Quickie: I have a question...

I'm just going to leave this right here.

It isn't exactly accurate to say, as some have said, that the research isn't out there to suggest the degree to which football can do damage to young brains, at least of high school age.

It's one study, and others are going to be needed, to be sure. But it is not anything to be ignored.

And hosanna gloria, the study is focusing on subconcussive brain trauma. At least somebody out there seems to be getting it.

But do read the whole thing through, and you'll get why I have a little question.

OK, so the research here seems to be designed for the purpose of developing better headgear. I presume that this better headgear will be intended for all sports (since the report seems to indicate that women's high school soccer produces about as much of this damaging effect as football).

But, then, this quote:

"You're not going to change the game. You are not going to get rid of the game, at least. So how can you make changes that keep the spirit of the game there, keep players enjoying, keep fans enjoying the game but at the same time be safe," 

Really?

This brings up a rather disturbing tendency that seems to be jumping out at me so far: even those medical professionals who are drawn into this concern seem to be acting out of an impulse that doesn't make sense for a medical professional.

To put it bluntly: should a doctor's first concern be for the health of those who are trusting them with their health, or to preserve the game of football?

Am I the only one who is deeply bothered by this?

You know, football has changed fundamentally before in order to keep from being banned. Remember Teddy Roosevelt? All of a sudden it was o.k. to throw the football forward, across the line of scrimmage, which was about as drastic and fundamental a change as possible. And in retrospect, the game seems to have coped with that drastic change just fine.

So why is it today that the game must not be changed? Is football really this unalterable edifice that must not be altered or refined, but that must be paid obesiance by all others? Is it truly necessary that players, fans, coaches, and all others -- even those who don't follow or watch the game -- must pay homage to the game, or The Game, as unmovable and fixed object of reverence?

Is football really what this describes it (in the most theological sense of the word) to be?

And if it really is this, what the Hell (in the most theological sense of the word) are we doing bowing down to it?

And how many are at the shrine right now?

Baseball gets its own "Spygate"?

Well, this is just...creepy.

I'm really not quite sure what to make of the reports that emerged today, informing the world that the FBI (??) was investigating the St. Louis Cardinals (???) for having apparently hacked into the (possibly proprietary?) computer databases and (possibly?) obtained information about players, policies, scouting reports, and, well, I'm not really sure what of the Houston Astros (????). In all seriousness, this report left me in a state of repeatedly saying "wait, what?" over and over again, with increasingly long intervals between the "wait" and the "what?"

Now I don't want to give the impression that I don't understand anything about the story.

The previous post on this blog alluded to the increased use of statistical analysis in baseball in the past few decades. Since the success of the Oakland Athletics in using such analysis to compete with far more moneyed teams, more and more teams have taken up such analysis, either hiring some of the pioneers of analysis (e.g. Bill James to the Red Sox) or developing their own systems and analysts. At this point very few teams don't partake of "moneyball" any more, which makes the business of statistical analysis extremely competitive.

A possible example of this kind of competitiveness occurred a few years ago when the Astros, and aging and run-down team, hired Jeff Luhnow as general manager, prying him away from a front office position with...the Cardinals, of course. Part of Luhnow's appeal was his perceived understanding of and comfort with statistical analysis, or sabermetrics.  After one of the worst three-year stretches in major league history, in which players with even marginal value were strip-mined and sold off or traded for potential, the Astros are emerging this year (at least a year early, by most estimations) with a much better record than expected and (even at this early point in the season) a better-than-average chance of making the playoffs in what was supposed to be a tough American League West division.

So obviously there's some connection between the two franchises, and that has led to some speculation that the hack was somehow meant to "get back" at Luhnow for leaving the Cardinals. This is nuts. Front office personnel, particularly when their opportunity for promotion is blocked (as was Luhnow's in St. Louis), change jobs pretty regularly (not unlike in other businesses--more on that point later).  That the Cardinals organization would somehow hold it against Luhnow for grabbing a chance to be a general manager would make the Cardinals one of the pettiest organizations in professional sports.  Now I'll admit that the Cardinals can come off a bit smug at times with that whole "best fans in baseball" schtick, but they don't seem that petty.

And it's not as Luhnow could actually take away the Cardinals' system and database when he left. Luhnow may have been gone but the Cardinals still had their own program. What exactly were they supposed to be gaining? And aside from the Luhnow connection, why the Astros, a team not even in the Cardinals' league (literally in this case, as the Cardinals are in the NL and the Astros in the AL). In the most basic sense, the two teams aren't really competing with one another. The New York Times report on the story suggests that Luhnow made a rookie mistake in carrying over some of the passwords used in the Cardinals' program to the new network he built with the Astros. That makes Luhnow spectacularly careless, and the Cardinals (if they really hacked to try to guard against Luhnow somehow carrying over actual information) paranoid on a New England Patriots scale.

"Jeff, did you ever change those passwords?"

