Playing games after Orlando

One "game memory" that is still pretty strong me is a memory of the absence of games.

This was, as some of you might remember, the week following September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). Major League Baseball was most affected, with a week's worth of games having to be postponed and rescheduled, resulting in baseball's first World Series to stretch into November. College football and the NFL ended up missing a week of games themselves, but that only amounted to one game in those sports. This was of course necessitated by the grounding of air travel in the US; indeed many of those MLB teams had a challenge getting home from the road trips on which they were engaged at the time.

I have the distinct memory, by about Friday of that week, deeply regretting that there was no game to which to go. Mind you, I was living in Tallahassee at the time, and the closest team, the Tampa Bay (Devil, at the time) Rays, were more than five hours away (and they were closer than the Atlanta Braves; I had actually measured this in the only way that made sense to me, by going to games in both places and comparing the distances). Nonetheless, that Friday night, even as I knew it was a practical impossibility, I ached for it. I ached for it, even as I was somewhat ashamed for doing so.

There was, as best as I could comprehend it, a desperate need to be among other people in a way that had even the tiniest tinge of normal to it. The week of course was filled with many different types of gatherings at churches and city halls and capitals and courthouses and all manner of other public places. But the very point of such gatherings was their not-normal-ness. The very point was the abnormality and the mind-numbing and mind-blowing horror of what had happened.

Games did resume, eventually, and while there were memorials and ceremonies at the "first game back" at minimum (and particularly pronounced ones at the first games back for the New York teams, the Mets first and then the Yankees), there was still baseball. The rules of the game were still the same. The interruption of baseball ritual by the displacement of the seventh-inning stretch with "God Bless America" (a disruption that seems to be receding somewhat but has long overstayed its appropriateness) marred the longed-for normality of a ballgame, but it was still baseball, gosh darn it.

There aren't many kinds of disruptions that can get games called off. (Whether or not this is a good thing is a discussion that is needed at some point, but this isn't the night.) A riot in a city can get that city's teams to postpone or move games, and natural disasters can sometimes cause cancellations or relocations (the Florida teams can get put off by hurricanes, as can teams in Houston, and earthquakes have been known to cause cancellations and postponements in California).

Our current situation is one in which a crime or tragedy with nationwide repercussions has no effect on the scheduling of games, but has a major effect on how said event is carried out, locally for certain and nationally in some cases. The latest instance of this is the set of responses to the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event with definite national repercussions and reverberations but one most intensely felt in central Florida.

Though I don't know for certain (I really cannot watch every game, after all), the standard response that I would guess happened pretty much everywhere was the traditional moment of silence. That could be done, and I'd guess was done at baseball games on that Sunday, probably at the next game of the NBA Finals (that I did not get to see), and probably at a number of minor-league baseball games as well. The Orlando Magic, the city's NBA franchise, was no longer playing; that left local commemorations to Orlando City SC, the city's MLS club; Orlando Pride, their new team in the Women's Professional Soccer League; and to a secondary degree the Tampa Bay Rays; obviously they're not in Orlando, but they are the closest MLB team and it's not a crazy drive. (The Pride were away last weekend; their next home game is Thursday night.)

The Rays, to a degree, had the first chance, and coincidentally Friday night's game had already been planned as a "Pride Night"; thus the team had a ready-made vehicle for recognizing and honoring the families of the victims, and stepped up their efforts pretty effectively, it would seem; Friday night's game was a sellout. Do not underestimate the significance of this; the Rays do not get sellouts, outside of Opening Day, and sometimes not even then. Orlando City followed the next night with their own effective commemorations (another thing that just doesn't happen: a game stoppage at the 49th minute as a moment of silence was observed). The city's franchises in the Arena Football League and the East Coast Hockey League also held commemorations at their immediate next games.

