavior by fans is so commonplace, and somehow so acceptable, that there is such as thing as "the way you're supposed to respond," is reprehensible on its face.

It isn't just fans in the stands who do evil in the name of sports.  Fans behind their computers are fairly scuzzy too.  Look in the comments section of most any sports news site stories.  I'm not about to link there.  It gets way too vile out there.

It's easy to look at the likes of Jeff Orr and say "I'd never do that."  (Orr, by the way, will "voluntarily" avoid going to any more Texas Tech games this season.  How holy of him.)  And for most folks that would be true.  Thankfully the Robin Fickers of the world are pretty rare.

Still, us normally "sane" folks have our blind spots too.

Hypocrisy is a fairly common blind spot in sports fans.  Take the issue of drugs (whether performance-enhancing or otherwise) in sports.  It's more or less a national pastime these days to dump on baseball for its issues with "performance-enhancing drugs" (or PEDs), and to consume the spectacle of Alex Rodriguez's downfall with the glee normally reserved for a new season of Downton Abbey.  The whole Biogenesis scandal claimed thirteen players.  Meanwhile six members of one NFL team alone (your world champeen Seattle Seahawks) have taken four-game suspensions for prohibited substances and claimed to have been tripped up because they were taking Adderall, the ADD medication normally distributed only by prescription and banned by the NFL.  (Every time this happens I have this fierce desire to hear the player saying, in Steve Urkel Voice, "did I do that?" Somebody out there with more YouTube savvy than I, please make this happen.)

Here's the odd part: NFL drug policy prohibits the league from disclosing the actual drug for which a player tests positive.  So if you hear that a player got suspended for using Adderall, that's not an NFL declaration.  So, when a player comes out and claims to have gotten "tripped up" because of Adderall, it is just possible that Adderall is merely being used as a cover for some other drug (Cue the Church Lady: "could it be...oh, I don't know...STEROIDS!!!!????); in other words, the player might just be lying.

Mind you, it is also possible that the NFL contains an unusually high number of players who suffer from attention-deficit disorder.  The Seahawks might be out front but they're hardly the only team to see such suspensions happen.

So of course Seahawks fans are concerned that there might be some possible drug abuse going on amongst their gridiron heroes and want to see things cleared up, right?

Yeah, right.

Of course not.  You get semi-literate rationalization and "your players are worse" self-justification.  Somehow, I can't help but suspect that if it were the San Francisco 49ers with all the Adderall suspensions, the above blogger would be demanding a full-scale FBI investigation.

(Oh, and the punishment for these offenses?  A four-game suspension.  The NFL might as well be saying "you cheated?  Here, take a vacation and rest up for the rest of the season.")

(If anything, this illustrates the depths to which A-Rod has sunk; even his own teammates just want him to go away, and you will have to look long and hard to find a Yankee fan willing to defend him.  But if it were Derek Jeter...)

Frankly, folks, we sports fans are scum.

Obviously I don't mean all sports fans are scum.  But an awful lot behave in ways that simply don't cohere with any claim to be a mature, even remotely decent individual.  And even otherwise good people can stoop to some depressing depths in the name of fan loyalty.

All of this leaves me with two questions I'm not sure I can answer:

Why do people do this in the name of sports?

And why do other people tolerate it?

How do you feel about having a beer thrown at you in the course of doing your job?

The above picture comes from a baseball game in Toronto where outfielder Nate McLouth got a beer heaved at him after making a pretty nice catch.  Sadly, many sports fans probably had the immediate reaction "he's lucky it was just a beer."  Worse has happened, and we somehow have come to expect it.

From a faith perspective, I can only suggest there's a line and too many fans cross it.  Cheering for your team: good.  Cheering for a really good play: good.  Expressing disappointment for a bad play or result: not strictly forbidden, but how you do it matters a lot.  Temper your tongue, folks.  There are probably kids around.

Interacting with the other team's players: probably not advisable.  Yelling vulgarities at them: when is it acceptable for a Christian to yell vulgarities at anybody?  See, there's the thing: we somehow justify doing things at sporting events, or online, that we'd be horrified to be caught doing anywhere else, and I'm not going to pretend people of self-proclaimed faith are any exception to the rule.  And maybe the worst part of it is that the other folks around such an offender support the offender by saying nothing.

