Weekly Reader: Headlines and reflections

Last week's post on this blog was a public regrouping in order to put forward a small part of the Christian ethical foundation underlying this ongoing project. Today's post will be similar, except framed in a reading of some of the recent headlines directly or indirectly pertaining to the subject and seeking to tease out where these ethical concerns may intersect. It is an excercise in developing a methodology, or trying to do so anyway. So, on with it.

ITEM: The NFL is considering dropping or severly curtailing its schedule of Thursday night games in future seasons.
REFLECTION: I see two particular concerns that are revealed by this piece of news.
The NFL is considering this move for one reason, and one reason only: poor ratings. Others connected to the game have certainly raised other concerns about the package -- bad games, over-saturation, and even player safety on occasion. However, these have been the case for a while -- really, is it not clear that playing a game on Sunday and turning around and playing another game four days later could make it difficult to get every body, or everybody, healed even to a minimal degree? Nonetheless, only the middling ratings for the games seems to have gotten the NFL's attention. So...
1. Why are we so confident that a league that has ignored safety concerns so far in inflating the NFL's Thursday presence, from Thanksgiving Day to a few late season weeks to half a season and, this year, to a full season, can truly be trusted to give enough of a damn about player safety in any other context, absent the pressure of losing not making enough money? To presume that a non-ethical actor is suddenly going to act ethically is, well, not very ethical, is it?
2. The flip side of this realization is that FANS DO HAVE POWER to cause the NFL to change its ways. Withhold your money, or even your attention, and look what can happen! This realization makes it a lot more difficult to cling to the notion that an individual's turning away from the game, for example, "won't make a difference." It apparently can effect the league when people don't watch. So fan responsiblity really does matter.
Sidebar: Some of the same concern will need to be directed at college football as well, in which some teams and leagues play some truly bizarre schedules -- Tuesday and Wednesday nights, even -- and Thursday games have been in place for some schools for as much as twenty years.

ITEM: A study from Harvard University recommends, among other things, substantial changes to the structure by which medical personnel are deployed in the league; the league responded with predictable staged outrage (predictable if you've been paying attention to the league for a while).
REFLECTION: Aside from yet another case of academia being out of touch with the real world, this story points to the mania for control that also contributes to the NFL's untrustworthy nature where player health is concerned.
The study proposes that doctors monitoring health not be employed by the league. The logic is simple; doctors who answer to the league or to an individual team are inherently in a position in which the interests of the team or league (i.e. get the star back on the field as quickly as possible) and the interests of the player (don't die, or don't hasten your own death unnecessarily) do not align, despite the NFL's vapid denials of conflict of interest. (The incredibly fatuous statements attributed to NFL spokespeople in the article suggest that the NFL is either unbelievably ignorant of what "conflict of interest" means, or desperately trying to muddy the waters on the subject.)
And as to claims that the proposed system is unworkable? Then are you serious about the health and safety of your players? It really is that simple.

ITEM: Zander Diamont, a backup quarterback for the University of Indiana Hoosiers, has decided to forego his final season of eligibility after "a lot" of concussions in his career (dating back to high school), summing up his decision with the pithy and on-point comment "I need my brain."
REFLECTION: As has been noted in previous blogs, not everybody would necessarily agree with that last comment.
Of course, as Diamont openly admits, he didn't have an NFL career ahead of him, and he is set to graduate from IU this spring. The lure of a pro career does often interfere with good judgment, it seems. (He's also the son of a soap-opera star, and perhaps that lessens the financial pressures that may cause some to press on in the game and hope against hope for that pro career.)
Also noteworthy is Diamont's acknowledgment that his particular playing style was such that he was more prone to head shots, and that his relatively small size made it hard to have any success without putting himself at greater risk. What is rare here is Diamont's apparent ability to see through it all and come to a decision to step away from the risk before it becomes harm. Hopefully.
What becomes a concern is the degree to which young men, who have been playing football since elementary school in many cases, are terribly good candidates to come to such conclusions more often than not. And this comes back to the root concern of this blog: just because young men are free to put themselves at such risk and to choose the harm, are we Christians ethically or morally free to participate in it with our dollars or our presence or our adulation? And if you've read much of this blog, you'll know where this blog stands.

ITEM: A lawsuit filed on behalf of 142 former NFL players calls on the league to acknowledge CTE as an occupational hazard that should be covered by worker's compensation.
REFLECTION: As much as I would typically be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, some shifty stuff is going on here.
The article states that the lead plaintiff was "diagnosed with CTE in 2015." Um, what? Since the article also seems to indicate that said plaintiff is also still alive, something is wrong here. If some doctor is "diagnosing" former players with CTE (and naturally, this is in South Florida, or Flori-duh), then either some amazing breakthrough has been made in complete and utter isolation and with absolutely zero publicity, or somebody's scamming somebody. Considering that, despite some progress, CTE cannot be definitively identified except posthumously...yeah, ethical dubiousness isn't acceptable on either side of this struggle.

ITEM: Liberty University has hired Ian McCaw as its athletic director.
REFLECTION: While there are about a million things that can be said about this subject, for this case (sticking with the football/CTE issue) we are again forced to consider the issue of trustworthiness, but this time from an explicitly Christian (or nominally so) perspective.
McCaw, of course, was previously the athletic director at Baylor University, at a time when the institution failed spectacularly at dealing with revelations of sexual assault among its athletes. Apparently Liberty's desire to become the Notre Dame of evangelicalism is not about to be sidetracked by mere concerns about the safety of women on campus.
The Washington Post's headline on the article places the stakes pretty high, but not inaccurately so, I'd say. If the term "evangelicalism" hasn't taken enough abuse as a result of the presidential campaign, items like this should help push that over the top.
Of course, one of the principal evangelical leaders involved in that campaign was none other than Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University. The juxtaposition of those two tidbits is juicy enough to warrant a larger concern about just what evangelicalism means anymore. Can an evangelicalism that wants to portray itself primarily through athletic success -- at any cost, apparently -- be trusted with the health of the players who are supposed to bring that athletic success? And a school that is so little concerned with what happened on McCaw's watch at Baylor is not that likely to care for the long-term health of its athletes, either.
The win-at-all-costs mentality of college football is sad enough among the largely secular universities who enjoy most of the success in it these days. Seeing schools who shout loudly about their "Christian character" be so cavalier about such costs, and prioritizing athletic success to the degree that it calls that character into question, is profoundly hard to swallow. It's hard not to wonder if grappling with football and the harm it does to some percentage of its players is going to have to go forward without much participation from the evangelical wing of Christianity, or whether that wing is capable of forming a Christian ethical response to the harms (as opposed to risks) of football.

Zander Diamont says "a lot" of concussions is enough.