On the national level perhaps the most effective commemoration, subtle but unmistakable, occurred last Thursday night, during the US Men's national team's match against Ecuador; team captain Michael Bradley took the field with his more typical captain's armband replaced with a rainbow-colored armband with the logo #OneNation emblazoned on it. The USMNT and MLS (which had been on a break for the Copa America Centenario tournament in which the USMNT was playing) had hit the airwaves with video messages of support for Orlando and the victims' families (at least one prominently featuring among its voices Sporting Kansas City's and USMNT's Graham Zusi, an Orlando native).

These commemorations are, sadly, in line with a pattern that has had the tragic opportunity to become well-established.

I really don't make any claim that any of this is wrong in any way. Sadly, with such tragedies allowed to be routine, it's only going to become an even more well-established pattern. And particularly on the local level, I really don't think a team can do any less, nor should they do so.

There is one thing I still have to caution against, though. It is a caution similar to the one expressed here, against thinking that sports can fix us. Sports might be a tool to do so, but can't do the job.

As sports can't fix us, neither can sports heal us.

Earlier today Richard Lapchick contributed this column to ESPN.com. Lapchick is no ordinary ESPN foof; he has a rather formidable title and role as the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida, and the director of UCF's Institute For Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (For the Florida geography-impaired, UCF is in Orlando.) You might have heard of that Institute for its reports on such things as graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, or its "report cards" on racial and gender hiring in Major League Baseball and other big-time sports programs. Being able to be critical of big-time sports and its ethical shortfalls is part of his job.

Side note: I can't think of many things that would entice me to leave my current vocation, but if a Christian-affiliated college, university, seminary, or divinity school were ever to create that kind of institute ... I'd at least have to think about it.

Being based in Orlando, Lapchick has had a front-row seat to the city's response to the Pulse attack and to the reactions of its sports franchises in particular (he acknowledges being at both the Rays game and the Orlando City match in the article, and even speaking to Orlando City's squad last Friday). Most of what Lapchick has to say in the article I have no problem with, but there is one sentence that just can't go unchallenged:

Sports can heal and unite and can change society forever.

Forever? Really?

If you followed that link earlier you know I already have a problem with the notion that Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier didn't heal anything. It changed the US forever, yes. It opened eyes, sure. It changed many Americans, no doubt. But let us be blunt: does the United States look like a healed country to you in terms of racial relations?

Similarly, while Billie Jean King made an undeniable difference for women in sports, it would be a major stretch to suggest that women in sports have anything like equality with their male counterparts (for one example, the US Women's National Team in soccer is now embroiled in multiple legal proceedings against the US Soccer Federation over unequal pay, even though the women are vastly more successful than their male counterparts). For that matter, the United States doesn't look all that much like a healed country in terms of gender relations either.

Sporting events can be moments of respite or relief, which can be a part of a healing process. You can't grieve 24/7, and if a communal experience of catharsis in a sporting event can provide that brief period of relief or respite, all to the good.

But healing, people of faith or no faith should know, doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It is a process that takes time, and deep engagement with the source of the grief. It isn't about "getting back to normal," because that "normal" is never coming back. Some new place becomes "normal," but it's a "normal" that will never forget the attack in this case.

The survivors of the Pulse attack, or the family members and loved ones of the victims, did not wake up "healed" on Sunday because the Rays and Orlando City played games on Friday and Saturday, and they were invited. They may have awakened to the realization that many more people cared for them and empathized with them and maybe even grieved for them, felt their pain or shared their sorrow to some small degree. They may have even been able to sleep for the first time in days, who knows? But the process of healing is still only just beginning for them. And if those games and the outpouring of care and affection they showed provided even just a little bit of that relief and respite, all to the good.

But let's not put the words "heal" and "forever" together here. There are just as many homophobic people around as there were before the Pulse murders. That particular hatred is not going to end because of a couple of sporting events, any more than racism was eradicated by sporting events in the wake of the Charleston church shooting last year, or by Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron. Sport simply isn't that powerful.

What it can do is still pretty amazing in the face of such shock and grief. Sporting events are still places where people who wouldn't even give each other the time of day elsewhere are united in common purpose. That's almost church in some ways (or a more successful example of what church would hope to do, maybe?).