What kind of abusiveness do we tolerate by our silence?

You say you don't go to games anymore because of exactly this kind of thing?  Good for you.  Did you tell team management this?  If not, well, there's that supporting silence.

You let the abusive drunk get away with it?  Why not get yourself out of there, but not before requesting security to get that person out of there and find you new seats?

You saw who threw the beer on the field? Rat 'em out.  I don't know about you, but I didn't pay for a ticket to watch a game delayed because of some fool in the stands.

And please, remember who you are and whose you are.  In the stands.  In the comments.  Even on Facebook or Twitter.

If there's enough wrong with sports these days that an idiot like me feels justified trying to blog about it from a Presbyterianish perspective, it must be pretty bad.  But what is often overlooked is just how much of that trouble can be attributed to the people who watch the games, not just the people who play them.

The football beatitudes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessed?

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

Richard Sherman, John Calvin, and vocation

*Note: sorry to be away so long, for the three of you who actually read this.  Large-scale internship requirements made it just about impossible to do much else of late and still have a life.  But no, this isn't going away, and what with my required course in Christian Ethics coming up this term I have a feeling many blog posts will be inspired in the next few months.  

Federal law requires that everybody have an opinion on Richard Sherman the last couple of weeks.  The Seattle Seahawks defensive back, at a moment you'd expect him to be shouting something like "WE'RE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL!" in one of those silly post-game interviews the NFL and its broadcast lackeys insist on foisting upon us, instead chose to go off on a rant about the San Francisco 49ers receiver Michael Crabtree, against whom he had been matched most of the game and against whom he had made a sterling defensive play to seal the victory.  (I'm not even going to try to link to it; just Google the guy.)  This struck many people as odd (and rightly, in my opinion) for a player in a team sport.

Of course, as Sherman's mouth continued to run for several days thereafter, opinion camps formed quickly.  There was the rather quick assertion that Sherman was totally justified in any- and everything he said and further that any criticism of Sherman for anything whatsoever was inherently and unforgivably racist.  There were strange slingings of the word "thug" against Sherman (that's silly; we know what a real NFL thug looks like).  There were even stranger statements that Sherman couldn't be a thug because he went to Stanford.  There was eventually a sort of apology from Sherman himself, once he figured out that by basking so much in his own personal glory he was kinda throwing his teammates under the bus.

I'll confess I tried not to pay too much attention to the fuss, though since I continued to check Facebook and Twitter on occasion that attempt was doomed to be futile.  As noted above, January was a busy month, and I was trying to avoid too many distractions.  However, one statement, which didn't necessarily draw as much attention as most others from Sherman, actually ticked me off a little bit, and even most of two weeks later I am compelled to voice my objection.

From his own fingertips, so to speak, Sherman put up this column in the days immediately after that NFC Championship game.  Much of it is devoted to the roots of his animus against Michael Crabtree (for the rest of this entry I'll stipulate that Michael Crabtree is a two-bit jerk.  I have no idea if it's true or not, but just to keep things simple I'll accept that so it doesn't become a distraction).  But before too long Sherman makes a statement that I can't accept.  Cut-and-pasted to insure that I'm not misinterpreting, here it is:

"To those who would call me a thug or worse because I show passion on a football field—don’t judge a person’s character by what they do between the lines. Judge a man by what he does off the field, what he does for his community, what he does for his family."

Not just no, hell no.

I refuse to accept the claim that an NFL player (or any athlete) is somehow to be excused for being an ass on the field because he does some nice things off it and doesn't beat his children.  You and I don't get a pass for our deportment on the job.  I don't care how hard it is, Sherman doesn't either in my book.  If I behave like an ass on the job I get called out on it, if I'm lucky enough not to get fired.  You do too, I'm guessing.  So does the President.  So does your pastor.  So does your child's classroom teacher.  Point is, the rest of us don't get to be obnoxious on the job and claim "adrenaline" and "the other guy was worse" as excuses.  Athletes shouldn't get that privilege, and in most sports they don't.  In most other sports a player who did that might run the risk of being ejected from the game if it were still in process, or at least enough of a fine to be embarrassing.  That didn't happen to Sherman (he got fined, basically the change a pro athlete can find between the couch cushions), which more or less suggests the NFL had no real problem with his behavior.  (To be really cynical, one might suggest that the NFL was happy to have reporters talking about anything other than CTE this week and was pleased to have Sherman provide the distraction.)  For that matter, Sherman's phrasing suggests that he knows he was an ass, and thinks he should get away with it because he's a nicer guy off the field, which at the minimum suggests a staggering sense of privilege, one which I hardly imagine is unique to Sherman.