Sports and belief systems

You might recall the basis for the name of this blog. Imagine the scene as a befuddled outsider (a yankee, probably) observes how southerners lose their minds over college football and comments on the passions being (for good or ill, quite possibly) like religion, only to have a native respond (a grizzled veteran, preferably) with something along the lines of "son, down here football ain't a religion, it's way more important than that."

Leaving aside the evident truth of the statement (more often than I as a pastor like to think about), and a previous and somewhat jocular blog entry to the contrary, I wouldn't necessarily argue that football, or any other sport for that matter, is a religion. I would easily and quickly argue, though, that sports share many things with religion. Possibly one of the chief similarities is that partisanship to most sports, or to individual teams in particular, seems to involve something like a belief system.

I'm thinking of more than the obvious "my team > your team" sentiment expressed with varying degrees of passion and/or vulgarity by fans, or sometimes with humor as by the t-shirt below, or in the song from Weird Al Yankovic's most recent album (your tolerance for which may be determined by your tolerance for an s-word that rhymes with "ducks").

Nota bene: I do acknowledge that there are plenty of fans who in fact know that such a claim is absolutely untrue for their team, and that in fact theirs is the team Weird Al is making fun of. They're the ones who are absoluely floored by a 6-6 season and a trip to the Independence Bowl, or not actually being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs before Labor Day. Those teams are not that common, and their fans tend to be looked down on by fans whose belief system is governed by one of the few close-to-universal claims, "if you're not a winner, you're a loser." But they do exist, and they are perhaps less verging on literal insanity than most.

No, I'm suggesting that there are somewhat more subtle, and usually unconscious, attitudes or assumptions or beliefs that underlie the fanship of an awful lot of sports followers.

I have no intention of trying to claim these beliefs as universal across sports, aside from the above winner/loser dictum. I'd say that many of the beliefs are particular to their sports, possibly to individual teams or the cities in which they play, and in a few cases to the league (or conference, in college) in which a fan's team plays. So instead I'll point out a few specific cases as best as possible.

Since I'm watching a baseball playoff game right now, its particular character as a very organized belief system jumps out at me, with the particular distinguishing characteristic that much of the game's belief system seems to originate with not fans or coaches, but the players themselves. This claim derives mostly from the particular canon of law, practically Talmudic in its scope, usually known as The Right Way to Play the Game (or in some cases The Unwritten Rules). 

This usually ends up being boiled down to "don't show me up." Anything that the offended party takes as embarrassing to the offended party comes under the ban here -- watching your home run ball leave the yard, flipping your bat after hitting it, any kind of gesture by a pitcher after striking out a hitter, a particularly showboat-ish catch in the outfield, you name it and it can be considered offensive by somebody, and you get condemned as not knowing The Right Way to Play the Game. And then somebody throws at your head, which is somehow construed as The Right Way to Play the Game.

Baseball also seems more prone to particular beliefs about curses than other sports. The lodestar example of this curse obsession is in this postseason, currently tied with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908, and rather than chalking it up to having a lot of bad teams and then having good teams not play well when they did get to the playoffs, a curse about a billy goat became the (ha!) scapegoat. Varying events such as a collapse in the NLCS agains the San Diego Padres in 1984 and the so-called "Bartman game" in 2003 (seriously, people, Bartman didn't choke away eight freaking runs to the Florida Marlins -- who, bitterly to Cubs fans, went on to win the World Series that season), are of course blamed on the Curse of the Billy Goat. I'm guessing that lots of Cubs fans are invoking that curse after being beaten last night by Clayton Kershaw, who is only one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Meanwhile, tonight there are probably Cleveland fans who are wondering about the Curse of Rocky Colavito after tonight's starting pitcher, Trevor Bauer, lasted only 2/3 of an inning after suffering a cut on a finger a few days ago. Since Mike Napoli just hit a home run to give his team the lead against the Toronto Blue Jays, perhaps they're calming down for a moment.

You can read about a whole bunch of other sports-related "curses" here. Other sports do get invoked, and in some cases cities are somehow regarded as being "cursed" across all sports teams.With the Cleveland Cavaliers' NBA championship, the supposed "Cleveland curse" would seem to be gone, with Buffalo and/or San Diego (which has never experienced a major-sport championship for any of its teams) most likely to be regarded as "cursed" even if no specific cause of a curse can be noted.

Most such sports beliefs aren't that elaborate or overtly stated, though. So much of the "belief system" around a sport or team is much more likely to go unspoken, and perhaps to claim much more power for its unspokenness. 

Sometimes that belief is tied up with beliefs outside of sports, such as nationalism. Here football is most prominent, though baseball certainly tries with its "national pastime" nickname. Football has certianly wrapped itself in the flag, both on the pro and college levels, and particularly since 9/11. It has also shown a propensity for direct military display, sometimes funded by the Department of Defense (although NASCAR and MLB also score heavily there).

But perhaps the most insidious unspoken belief in sports, and likely the most unspoken and most powerful, is simple but sinister, and one shared with nationalism at its most base.

My team, right or wrong.

It may have adaptations; my conference, right or wrong (fans of the Southeastern Conference, particularly in football, are Exhibit A here); my league, right or wrong; maybe my sport, right or wrong?

It's the impulse that turns Baylor University and its fans into particularly horrid victim-blamers in the face of accusations of sexual assault against its football players (and Baylor is hardly the only example here, though probably the most egregious of late). My school, right or wrong.

It's the impulse that (along with gobs of cash) makes FIFA one of the most corrupt organizations on earth. My sport, right or wrong. 

It's what allows Atlanta or Cleveland baseball fans, or fans of a whole heap of college teams (Florida State, for example), or Chicago hockey fans, to ignore the inherent insult in making mascots out of fellow human beings (even those who have enough ethical understanding to know better). My team, my school, right or wrong.

And (you knew I was going here) it makes football fans, teams, collegiate conferences, and the NFL unwilling to face just what playing the game has most likely been doing to players for more than a century, even if we only noticed it when Mike Webster died.

And this is why it will be virtually impossible to "fix" football. 

Because my game, right or wrong. 

It has to be the players' fault. Something must be wrong with them. Or the coaches are doing it wrong. Or the helmets are wrong, or the artificial turf is wrong, or anything other than the basic and hard-to-escape observation that when very large and very strong men run into each other at very high speeds and over and over and over and over and over again, the miracle is that such brain trauma doesn't happen to more players. 

It can't be that. My game, right or wrong. 

And thus the game will go on, and people will keep on getting damaged beyond repair, and nobody in the stands will be able to tell. 

And, I guess, nobody will care.

Weekly Reader: Well, what do you expect?

So on Sunday afternoon, before heading off for a couple of meetings, I was busy watching football (or futbol, to be more precise) when my Twitter feed apparently felt compelled to alert me that a football (American style) player had gotten hurt.