Christian faith acknowledges one healer, called a Gentle Healer by some, a Wounded Healer by others, both accurate enough. Again, though, I don't think that in this case any particular religious affiliation is required to get that healing is too deep and too long a process to be accomplished by any sport, or certainly by any one game. It can be a step or a part, but it can't do it on its own, and evidently not forever.

Note the armband.

The Band Geek: college version

I have in a previous entry explored the degree to which my young life, in ways I didn't see at the time, was governed by the rhythms and schedules of football, at least during the fall, due to my membership in the marching band. Another past blog post explored one early if not quite informed introduction to the spectre of catastrophic injury even at the high school level, again as part of that marching band experience. However, it is needful for me to admit that this was not the full extent of my band-geekery.

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't). There was good reason for this besides the football team's ineptitude; Wake's basketball team was actually pretty good in those days (and this was pre-Tim Duncan), and had a sort of moment in the spotlight when an upset win over DePaul (they used to be good, too) prematurely ended the career of their longtime coach Ray Meyer, a sentimental favorite to win it all or at least get to the Final Four in his final season. Delaney Rudd, Anthony Teachey, Danny Green (not that one), and the next year Muggsy Bogues showed up. Good times.

The college marching band experience was a little different, mostly because (1) the games were on Saturdays instead of Fridays, which gave the experience a slightly different vibe, and (2) Wake Forest simply wasn’t that good. Dublin High’s teams were not necessarily perennial playoff winners, but they usually won more than they lost. Wake’s teams didn’t. (This was in 1983 and 1984, long before the Demon Deacons’ inexplicable run to the 2006 ACC championship and Orange Bowl appearance on January 2, 2007.) When the most ardently cheered player on the team is the punter, you know the team isn’t that successful. (To be clear, the punter deserved the cheers: Harry Newsome was an All-American in 1983, and went on to an NFL career with, I think, the Steelers and the Vikings.)

The university’s athletic department recognized the general lack of appeal of a poor team with a small alumni base, and during the two seasons I was in the marching band the games tended to be followed by some kind of entertainment show or concert. Because of these I got to see Bob Hope live (clearly Wake’s students were not the intended targets of these shows), as well as the Four Tops and Temptations, so the effort was worthwhile for me at least, and I was not so young and stupid as to be unable to enjoy such legendary acts. Some of the acts were less familiar to me, which got annoying as the band absolutely was not allowed to leave early in those cases. This also provided me an introduction to the mingling of sport and entertainment that would become another piece of the puzzle in these later years, sorting out the ways in which football generates and keeps its hold on its acolytes with spectacle and distraction.

Road trips could be a different affair as well. Back then, some combination of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Duke was certain to be on the schedule, and those were pretty quick trips. Others could be longer and a bit more involved. As well, sometimes the road trips only involved a pep band, with no time spent on the field (I remember a game at Richmond -- yes, Wake Forest traveled to a game against a 1-AA team -- that was pep band only. Back then they were still playing at the stadium that now houses the Richmond Kickers soccer team.) 

Maybe the most notable road trip was to Georgia Tech, if only because several of my high-school classmates had chosen to attend that school. I snuck off for the third quarter and spent it among them, in a Georgia Tech student section, in my Wake Forest band uniform (this was a real marching trip, no pep band). The other memorable (and much less pleasant) part of that trip was a girl I was interested in making it clear she was dating a rich sophomore instead. As you can note, very few of my marching band memories from my Wake Forest time really involved the actual game of football at all, aside from cheering for the punter. (Wake Forest also hosted a high-school marching band competition, for which we band members were assigned various tasks. That was more fun than any game I ever attended.)

After transferring away from Wake Forest in the middle of my sophomore year (to major in music, ironically), my exposure to live football became much less frequent. My new school didn’t field a football team, and aside from one trip the next fall to see Wake Forest at Georgia Tech and catch up with my old band mates, I saw very few games live, mostly during my time in graduate school at Florida State; my fellow grad students in my degree program generally got together to get tickets for one game per season. Otherwise, I frequently spent football Saturdays across the campus, working in the music library. Most of the time, though, the game was on our television at home.