A side point on this story is that for all the fuss of the moment, the whole story may not amount to much legally. The FBI may be investigating, but it's entirely possible that the whole business may not rise to the level of a chargeable crime. I find that pretty depressing, if the same high bar applies to the hackers who keep trying to get into personal computers. At the same time even if no criminal charges are filed, MLB may well choose to carry out some kind of punishment against individuals involved. At the minimum MLB (and other professional leagues) may be compelled to develop a policy on this kind of thing. Most stories of such hacking seem to fall into the realm of international espionage, accusations or charges that China or North Korea breached databases or systems in the US government or of US corporations. One sports team hacking another is in the strictest sense unprecedented.

More broadly, though, the business of one team cutting ethical corners to get a leg up on another is quite an old story; it usually played out on the field or in the stands, most notably in the business of stealing signs. Teams might station someone in the center-field stands or some other advantageous location to spy on the signs the catcher flashes to the pitcher, calling the next pitch, or maybe signs being flashed from the dugout to the catcher. In theory, that information would be relayed to the hitter, giving him the advantage of knowing what pitch was coming. The famous home run hit by Bobby Thomson in a 1951 playoff between the then-New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers turns out to have been hit against a backdrop of sign-stealing by the Giants during that season.

Frankly, this leads to about the only point that can really be made here; baseball has a pretty long history of ethically dubious behavior. I'm not even getting into the allegations of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the 90s or other kinds of drugs in the 70s and 80s. Go back further and you find pitchers spitting on or sanding down or otherwise defacing a baseball in order to cause it to break differently and fool hitters. (This stuff still happens on occasion.)

You can also look back even further to a time when the Cardinals, who as noted above can come off as a little smug and maybe even a tad self-righteous, would have been thought of as the dirtiest team in baseball. The 1934 team known as the "Gashouse Gang" somehow managed to stand out in what was still a very rough league at the time, one in which deliberately trying to injure an opponent with your spikes or by some other means was pretty common.

As for front offices, their malfeasance tended to be directed against players. Whether in unjust withholding of salary or bonuses owed to the player, or simply stashing a player in the minor leagues without hope of promotion, no matter how well he played. Back then rules didn't give a player any leeway at all in terms of moving from one team to another; fans gripe about it now, but some level of freedom of movement for players, only won with great difficulty across the 60s and 70s, is BFD precisely because of such abuses from the earliest days of baseball.

This is just one sport, like all others or even non-sporting organizations populated by humans, and bad apples are going to appear. It is perhaps a little disturbing how often church folk, or at least some strains of church folk, tend to resort to sports as some kind of shaper or guarantor of moral and ethical character when baseball (and every other sport) is littered with examples that would seem to suggest the exact opposite. Any endeavor that includes competition is inevitably rife with some level of corruption, once you look at its history. (Seriously, can you name me one human endeavor with competition involved -- sporting or not -- that doesn't end up in some kind of scandal or corruption? I'd really like to know) Why, then, do we seem so willing to lionize sport and its participants as some kind of ethical lodestar?

I really have no idea where this Cardinals-Astros business will end up. I suppose that the only surprise is that the story, or something like it, took this long to come to the fore. Maybe one day we'll quit thinking of sports as character-building and realize that it, like pretty much everything else we do, is another venue for the demonstration of the fallenness of humanity.

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. 

Oh, yes, it matters

Today in Boston they had a parade.  Not on account of some civic holiday or victory in a war or any such, no.  The parade is being held because a baseball team that plays primarily in Boston won four games in a series designed as a best-of-seven format, against a team that plays primarily in St. Louis.  I say "that plays primarily in" because, of course, the teams don't "belong to" either city in any legal sense, nor in a residential one (most players scatter to warmer climes in the offseason), nor indeed in any other sense besides the fact of playing a majority of their games in that city, except for what might be called the "heart" sense.  Thousands of citizens in Boston claim the Red Sox as "their" team, even their "home" team, and go to sometimes mind-boggling lengths to demonstrate their loyalty to that team.  On occasion, as was the case this year with the Red Sox and Boston in the wake of the Marathon bombing, the team actually draws closer to "its" city than is typical of the hired mercenaries that professional team sports players are, for all practical purposes.  Still, viewed in the abstract, it's an odd thing, even if has become a tradition stretching over decades.

In other parts of the country, thousands upon thousands of individuals are descending upon cavernous coliseums and smaller-scale gridirons in large cities and college towns and even smaller towns to watch dozens of huge boys slam into each other at frightening speeds wearing layers of armament, seeking touchdowns and glory.  Some of these individuals (or "fans," which may or may not bear relationship to the far scarier word "fanatic") perhaps attended the colleges or universities hosting these games today; many did not.  This after many of these same folks crowded into high school stadiums for football games last night, and before many folks will trek to one of thirty-two stadiums designated for use by professional football teams playing in a league that rakes in cash in unimaginable fistfuls, some small pittance of which cash goes, after much legal gnashing of teeth and years of garish denial, to the men whose minds were broken by their participation in the game, or in many cases to their survivors, a league with the power to snap its fingers and cause ESPN (a rather large financial player in sport itself) to run contritely away from a documentary on that subject by two of its own best investigative reporters.