In this case New Orleans Saints defensive back P.J. Williams had to be carted off the field after sustaining not one, but two hits to the head on one play. Due to the uncertainty about Williams's injuries and their extent he was immobilized on a backboard and his head/helmet was strapped down to prevent any further injury. In the end, though, the diagnosis was a concussion, and while Williams stayed overnight at a hospital for precautionary reasons, he was expected to be discharged on Monday and enter the NFL's concussion protocol.

Quite a Sunday for your second-ever game in the NFL. He was even a hashtag for a little while.

Now time for this blog to get callous.

There are injuries by which you are allowed to be shocked. When Kevin Ware's leg snapped like a cheap pencil in the NCAA Final Four, shock was appropriate. It was horrifying, grotesque, and completely not typical for a basketball game.

Then there are injuries you really have no business being shocked by.

You really have no business being shocked when your favorite baseball team's best pitcher goes down with a torn rotator cuff. It's pretty much an epidemic, and while it generally isn't life-threatening, it still happens way more than it should.

It's a bit silly to be shocked when a hockey player loses a tooth. It's a stereotype, for pete's sake.

On the more farcical end of things, there's no point in being shocked when a soccer player acts as if he's in the throes of mortal agony after a non-contact play (I say "he" here because this really doesn't seem to happen so often in the women's game).

And football? I'm not sure there's any kind of injury on a football field that should really be shocking anymore. We've seen too many. And frankly, at this point it might be that those who suffer obvious injuries that require them to be removed from the game are fortunate, in that they don't stick around for two or three or a dozen more hits to their stunned cranial matter.

This is what the sport does to its players. And you know that going in, if you're a rational adult.

So spare me the hashtags. You've made the bargain; live with it.


Other things to read and think about:

*If you wondered why the NFL had become such a prolific contributor to select members of Congress, now you know why.

*From the "Waiting on Science Our Savior" department: The NFL is gonna throw gobs of cash at the pursuit of a "magic helmet," and some for concussion research too.

*Former NFL placekicker Cary Blanchard died earlier this month. He was one of the 4,500 former players who was a plaintiff in that settlement reached a couple of years ago. Yes, placekicker. Even I didn't think that was terribly possible. Shows what I know.

*From earlier this year: you might remember an experiemental study from a few years ago, when a number of former players like Tony Dorsett were judged to show signs of CTE while still alive? The first former player to be a part of that study, Fred McNeill, has died, and...he has been posthumously confirmed to have had CTE. This could be a very big deal in the effort to diagnose the disease in the living and try to find some way to combat it. The bad part, of course, is that more players will have to die to confirm this -- the great ethical conundrum of CTE research.

*A former NFL great suffering from possibly football-related dementia has become the subject of an ugly custody battle.  He's regrettably unlikely to be the last such story.

Outside concussionball:

*A group of NHL players hit Capitol Hill (figuratively) to lobby for tigher rules for younger players.

*Political activism among athletes is not limited to NFL players during national anthems.

Scary, but not shocking.

Shining a light

Media attention to the ongoing brain-trauma struggle in football has come from various sources. In terms of media presentations, the movie Concussion and the PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial (based on the book of the same name) are probably the most high-profile projects, although others have been produced on the subject. A number of books and articles have also been produced, although these are often more general treatments of the violence and physical toll of football.

A couple of new productions are making their way into the public consciousness this month. A documentary with the heart-tugging title Requiem for a Running Back appeared at the Carter Center in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago (see no. 5); in it the director Rebecca Carpenter chronicles the decline of her father Lew, a former back for the Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, and Cleveland Browns and also a coach in the NFL, in his later years. Unbeknownst to Carpenter, in those years her father was likely suffering the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which was found in his brain after his death. (The Carter Center screening was arranged in part by an intern at the Center, by the name of Chris Borland; you might remember him...)

Carpenter's reflection on her father's life and decline contains some familiar elements from the stories of others; sudden mood swings, forgetfulness, becoming withdrawn and distant, and more. Lew Carpenter died at a relatively early phase of CTE research, though well after the early names like Mike Webster or Andre Waters. He became the 18th former NFL player to be diagnosed with CTE after his death in 2010 (keep in mind that number is pushing close to 100 now).

Rebecca Carpenter's experience is refreshingly informed by what might be called NFL privilege. As a result of her father's career, she was able to access an education and social status she would never have been able to access otherwise, and that such status allows her the privilege to make sure her son never gets near a football field "unless he's dating a cheerleader." It is a complicated situation, and at times her words carry the weight of survivor's guilt.

A different take on the subject of football airs tonight on something called truTV, a channel I know of only because it carries some early-round games in the NCAA basketball tournament. A comedic/informational show called "Adam Ruins Everything" promises to perform its title act on football in an episode airing tonight at 10:00 p.m.

Adam Conover is a stand-up comedian who developed the original version of the show for the website College Humor. Like the annoying friend who won't let you off the hook for believing those commonplace things that turn out to be untrue, Conniver takes a topic per show and takes down two or three myths associated with that subject. Tonight's subject is football, and Conover will sound the alarm about the health problems and myths associated with sports drinks as a principal means of hydration for young athletes; the degree to which the playoffs are thoroughly unsuited for determining the best player in the league; and ... the degree to which head injuries are far less avoidable than people think, it sounds like. (Oh, and the guy sources his information online.)

I don't know that you'll necessarily learn anything from Conover that you haven't already seen in this blog, but I have no doubt that Conover will have more eyeballs on his show tonight than this blog ever gets. So I won't complain if somebody else is out there banging the drum on how concussions are not the only culprit in football brain trauma.

So you have former players, and their family members, out there trying to make an impact; researchers like Dr. Ann McKee and Dr. Bennet Omalu; occasional journalists like Alan Schwartz of the New York Times; the Fainaru brothers, authors of League of Denial and occasoinal ESPN contributors, and a smattering of other journalists and authors.

From the precincts of the church, you get a few articles in Sojourners; a downloadable study from The Thoughtful Christian, which aims more generally at football than strictly brain trauma (and that seems to be the extent of my denomination's efforts in the area); a little bit of content from the Christian Century; and a few scattered efforts elsewhere. Not much, for a people whose ethic claims (often very loudly and rudely) to be about the preservation of life.

I don't know what will happen to Rebecca Carpenter's documentary; maybe it will get to HBO (although as invested in football as they are, probably not) or some other distribution. And a few people will see "Adam Ruins Everything" tonight as well.

That's something, I guess.

Airing in a little less than an hour...

Maybe it *is* a religion...

This one was too much to pass up...

You may have noticed in different news outlets (or on my social media feeds if you follow those) an amusing-looking story about a course offering at Presbyterian College, a small (yes, Presbyterian) school in a small South Carolina town, on a timely subject: The Religion of SEC Football.