While there were no major on-field injuries during the games I saw at Wake Forest (at least not that I remember), I did get an early introduction to the signature malady of the current age of CTE: the concussion. In my first semester at the university one of my classmates in an introductory theatre class was a walk-on football player, whose hopes to play for the Deacs had been derailed by a concussion suffered during pre-season training. Or at least it was supposedly a concussion. At least a few folks suggested he had suffered more than one, and you couldn't really be certain that wasn't the case.

He was as nice a guy as you could hope, but clearly not all was right with him. On more than one occasion he would be found in class zoned out, completely having lost track of all going on around him, noticing nothing but the headache. The professor didn't really know what to do with him in those situations. Part of the responsibility for this class was to work as off-stage personnel for the theatre division's fall production (Shakespeare, but I don't remember what). This fellow and I were both assigned to the costume shop. There was enough of a challenge for him and his enormous hands trying to manipulate sewing needles and replace small buttons. On the bad days, it was impossible.  He made it to most of the classes, occasionally missing because, as he would later explain, he just couldn’t get around the pain. By the end of the semester his symptoms had abated somewhat (and I do emphasize somewhat), but while he tried again, to my recollection he never made Wake’s active football roster. But since I was only there for one more year, how would I know? He might just have gotten on the roster later, as messed up as his brain clearly was.

I wish I could say I was enough of a prophet to see from his difficulties that it was all going to end badly, and that football was a sport with a serious head trauma problem even at that time. No, I didn't see that coming, being in a way still too close to it, I guess. Though my direct experience of the game was going to wane in the intervening years, I certainly wasn’t ready to walk away from it yet. That was still years in the future.

If a punter was ever going to look like an All-American, this was it. Harry Newsome at Wake Forest.

Game memories: Dublin 10, Jones Co. 0

An autopsy on Evan Murray, the New Jersey high school quarterback who died after an on-field hit during a game Friday night, revealed that the 17-year-old died of a lacerated spleen leading to massive internal bleeding. According to the autopsy, Murray's spleen was abnormally enlarged, making it more susceptible to injury.

More susceptible or not, it's hard for someone who never played a sport like football or hockey to conceive of being hit hard enough to have one's spleen ruptured.

While there have been incidents of deaths of college football players due to in-game or in-practice injuries, including Derek Sheely's death due to a brain injury sustained in practice at Frostburg State University in 2011, more attention seems to flow towards the deaths of players still in high school. These players are still teenagers. There is something that much harder to cope with for many people, even though it's not as if college football players are that much older.

These things do not happen often. While I've seen many horrifying injuries on television across many different sports (including a scary injury to Stephen Pisciotty of the St. Louis Cardinals just last night), I can only remember seeing one scary injury situation in a live event in my lifetime.

September 26, 1980

The game itself was extremely un-memorable. Dublin won 10-0, and unlike the game recollected here, I couldn't tell you how Dublin scored to save my life.

It was a home game, so the band was settled down in our usual position in the home stands, at the south end zone. There were advantages and disadvantages to such a position; if the action was happening at or near that end zone, we were in prime position to enjoy it and respond with the fight song as needed. On the other hand, if things were happening at the opposite end of the field, we might be the last to know.

At any rate it was late in the fourth quarter and Dublin had Jones County pinned deep in their own territory. Dublin's defense managed to sack the opposing quarterback, or at least we assumed that was what happened based on the crowd reaction and the fact that no football came flying out of the backfield and no runner burst out with the ball. We may have played a quick cheer or possibly a snippet of the fight song to celebrate.

Then nothing happened.

And nothing continued to happen.

As I remember, the crowd between us and that far end of the field was standing, so we in the band really couldn't see what was going on. Apparently, though, the Jones County quarterback hadn't gotten up after the sack, and in fact stayed down until he was taken from the field by ambulance.