At minimum, it seems perfectly fair to raise the question of the value of any job that demands that one be an ass to do it effectively.  If any job requires behavior that you have to make excuses for engaging in, is it really healthy to be employed in that job?

More to the point, a would-be follower of Christ can't emulate that behavior or seek that excuse, particularly if one lives in the framework of the Reformed tradition.  John Calvin wouldn't hear of it.

One of Calvin's more remarkable departures from either the secular world or the Christian tradition before him was his elevation of the idea of labor or work to the level of "vocation."  Most Western tradition assumed a definite hierarchy of work, with manual labor of any sort seen as low or beneath an individual of any stature.  In Greek thought (so significant in shaping Western thought after) manual work was the province of slaves.  Even most Christian traditions bought into this to some degree.  One can still hear echoes of this attitude in modern conversation, particularly if one speaks of leaving behind a job to pursue some sort of "higher calling."  (Augustine may have pushed back against this a little bit, but not in a way that had great impact, except perhaps on Calvin.)

Calvin would have none of that.  To him, work was in its way a sacred thing, no matter what kind of work it was.  No particular labor was to be disdained by the church, no matter how low the world considered it to be.  For that matter, no particular work was necessarily to be the subject of undue veneration.  The civil magistrate held an important role in society to Calvin, to be sure, but to respect the work of the civil magistrate did not give reason to belittle the work of sweeping streets or laboring in the field -- those were important and needed as well, and Calvin would even argue that the work done by those laborers was sanctioned or even ordained by God for the good of society.

John Calvin throws a flag on Richard Sherman

*Disclaimer: I'm sensitive to the importance of this; I am, if you read the bio alongside this blog, a person who gave up being a college professor to pursue this ministerial vocation.  I don't ever want it said of me that I'm pursuing a "higher calling."

A vestige of this kind of thought can be found in the modern Presbyterian Book of Order, in a part known as the "Directory for Worship."  I hear you: Directory for *Worship*?  What does that have to do with work? Hang on to your hats, kids:

"God hallows daily life, and daily life provides opportunity for holy living.  As Christians honor and serve God in daily life, they worship God.  For Christians, work and worship cannot be separated."  (Directory for Worship 5.6003; hat tip to Shelby Etheridge for the reminder)

Wow.

Let that roll around in your brain.  Work and worship cannot be separated.  What we do in our daily labors, whatever that labor may be, is intricately and inseparably knit up in the worship of God.  What a staggering thought.

It provides a serious difficulty for the dividing of "work" from "having a life."  It becomes a problem for the whole idea of waiting for the weekend to "live."  It calls into question any kind of job in which being demeaned or scorned is "just part of the job," or which expects its laborers to be satisfied with poverty as its reward (Luke 10, particularly verse 7, suggests that the laborer ought to get paid; it doesn't seem hard to extrapolate that poverty wages for hard work is unacceptable).  And it certainly calls into question any work that requires its laborers to demean others (or seems to do so; plenty of other football players manage to do their jobs and do them well without behaving like an ass).

I should hope it's obvious, but just in case: Richard Sherman has not set himself up as all that great a role model.  I have no particular problem with his knowing he's good at his job and saying so (although the calculated nature of that interview is bothersome).  False humility is pointless.  But it isn't necessary to descend to the level of the two-bit jerk you've just conquered, and in fact it's only damaging to your case.  But there's just no way to justify being an ass on the field for any reason.  Feeling the need to do so only calls into question the very justification of your profession.  To say that an NFL player (or any other athlete) has to be an abusive jerk in order to play well only calls into question whether a functional society should tolerate the NFL (or any other sport).

And right now the NFL has enough questions about its place in a functional society.  It doesn't need any more.