It's an elective course, team-taught by professors in history and English who both identify as intense fans of schools in the Southeastern Conference. The course description is fairly descriptive:

Woo Pig Sooie!? Roll Tide!? Go Cocks!? What is it about college football that turns otherwise sane people into raving lunatics? Why is it that each fall millions of people schedule their lives around SEC football, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for RV’s and tailgating for days prior to a game? Why do fans often hate another school — such as the ‘Bama fan who poisoned 130-year old trees at Auburn? This class will attempt to answer these sorts of questions by exploring the ‘religion’ of Southeastern Conference football and how each of us fit into that faith.

Sounds like fun, I guess.

In truth, the course is not new. It was first offered back in 2003, and has been offered "periodically" ever since. For whatever reason, this was the year that nationwide publicity came upon the class. It's a fairly interesting coincidence of timing, as Presbyterian's football team is making its biannual pilgrimage to serve as a sacrificial lamb for an SEC school, in this case the University of Florida, later this season. (Tickets are available.)

Of course, PC (as it's sometimes called) has a bit of experience as a sacrificial lamb. The school's athletic programs moved into NCAA Division I in 2007. The football team plays in the Football Championship Subdivision (what used to be called I-AA), in the Big South conference, but like many schools on that level it sells itself out to big-time programs as, in essence, cannon fodder. The gain in such a sacrifice, of course, is a paycheck, one that provides a substantial chunk of the athletic budget for a school of PC's size. (Please divest yourself of any fantasy you might hold about athletic revenue having any beneficial impact on the school's academic programs. Boosters essentially have to be bribed into supporting anything academic.)

I can only wonder what the benefit is beyond the paycheck. Partly as a result of their paycheck pursuits (they also travel to play Central Michigan of the Mid-American Conference), PC only has four home football games this year. If the point of such a move in the athletic department has anything to do with the enhancement of campus life, four home games seems a pretty meager return. For what it's worth, the Blue Hose (yep, that's the nickname) basketball program has known some bumps along the way in its Division I journey (with no subdivision to cover itself in that sport) but at least they got to play half their regular-season games at home last season.

In short, it might be worth some professor's time to develop a course on PC's own athletic journey and what, if any, benefit it has brought to the university as a whole. But for now, back to the class subject at hand, the "religion" of SEC football.

You might be expecting this blog to jump in feet-first. And yes, this blog would normally not pass up a chance to do so. But honestly, I can't quite get that excited by it.

Yes, there's a ton of excess in SEC fanship. The anecdotes related in the larger article above are all sufficient evidence of that -- the parents who blew off their daughter's wedding because it conflicted with a 'Bama game, the 'Bama guy who poisoned the Auburn trees, the PC professor who floated to his wife the idea of naming their child Zorback (as in Ra-Zorback) (I'm guessing he was at least joking somewhat, but it really did happen to someone...). It's comical, or it would be if it weren't so sad.

But such idolatry (and that's what is, well beyond mere "zealotry" as called in one of the articles) is hardly restricted to the SEC, is it?

The conference has its own network, sure, but in this they followed the lead of the Big Ten Eleven Fourteen Whatever.

Despite the antics of certain church-attendance-enforcing head coaches/violators of the Constitution, the SEC doesn't actually engage in the direct mixing of their athletic programs with religious missions (looking at you, Notre Dame, BYU; please sit down, Baylor).

Is the SEC egregiously bad about worshiping its teams, or even its own conference reputation? Yes. But you don't have to be in the SEC to have a cultish following.

Are they that much worse than, say, the Big Whatever, the Other Big Twelve Ten Whatever, the ACC, or the Pac-10 Whatever? I don't know that they are. And does it even compare to the idolatry of the NFL, the league which (as one of the better lines from Concussion puts it) now owns the day of the week that used to belong to the church?

And that probably isn't the worst part. The worst part, beyond the idolatry of any individual team or conference, is the inherent, but much less questioned, idolatry of the sport itself -- an idolatry that, as regular readers of this blog will guess I believe, claims its own physical sacrifices regularly.

When somebody develops an academic course that tackles that particular worship, then I'll pay more attention.

Circle Nov. 19 on your calendar...

Baylor

It's as if God decided to deliver me some headlines tailor-made for a blog about sports and faith.

On Thursday, heads started rolling at Baylor University. Proceedings were announced to fire the school's president, athletic director, and head football coach. (The athletic director has since saved the school the trouble by resigning.)

As you've quite possibly heard by now, the terminations were carried out in response to a report from a law firm investigating allegations of sexual abuse against female students at Baylor, many (but not all) by members of the football program. The university's Board of Regents issued a Findings of Fact report which speaks to nothing less than institutional failure, particularly regarding Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization of 2013, both for the university as a whole and the athletic department and football in program in particular.

Predictably, the story has spawned a great deal of pontificating, high-minded speculation about culture change in college sports, and predictably self-interested tweets from Baylor players and ship-jumping by recruits. In the meantime, the university has named an interim president (who I think was once a New Testament professor of mine, not at my most recent seminary stop) and an acting head coach, Jim Grobe, once of Wake Forest. This is an interesting hire; Grobe, who retired from Wake just a couple of years ago, looks like a true interim hire -- someone who will not, and quite possibly does not want to be, considered for the permanent position, but will get the team through the coming season.

Grobe also has a track record, albeit not as impressive as that of fired coach Art Briles, of success at a  school not accustomed to it. His overall record wasn't great, but Jim Grobe coached Wake Forest to an ACC championship and an Orange Bowl bid. That remains one of the most impressive "wait, what?" accomplishments in athletic history.

Briles's success at Baylor looks similar, with the exception of apparently being more lasting. The school's football team now plays at a shiny new stadium that would never have happened without the success of recent seasons there, with players like Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III and a lot of attention to the program and, by some remote extension, the school.

The allegations, which were being investigated for almost a year by the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton, have rained all over that success like a particularly nasty Plains thunderstorm.

Where this case stands apart from so many others is this:

Baylor University is a Christian institution of higher education. Its website will tell you so.

As a former student at a Christian college and a former professor at a Christian university, that does make my ears prick up in this case. Unchallenged sexual assault doesn't really go very well with such a self-description.

A university Board of Regents (or trustees or governors, as they are variously named at different schools) can be a vexing thing, making prescriptions about educational matters in which they have no ability or expertise or, in the case of a Christian institution of higher education, expecting the school to serve as little more than an extended Sunday school.

In this case, I am trying to read events at Baylor optimistically. The Board of Regents at Baylor, I am hoping, really valued Baylor being a Christian institution (whatever that means), even at the expense of all that football glory.

Much of the commentary around the Baylor case has not commented on this aspect of the school's identity. A few have, but many have not. This may be why what has happened at Baylor won't really be a sign of general culture change after all. Most of your big-time football franchises in the NCAA don't have that particular pressure to live up to Christian principles, even if their coach is barely concealed preacher-wannabe. If pressure comes to clean up a situation like this one, it comes mostly through threat of legal action. (Sadly, the desire to do right by the university's female students doesn't really seem to register at most universities.)