This is the first such serious on-field injury I can recall seeing live (and five years before the Joe Theismann Monday Night Football injury that everybody remembers). What I remember most vividly is having no idea was going on. Unlike the television viewer who may benefit from a sideline reporter's information in such a situation, we in that stadium had nothing to go on except that ambulance, which was always present at games, actually being forced into use (which I had not seen before).

The other memory that hangs on came after the fact; whether after the game (which was actually called off with a little under two minutes left in that fourth quarter) in the band room, or possibly the following Monday back at school. By this time word had come that the injury that had seemed serious at the time was not going to be debilitating, and that the Jones County quarterback would recover. One of my bandmates, I think, captured the bizarre quality of the situation in a joke of sorts (what follows is a rough paraphrase):

"oh, man, is this guy going to live? is he going to walk again? this is awful..." [mimicking adult voice] "He's O.K." [back to normal voice] "wow, we really put a hit on that guy! we really pounded on him..."

We cheer for the hit, until somebody doesn't get up from it.

The cliche has far too much truth for our comfort:

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

And sometimes they take a long time to get up...

Game memories: Dublin 6, Dodge Co. 0

A little something different tonight.

Last fall I used a blog entry to tell the story of how I came to stop watching football. It actually got more clicks than usual on this shouting-into-the-wind forum, but then the transition to a new state, a new vocation, generally a new life derailed my blogging of any sort. After getting established, at least a little, in the new call, I found that I missed the blog, missed the outlet to cry out and lament against this ongoing damage done by a game I used to love.

Yes, it's true. I really did love football growing up. It was never my favorite sport, to be sure; Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home run record sealed baseball on the throne of my sports-fan kingdom forever and always. Although basketball was actually a sport I played in my teenage years (strictly church league, folks, don't get excited), I never really "got" it until I attended Wake Forest for a year and a half and was thus introduced to ACC basketball. Hockey never took with me, even though I tried really yard for the few years that Tallahassee had a minor-league hockey team while I lived there. Soccer is an extremely recent passion in my life.

But I was like a lot of other people who were raised in small or smallish towns, particularly but not exclusively in the South, whose life actually revolved around football to a far greater degree than I realized at the time or at any time until recently, as I began to dig into the issue of football and brain trauma.

I didn't play. Goodness, no, I've never been an athlete; church-league softball and basketball were the extent of my athletic struggles as a youth, and whenever possible I was the last guy off the bench for good reason. My closest brush with athletic success was as a coach of elementary school kids, where we managed to come in first in a league with all of two teams.

But in some ways my high-school years were governed by football possibly more so than anyone other than a player or maybe a cheerleader. You see, I was in the marching band.

As a result I played four years in the Dublin High School Fighting Irish Band. My instrument was the mellophone (that's what they gave French horn players to march with). As a result, except for the rare open date, my Friday nights from maybe late August into part of November were governed by the football schedule. My Thursday nights became band-practice nights, the one occasion on which the marching band actually got to practice on the actual football field. My mother was involved as well, as the director of the concession stand on the visitor's side of the field (the Band Boosters got to run those to raise money).

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't).

That four-year stretch of being attached to football also provided one of the most intense experiences of my high school years, at least that did not involve me as more than an observer or spectator. It was perhaps the first time I understood, once I looked back at it, the intensity and total saturation that is possible in being a part, even only a spectator part, of a game, particularly live and in person. It isn't that I remember every detail; I'm not certain even what year it was, and I can only remember that it was a road game against Dodge County High, who was something of a rival at the time.


October 12, 1979 (I think...it might have been October 9, 1981)

The reason I think it was 1979, my freshman year in high school, was that as best as I remember, it was an important game, in a season in which both teams were doing well at that point. Dublin had only one loss at that point and Dodge County was undefeated. (I also seem to feel that the whole marching-band experience was pretty new to me at this point, and this would have been only my third road game. But I could be wrong.)

*It blows my mind that the above website, the Georgia High School Football Historians Association site recording records, results, etc. for all those high school teams in Georgia dating back (in Dublin's case) to 1919 (1919!), exists. But credit to them for supplying what I can't remember.