A not-small number of fans tuned into football of a different sort today, the kind that actually requires feet on the ball more routinely, broadcast from England or other points in Europe.  They were probably spared the sound of any racially-based taunting from fans in the stands towards players of obvious non-European origin.  Some fans of that sport will take in the playoffs in the domestic league tonight.  

Other fans will turn out for games in the NBA or NHL, two seasons just getting started as baseball ends and football nears the homestretch.  Fans of college basketball await season-opening games in just a few days.  Players will play, fans will scream and cheer and groan and maybe boo and maybe worse.  Some players will be injured.  Many will watch games at home, singly or in groups.  Rivers of alcohol will be consumed.  And billions of dollars, insane amounts of money, will change hands.

Some teenagers or even younger kids spend virtually all year playing a single sport, the whole concept of "seasons" going out the window, in an effort (I presume?) to improve their chances of getting a college scholarship or going pro.  Kids skilled at tennis or other individual sports uproot their entire lives to enroll in and live at "academies" in nice sunny places to pursue that sport virtually full-time.  This latter is pretty old-hat by now.  In high schools and colleges, being "on the team" has moved far beyond a get-out-of-school-free pass or anything so small; it has almost evolved into license to rape.  And the only word in that last sentence I regret is "almost."

Frederick Buechner, in The Alphabet of Grace, sagely observed that "where your feet take you, that is who you are."  Others have made note of the power of money to reflect the priorities of those who have it and spend it.  These facts alone, in my opinion, are quite sufficient justification to hold up the world of sports, those who play it and those who watch it and those who own it, up for critical scrutiny from a perspective informed by faith, theology, doctrine, belief, or whatever religious buzzword you choose.  It is a powerful, lucrative, and pervasive societal presence.  To pretend it is beneath consideration, somehow an abstraction from the "real" business of living as Christ-followers in God's world, is as insanely wrong-headed as an uncritical opportunistic embrace of sport as a vehicle for marketing faith, or particular varieties of it.  

The title of this blog is taken from a remark I remember well from my south Georgia childhood, something like this: "Football is not a religion.  It's way more important than that."  The remark, or some variant of it, was usually delivered tongue-in-cheek even if it shouldn't have been, even if it should have been uttered flatly as an unexceptional statement of fact.  There are of course many who take in sporting events for whom it is far less than that, an occasional escape or diversion.  Still, the money changes hands, and that escape may be implicated in more brain damage, or the sham of the "student-athlete" or funds for a ballpark instead of schools, or who knows what yet-undiscovered shame or scandal.  Where our feet take us is who we are, at least to some degree, and our money reveals our love.

I am a fan, particularly of baseball, somewhat of college basketball, increasingly of MLS soccer (awaiting Sporting Kansas City's playoff match tonight).  These days I can't make myself watch football without wondering how many years are being taken off lives with every hit, but I keep up enough to follow conversations during the week.  I haven't really followed the NBA closely since Dominique Wilkins left the Hawks, but again, I do keep up.  If you doubt my bonafides, I'd invite you to investigate my t-shirt drawer, or drawers; more baseball t-shirts than I can count, major and minor leagues, including eight just from spring training sites in Florida, some of which are no longer in use, as well as a Sporting KC t-shirt and one from the Kansas Jayhawks' national championship back in 2008, and a few assorted Florida State shirts.  

I'm also a seminary student hopefully graduating in May and hopefully headed towards a pastorate somewhere, with an itch to write.  Between the two, I just don't think the role sports plays in the world can be ignored by people of faith.  I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm the perfect person to do it (I can't wait until somebody attacks me over presuming to speak on the subject when I Never Played The Game), but I'm arrogant enough to think that somebody needs to speak to it, and I'm expendable enough that I might as well hold the fort until bigger names and smarter thinkers than I get around to it.

Hence, a new blog.  My other blog is still in existence, and I'll still write on it as often as possible.  Where that one is a bit more personal, I'm naive enough or arrogant enough to hope that this one might go somewhere.  For now, it starts small, as I work out the kinks (and finish seminary!).  I have a heap of ideas but would not mind suggestions.  

Do I expect to change the world?  Hah.  I don't even expect to change your mind.  But I do expect you to think about it, at minimum, and be ready to ask questions sometimes; to question assertions that somehow rule out a course of action when a problem seems intractable.  Is football scrambling brains?  Don't tell me that football can't be curtailed or eliminated if no other solution is found.  Don't tell me that superstars can't be suspended for cheating (this means you, Alex Rodriguez).  Don't tell me can't, ever, when it comes to sports and their scarring of society, no matter how much good they might sometimes do or how much enjoyment they bring.

Because if we ever accept the word "can't" when addressing the ways sports becomes a blemish on society, the church should just fold up and disappear just as surely as it should if it ever accepts poverty or prejudice or any other societal ill you name as intractable and gives up screaming for justice.  

At least, that's what I think.