So no, I'm not looking for any kind of culture change from this situation, outside of Baylor at minimum. As for Baylor itself only time will tell.

*Some commentary after the fact has suggested that Briles saw himself as a guarantor of second chances, for players who had gotten into trouble at other schools. Well, if you're going to give out second chances, you are obligated to put in place a system of oversight to make sure those second chances don't end up bringing harm or assault to others. If you don't, your gracious second chance starts to look awfully opportunistic. There is zero evidence that any such oversight was ever put in place in these cases. 

**I'm going to forego the wide-open opportunity for schadenfreude that the university's president, a man who made his reputation zealously pursuing what he saw as a sexual misdeed, is now losing his job over failing to pursue charges of sexual assault at all. At least I'm mostly going to forego it.

Where this becomes challenging for us is in the conflict between Baylor's much-proclaimed Christian identity and its increasing desire for success in the cutthroat world of college football. What had looked like a great story rapidly denegerated into a story of soul-selling, looking the other way in the face of one of the most vile and unchristian, not to mention criminal, things that one human being can do to another. Whether Baylor's football team will ever regain its lofty heights is pretty doubtful. What Baylor would be willing to do in order to get there, we shall see.

I don't, despite the title of this blog, hold to the notion that football (or any other sport) is a religion. I am beginning to wonder, however, if sport is a belief system. And I am beginning to wonder if that belief system is at all compatible with the following of Christ that is the call of any self-proclaimed Christian. (And yes, this does bear implications for the usual subject of this blog. We'll get there.) On this, I am less optimistic. And while football may be the place where the belief system of sport and the Christian walk are most in conflict, I fear what it may mean for the relation of the Christ-follower and the big-time sport that so fills up the culture in which we live.

An image from Baylor's website.

The two- (or three-) way street

Loyalty is an awfully strange word in sports.

There's the whole business of which loyalty we're talking about.

There's the question of coach or manager loyalty to players. Players' loyalty to coaches or managers. On the pro level, ownership adds another level to the loyalty question. And then there are the fans, the ones who, in Jerry Seinfeld's words, root for laundry.

Loyalty got an unfortunate social media workout last night, apparently, in the recruiting life of the Texas A & M University football franchise. Notice the word "recruiting" in that sentence. In other words, the question of the loyalty of football players who are, technically, not yet part of the program or franchise became an open question, and as a result, some football players who were planning to join that program are now no longer planning to do so.

A little background is in order; a more detailed sketch of the events leading to this impasse is here. To be brief, the program has had some difficulties holding on to the highly touted quarterbacks who have variously played for or committed to the franchise, to the point of losing players who had made "oral commitments" to play at Texas A & M. Up to last night, the main shocking news was that the two quarterbacks who got most of the playing time last season had decided to transfer to other schools.

Seeing the instability, Tate Martell, a highly ranked high school quarterback who had made an oral commitment to A & M before his junior year of high school (yes, junior year), made the strange announcement that while he was still committed to A & M, he was going to take advantage of all five of the official visits a high schooler is allowed to make to different football franchises. While this might sound a little like telling your girlfriend that while you're still dating her exclusively that you're going to go on dates with four other women, one could argue that the franchise is "dating" a whole bunch of other quarterbacks while theoretically remaining "committed" to you.

Whatever the reason, Martell made the decision to "decommit" from Texas A & M, re-opening his recruiting process more fully and spilling some beans on who else had expressed interest. This was last night, a little more than two weeks after the decision to make all his visits.

For whatever strange reason, one of A & M's coaches, Aaron Moorehead (the wide receivers coach), then fired off a series of tweets on the subject of loyalty. It was hard to escape the notion that Moorehead (the college coach, the presumed adult in the room) was going off on Martell, the 17-year-old high school quarterback). Moorehead, because of NCAA rules, couldn't mention the name of a recruit who had not yet signed a letter of intent (which Martell is not eligible to do until this coming February), maintained that he wasn't tweeting about who people thought he was tweeting about, but went right on tweeting in a way that more or less said that these tweets about loyalty were "relevant" to the situation that everybody thought he was tweeting about.

Meanwhile other recruits took notice. A highly-ranked receiver, taking notice of the words of his "future coach", used Twitter to announce his own decommitment. (This receiver, Mannie Netherly, has already received an offer from the Mississippi franchise. Things do change quickly.) This didn't stop Moorehead from tweeting, adding that kids these days were too sensitive and "soft." This in turn persuaded another recruit, not committed to Texas A & M but still considering the franchiie, to decide he was no longer considering the program. Another player, not even an A & M recruit, offered the opinion that the tweetstorm (apparently that's a thing now) had probably cost A & M about twenty-five recruits, while others weighed in on one side or the other.

Today brought the mandatory apology from Moorehead and vague insinuations by head coach Kevin Sumlin that Moorehead might lose his social media privileges.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds the whole business bizarre on its face. I can't possibly begin to enumerate the dumbfounded and I-can't-believe-I-have-to-ask questions this provokes in me, but just to name a few:

1) Making "oral commitments" before junior year of high school? Since when is that ever a good idea? And yes, I've heard the stories of offers to kids in junior high, I just don't want to acknolwedge them. I suppose on some level that making such an early commitment theoretically allows a kid to play his last two years of high-school ball without all the distraction of a full-blown recruiting process, but I have my doubts that this theory really works out that well in practice. And who's to say that any of the coaches who recruit you as a sophomore are going to even be around by the time you're a senior, much less ready to join the franchise?

An "oral commitment" is a strange thing. It is utterly without backing. It has, really, about as much credibility as your promise to your doctor to exercise more and cut back on the sweet stuff.

2) Coaches are not really the best people to go tweeting or otherwise browbeating about "loyalty" to a program. To pick on the currently humiliated Moorehead: is he really saying that he plans to spend his entire career as A & M's wide receivers coach?

Even in my short stay in academia I climbed the career ladder. I moved, after three years of teaching at a small evangelical school in south Florida, to a much larger state university out in the plains, one with one of the better music programs in the country and with much more interest in basketball than baseball. For me, the appeal was threefold: a slight pay bump (but also a move to a much less expensive place to live, which heightened the effect), a chance to work with graduate students and not undergrads only, and, well, the prestige of the music program there. Such a move was no declaration of disaffection for my previous school, but I will never doubt that it was the right thing to do at that time in that career and will never regret it.

It's hard for me to believe that Moorehead isn't going to want to climb the career ladder in football coaching at some point. And hey, this is the good ol' USA; nobody's really going to begrudge him that privilege. He might move to another school for an opportunity to be an offensive coordinator, or maybe even a head coach, or he might make a move to the NFL. (Of course, how much the publicity from this incident will affect such opportunities for him in the future remains to be seen.) But a system that allows him to demand such loyalty out of players who might not even be at A & M before he climbs the next step on the coaching ladder is a broken system, isn't it?