I won't claim it was the best football game I ever saw; it was in many ways marked more by failures and mistakes than by great plays. By most definitions it was not the most dramatic game ever; the winning (and only) score happened quite early in the game, and was followed by one of those mistakes -- a missed extra point. I can't remember any of the main players' names, even the one who scored the lone touchdown (I only remember that, for some reason, he was apparently wearing another player's jersey).

It was one of those strange plays when the running back, assigned to plunge into the middle of the line on a third-and-short or maybe even fourth-and-short, suddenly found himself all alone on the other side of Dodge County's defensive line, with nobody between him and the end zone but a couple of officials. He did, perhaps after a fleeting instant of shock, run the fifty-plus yards and Dublin had a surprise lead. The excitement was immediately tempered by the missed extra point.

Again, it isn't specific plays or players I remember. What has stayed with me all these years was the sheer intensity of the game and its peaks and valleys. Dodge County had no real reason to despair; there were at least three and a half quarters remaining. And they immediately started their own drive down the field.

It fell short.

Dublin answered with another drive. It got stopped.

And again. And again.

The remarkable part was that for a low-scoring game, I really don't remember a lot of punts. Drives would end on fumbles, or interceptions, or simply on unconverted fourth downs. They also tended to end well into the other team's territory.

Dublin would grind its way down the field. We would get excited, even a little frenzied, and more and more so each time. Finally. We'll score this time for sure. And then the team would fumble or give up an interception or lose the ball on downs.

Dodge County would grind its way down the field. We would get agitated, even a little despairing, and more and more so each time. Oh, no. They're going to score, finally. And then they would fumble or give up an interception or lose the ball on downs.

I remember nothing of what the band did at halftime. We typically had the third quarter off for refreshments or bathroom breaks or whatnot, but I don't remember going myself or seeing anybody else go. I'm sure I probably did, but I don't remember it.

Typically the band would play little punches during the game, the kind of short bursts that accompanied cheers or provided the background for one. I don't remember a whole lot of those either.

I just remember the continuing and compounding exhilaration and anxiety as each drive ground its way down the field only to fall short.  It's not as if I can truly capture it in words; the heart racing and then stopping, the primal release of emotion, of one sort or the other, the clinging to neighbors or section mates or total strangers in the stands as each minute ticked away.

And then it was over, and just the way it had virtually started: Dublin 6, Dodge County 0.

The main emotion I remember at its end, if it counts as emotion, was exhaustion. Yes, celebration; yes, relief; yes, something possibly a little like joy, but mostly sheer emotional draining. And none of us had set foot on the field for any play during the game. (No, marching the halftime show didn't count.) One peak after another, one valley after another, one rise and fall and pinnacle and crash after another.

And then it was over. And finally I understood, at least a little, why people got so involved in this.



So let's be clear; I don't at all underestimate the challenge involved for a football fan in turning away from the game. Every sport has its particular passions, and football's are not easily duplicated by other sports. Yes, there is loss involved.

Still, the person of faith who would live his or her life in any kind of mindful or intentional way cannot escape the ethical dilemma of a game that still consumes its players so, whether it be one or ten or a hundred or a thousand.

Other sports have to face this question too, hockey and possibly soccer in particular. Football is the titan, though. It boasts (and I use that word quite intentionally) the largest fan base, the most money, the most corporate clout in American sports. To whom much is given, much is required.

The corporate leviathan that is the NFL, or the exploitative enterprise that is NCAA football, simply will not respond to anything other than financial pressure. No such organization ever does. The corporate sponsors of those organizations likewise will not respond to anything other than financial pressure.

Only people not watching games, not buying tickets, not buying merchandise, not spending money on the whole enterprise will move the needle. And if Christians can't be out front on this, at least asking the hard questions and not ducking away from the hard answers... .

Really, I've got no pictures from back then. Zip. Zilch. Nada. 

This is the best I can do from web-scrounging.