3) Twitter, boy, I don't know... .

4) I won't even get into the degree to which this whole process is utterly divorced from the basic concept of a college or university education... .

5) And because you know this blog is going to go there whenever the chance arises, this coach (the one tweeting how kids these days are too sensitive or soft) is somehow being trusted with, among other things, the health of the players who play under his direction, including yes, the health of their brains. Sound like a good idea to you?

6) I haven't waded into the cesspool of comment sections or Twitter replies to get any reactions from fans of A & M or other franchises, the ones rooting for laundry. I'm not going to, but I'm going to guess that it's ugly and vile and petty towards the de-committers, and obnoxiously defensive of Moorehead. That apparently is what fanhood requires (auto-correct wanted to change that word to "manhood." In that case I have to concede that auto-correct might have a point). Defend the franchise against any and all assaults, including any physical ones committed by players or coaches, but turn on the franchise and demand blood if it doesn't win enough games. I guess that's fan loyalty.

In this case, this particular situation is unique to college, and to college football somewhat. College basketball has its own profound corruptions and irregularities, but early recruiting just doesn't have quite the same hold on that game. Coach-hopping is maybe even worse, though. On the pro level, loyalty is deeply intertwined with money. (Not that it isn't on the college level, but for those actually playing it is mostly future money at stake.)

In all seriousness, I am not sure it requires a faith-based ethical viewpoint to make a person wonder if it would be best just to shake one's head and walk away from the whole business. A basic rational mind and sense of human decency might well be enough.

How nice that he bounced back so quickly...

Spectacle, the NFL draft, and Johnny Manziel

With the NFL Draft bearing down like an out-of-control freight train upon the American consciousness, it seems like a good time to talk about spectacle.

Oh, and Johnny Manziel too.

The NFL has, to its credit if you believe it's a good thing, done a pretty amazing job of turning its off-season into a spectacle almost equal to that of the season itself. (Reminder: the subject of spectacle and its relationship to the ongoing concern of this blog was introduced in the previous post.) This itself is not necessarily unique to the NFL, but what is particularly of interest is how much of this off-season spectacle revolves around young men who have played absolutely zero snaps in the league as of yet.

Major League Baseball has long enjoyed an offseason spectacle of sorts, so old and traditional that it earned itself a nickname -- the "hot stove league" -- that has long outlived the source of the name. That bit of spectacle revolves around the trading or potential trading of players and, in more recent years, the signing or potential signing of free agent players. As with much of baseball, the hot stove season unfolds in a relatively leisurely fashion, with occasional spasms of activity around certain off-season markers such as the Winter Meetings or general managers meetings in which trades were often culminated in the past. But again, the emphasis is on players who have established themselves and in some cases are about to get obscenely rich. What the NFL has done is make an all-consuming spectacle of a sequence of events, from NFL scouting combine to the draft itself, out of players entering the league, rather than familiar faces in the league.

Of course, it helps that the players are not exactly unknown. Thanks to the popularity of college football, the league doesn't have to introduce these wannabe-NFL players from nowhere -- in many cases these guys are pretty familiar already. On the other hand, many of the players who become "stars" in the draft -- early draft choices, the number one pick, and so forth -- are not necessarily the ones who became most famous in the NCAA. Really, how much did you follow Carson Wentz's career (North Dakota people, put your hands down) before he became a potential #1 or #2 pick? And when a team settles on an offensive lineman for their draft pick, that player isn't going to be as famous as the Heisman Trophy winner.

No matter. First the combine -- a glorified workout session -- leading to the final frenzied push to the draft itself. People now make actual careers out of projecting the draft's results. (Looking at you, Mel Kiper.) What used to be a Saturday afternoon affair has now blown up into a three-day event, although how many people actually stick around for the sixth and seventh rounds isn't necessarily clear.

NOTE: yes, the NBA does a similar thing with its draft, although it's only two rounds and contained in one evening, and there's nothing like the NFL combine. Also, the number of international players that get drafted in that league require a bit of introduction that even the most obscure o-lineman doesn't on Draft Day. 

And yes, there was even a Kevin Costner movie about the NFL draft, at least nominally. (At least it didn't wipe out as badly as the FIFA movie.)

There's a reason I'm alluding to the NFL Draft here, in a blog that concerns itself most frequently with the traumatic effect of the game of football on some substantial chunk of its players. It is at the draft, and during the combine and process leading up to it, that the commodification of the athlete is most clearly on display.

The combine is, frankly, a meat market. The appeal of a bunch of post-college guys standing around in their tighty-whities getting measured and poked and prodded escapes me. At least the potential draftees get to put on clothes before they go out on the field in Indianapolis and run and jump and throw or catch footballs, while Important Men with stopwatches stand around and look important and measure things.

From there NFL scouts will also make visits to various college campuses for "pro days," in which players who for whatever reason don't get to the combine are measured and commodified. Meanwhile the Kipers of the world issue weekly updates about Who Will Be Drafted When, with the breathless urgency of the live updates from Baghdad during one Iraq war or another. It will get louder and more breathless until this weekend.

At the draft itself a select pool of likely high draftees is invited to demonstrate their fashion sense, or lack thereof, while sometimes getting phone calls and otherwise waiting for their names to be called, to find out which franchise controls their fate and how much money they will or won't make. They might get interviewed, or filmed hugging their weeping mother or who knows what. They'll walk to the podium, endure a handshake from Roger Goodell, hold up a replica jersey or ball cap, and be shuffled off to be discussed endlessly.

ESPN or the NFL Network will try to convince you that these players are Real People, with lives and families and interests outside of football. This is less untrue than it is irrelevant. What matters most, what matters at all from this point forward is their value or usefulness to the franchise that drafted them. If it doesn't work out for the team, well, remember that NFL contracts, aside from signing bonuses, are not guaranteed.

And even that human-interest angle is, in the end, part of the spectacle. One would think we were choosing our representatives to defend Earth in some kind of interplanetary battle royale.

Perhaps the most revealing spectacle, one that isn't necessarily going to happen at every draft but happens just often enough, is the Player Who Slides Down The Draft Board. This is usually a fairly famous collegian (the spectacle works best if it's a quarterback) expected to be drafted pretty high, who instead gets passed over by team after team until suddenly we're down around the 20s in picks and he's the only guy left in the green room. This becomes a spectacle rather like that of vultures circling a wounded animal. What went wrong? Why is everybody passing on him? What ugly secret do these teams know about him? It gets pretty grotesque, really, until some team finally pulls the trigger and drafts the kid.

This happened to Aaron Rodgers eleven years ago, and he turned out okay. He fell all the way to the 24th pick in the first round of that draft before the Green Bay Packers selected him. He had to wait a few years for Brett Favre to clear out, but things have turned out pretty well for Rodgers, and his draft slippage only comes up to demonstrate, as here, that it didn't hurt his career so much.

This also happened to Johnny Manziel.

You may remember two years ago that Manziel, carrying the monicker "Johnny Football" and a reputation towards recklessness both on and off the field, tumbled through the first round before being drafted 22nd by the Cleveland Browns.

Now Aaron Rodgers and Johnny Manziel are extremely different people. Rodgers has, for one thing, a life beyond football, or perhaps more accurately an awareness of how to leverage his football fame for things beyond football, and generally seems a level-headed sort. These are not words that fit well with Manziel. Further, Rodgers slid into possibly the best possible football situation for him, while Manziel slid into the dumpster fire that is the Cleveland Browns.

Manziel was pretty well-known as a party animal when drafted. It couldn't have been a surprise that he didn't immediately transform into a choir boy upon being drafted. Even so, his two-year descent from hope of the franchise to outcast is pretty striking.

The troubling possibility I can't escape is that Johnny Manziel, the spectacle, was more useful to football than Johnny Manziel, the football player, at least until he started hitting his girlfriend. Until he invited the ugly spectacle of Ray Rice back into fans' memories, the screwup, the struggle to do anything useful on the field while continuing to be a party boy off it, was a useful storyline. The Browns can't really be any more embarrassed than they usually are, and they get to cut Manziel loose, sign Robert Griffin III, and be in line to draft the aforementioned Carson Wentz, who doesn't initially look like that much of a party boy. The NFL gets to pat itself on the back for maneuvering an abuser out of the way.

The spectacle serves to keep all eyes on the league. A quiet offseason doesn't serve a league that thinks $25 billion (yes, billion) in annual profits is its natural right. Keeping enough eyes bedazzled to sustain a whole network and a daily ESPN show all year long is paramount, not to mention selling jerseys and all that stuff.

In a league where commodification and spectacle and distraction are as paramount as all this, would you really trust the higher-ups to give a damn about the health of your brain, not to mention the rest of your body?

Not if that brain is working, you wouldn't.

Would you also expect the fans who buy all the stuff, who shout obscenities at you before you're even drafted, who spew bile anonymously on sports radio and internet comment sections, to have your back?

Yeah, right.

So if the DeAndre Levys of the world are taking their own health into their own hands, it is only because it has become clear to them that they are the only ones who will.

The number of ways the NFL Draft is a disturbing spectacle would require an entire blog even to begin to express its breadth and depth.

Pay attention!

1.

Apparently Ricardo Lockette of the Seattle Seahawks came awfully close to becoming the first on-field casualty of the NFL in, well, ever.

Back in November Lockette's head was nearly removed on a hit by Jeff Heath of the Dallas Cowboys. That phrase is normally used as hyperbole, but it is apparently uncomfortably close to truthful in this case.

Scary moment, maybe more so than anyone realized at the time.

Lockette discussed this injury on a visit to the paramedics who responded to his injury, properly handling him so that his neck didn't fail completely.

This blog mostly concerns itself with the issue of brain trauma in football, though we're on a slight break at the moment. It's worth the occasional reminder that one doesn't have to suffer concussions or end up with a CTE-riddled brain for football to mess you up whether you hit each other in practice or not.

And on that subject, one has to wonder if the same kind of care always comes into play when head injuries and potential concussions are involved. Those usually don't draw paramedics onto the field.

2.

So a kid attending a spring training game at Disney World wasn't far from having his head removed either.

As the Pittsburgh Pirates were playing against the Atlanta Braves (who for now still have spring training at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex), Pirates batter Danny Ortiz lost his grip on his bat after a swing, with the bat spinning crazily towards the stands. In the stands, Shawn Cunningham barely had time to stick out his arm to deflect the bat away from the head of his eight-year-old son Landon.

Frighteningly close.

The money quote is at the bottom of the article, by a representative of a company that supplies netting to MLB teams to keep this kind of stuff from happening. 

Huff added that it is important for fans to be aware of what's happening on the field and avoid distractions such as cellphones. 

“Fans have to actively watch the game,” Huff said. “It is just like crossing the street — you need to look up from your phone to do so safely.”

Man, oh man, is that a great quote. "Fans have to actively watch the game." I may just make it the motto of this blog.

3.

Of course, what you see when you do so is sometimes downright ugly. At least the team being threatened won, to the degree that counts for anything.

That guy does have a history in sports, for what it's worth. He actually managed to destroy a league (almost) all by himself.

Now he seems set on destroying other things.

Sports fans are capable of enough ugliness, without intentionally divisive and race-baiting politics being thrown in. 

I'm trying to think of a time when the mixture of sports and politics has ever been good for sports.

Can't think of one. 

But pulling this crap on high school kids? Evil. Pure evil.

4. 

Wrapping back to a previous blog entry, and to bullet point #1, Calvin Johnson, a.k.a. Megatron, has confirmed he will retire from the NFL.

The rumors had been pretty well-established out there since the end of the regular season, and now it's done. Johnson retires after nine seasons. 

As noted in the earlier blog post, that used to seem like a short career. Not any more, perhaps.

Football doesn't have to screw up your brain to mess you up real good. 

You have to actively watch the game, even when you're not actually at the game. It is showing us ourselves, good and bad. Ignoring the bad is self-destructive. 

Pay attention! This stuff matters more than it should.

Defining "risk"

We need to talk about what "risk" means in this context.

Every sport entails risk.

This is a basic fact. It is also, however, a lame defense.

It is a basic fact that participation in any sport entails the risk of physical injury or harm. Two people have actually died as a result of injuries sustained on the field in professional baseball. One, Ray Chapman, died as a result of being hit in the head by a pitch in 1920. The other, Mike Coolbaugh, died after being hit in the head by a line drive while working as a first-base coach in a minor league game in 2007. Concussions have shortened the careers of a number of players, perhaps most notably Mike Matheny, a longtime catcher for four major league teams who retired in 2006 due to persistent concussion-related symptoms, but who now manages the St. Louis Cardinals. Ryan Freel, a former utility player for several teams, committed suicide in 2012; a postumous examination revealed the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his brain.

Basketball has seen some rather gruesome leg injuries, the one suffered by Louisville's Kevin Ware in the 2013 NCAA tournament in particular. After an extended recovery, Ware eventually transferred to Georgia State to conclude his collegiate career, where he helped that team make an improbable tournament run in 2015. A devastating injury, but he did play again. To my knowledge no former basketball players have been found to have CTE.

Soccer can have some pretty nasty injuries, and concussions are a concern in the sport. As I write this I'm watching a USMNT match against Iceland, for which one of the commentators is Taylor Twellman, a former USMNT member whose own career was cut short by concussion symptoms and who, like Matheny, has become a voice for concussion awareness and prevention in his sport. He has also agreed to donate his own brain for CTE research after his death. Two soccer players, an American semi-pro player and a Brazilian star, have been found to have CTE after their deaths.

After football, hockey is probably the most notable sport to face the issue of concussions and CTE in recent times.*  The sport has lost a number of well-known names who were diagnosed with CTE after their deaths, including Bob Probert, Reggie Fleming, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, and Derek Boogaard. As a sport with a very distinct history of fighting on the ice as somehow part of the game (at least in its North American manifestation), one might argue that once CTE was identified as a peril of contact sports, hockey was inevitably going to have its crisis. I'm not familiar enough with sports outside of the United States to comment much on rugby or Australian football, but one might guess that they would possibly face some future cases of CTE, or perhaps some past cases yet to come to light.

*(For the purposes of this discussion, boxing is not included. Its ability to cause brain trauma has been known for years, although the term invented for such boxing injury is "pugilistica dementia" rather than CTE. Frankly, if you're watching boxing, I'm assuming you don't give a damn.)

So yes, it is a basic fact that every sport has risk.

It is also a lame defense of football.

First, let's take a quick moment to acknowledge that brain trauma isn't the only harm associated with football. The whole body gets beaten. That much we have known for a very long time. We don't necessarily like to think about Earl Campbell in a wheelchair, but we know it happens.

We also know that sometimes really gruesome things happen on a football field. All I have to do, if you're of a particular generation, is say "Joe Theismann."

Although we don't much care to think about it, we know those things happen.

And then, there's this rather incomplete list.

What we're not really coming to grips with very well, and which tends to lead to lame defenses like "there's a risk to every sport," is that for every player we see go down with an obvious or identifiable injury, even a concussion, there is somebody else taking a blow on the field that is going to come back to haunt them years later.

The NFL admits it, in a legally binding way. In a year in which concussions spiked noticeably over last season,  there isn't much likelihood of making that 33% number go away any time soon. Players on the field are taking hits they're going to pay for much later. We just don't know who.

We'll presume that for college players who don't go pro, that number will be somewhat less, although even college-only players aren't immune to severe damage and premature death. And on the high-school level, less still (although sometimes the deadly blows are horrifyingly obvious). Nonetheless, somebody is taking a hit that will come garishly close to fulfilling one of The Onion's too-true-to-be-funny headlines.

In short, here is why talking about risk and football as if it were the same as in all other sports is fatuous at best, potentially evil at worst.

A player can get hurt, and even get a concussion, playing sports.

In baseball, for example, there's a risk that a batter might get hit in the head by a pitched ball.

Might.

In football, on the other hand, someone will suffer a damaging or even destructive blow to the head, whether we know it at the time or only many years later.

Will.

The element of risk, such as it is, is just a matter of who.

Damage unseen

My sports fandom sometimes comes with a serious dark side.

Interestingly, it shows itself most often in connection with college basketball. I still consider myself a baseball fan first and foremost, and baseball can leave me heartbroken and frustrated and even angry sometimes, but not really dark in the way of which I speak.

I've become more of a soccer fan of late, and flopping drives me nuts. Fan behavior can get me angry (no, Portland Timbers fans, it is not acceptable to cheer for Sporting KC's goalie to be concussed and to interfere with the trainer trying to examine him by thowing stuff on the field -- I was watching, I saw), and I can be heartbroken over a bad result (the shot hit both posts, really?), but again, not quite the dark side.

But college basketball? Serious dark side.

It showed up last night. The Kansas Jayhawks (KU was my last teaching stop) found themselves in a heated and extended battle with their conference rivals, the Oklahoma Sooners. First Kansas built a big lead; then Oklahoma came back and built up their own big lead. Regulation time ended in a tie. So did the first overtime. So did the second overtime. Finally, in the third overtime, Kansas outlasted Oklahoma 109-106, a score more suggestive of the NBA than the NCAA.

So, plenty of opportunity for frustration, particularly with one Buddy Hield.

Hield is the Sooners' best player. And he's really good. This isn't new, but the performance he turned in last night was next-level stuff. Hield dropped 46 points on the Jayhawks, and did so with some ridiculous shots. And at least after some of those shots I caught myself wondering why one of the Jayhawks didn't body-check Hield into the upper seats of Allen Fieldhouse. Dark side. Not really an acceptable way to think, particularly for a pastor. At least I wasn't with anybody at the time.

This opens up a question about how we relate to sports as "participants" (fans, consumers, whatever you choose to call it) and how that participation affects us. There are many who can watch a game and be largely unaffected by it aside from a basic happiness if their team wins or unhappiness if they lose. I kinda envy them sometimes. But then sometimes I don't. There is really very little like the sheer sense of exhausted exhilaration that comes after a game like last night's contest.

But not all reactions are so joyous. There are those whose dark side goes much further than thinking about hard fouls. Bryan Stow could tell you about that if he were physically able, after being beaten within an inch of his life by two Los Angeles Dodgers fans, apparently for the "crime" of being a San Francisco Giants fan. That represents an extreme that, thankfully, is rarely enacted. Riots at matches or games would fall into the same category, thankfully. (Outright hooliganism, on the other hand, seems more of a case of violence using sports as an excuse, but that is a thought that would take much longer to unpack, on a subject that seems to be much less frequently enacted than in the past.)

There is, as has been alluded to in this blog in the past, nowadays the question of how much responsibility fans of football bear for the ongoing prevalence of traumatic brain injury and CTE in the game. Fans, after all, spend the money that is the lifeblood of the football empire. If the money dries up, there's a real good chance the game dries up. This is a real and challenging question.

But there's another question, related but different, that also has to be faced:

Are we harmed by watching?

Do we get numbed by seeing so many hits, so many concussions, so many subconcussve hits, so many injuries?

Do we damage ourselves by seeking out rationalizations or reasons to absolve ourselves when we watch? "I don't watch for the violence, I watch for the beauty ... " "It's their responsibility if they choose to play, not mine ... " "It doesn't make any difference if I don't watch, I'm just one person ... " "Watching my alma mater is different than watching the NFL ... " "People get hurt playing other sports, are we going to ban them too? ... " "Football is too important a part of our culture, it can't be changed ... " "A lot of players don't end up with this damage so it must be o.k. ..." "Technology will fix everything, they'll come up with the perfect helmet soon ... " and you can probably supply others.

How much do we damage our own ethical framework, our own moral centers, with such rationalizations in the face of undeniable damage to the bodies and brains of more than enough players to fill a team?

Does it do harm to us? Do we at least have the basic fortitude to pursue the question without hesitation?

(to be continued)

In this case, not the specific "brain trauma" I'm worried about...