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.

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.

Land of opportunity?

If you like baseball, it's hard not to like Andrew McCutcheon.

McCutcheon (or "Cutch") was the National League Most Valuable Player in 2013. His performance last year was perfectly worthy of another MVP award, but Clayton Kershaw had an insane season for the Dodgers and won both MVP and Cy Young awards.

It's hard not to like McCutcheon because, unlike some players, he does everything. Dude can hit, field, throw, and do all of them really well. To top that off, by all accounts he seems like a thoroughly decent human being. He's the type who, earlier this year, let his trademark dreadlocks be shorn off for charity. He's the face of one of the good stories of major league baseball the last couple of seasons, a Pittsburgh Pirates team that hadn't won diddly since 1992 (the infamous Sid Bream slide, for those with such memories) before breaking into the playoffs year before last (in other words, the Kansas City Royals of 2013) and followed it up with a return trip last season. He is a thoughtful and articulate man, not given to the shoot-from-the-lip blather of so many athletes. His mom is a pretty proficient singer who belts a mean national anthem, for pete's sake. How do you not like?

So when Andrew McCutcheon threw up some red flags about the Chicago Little League team that got stripped of its titles after their much-publicized run, I guess I was a little more inclined to listen than if the words had come from a more average, hotheaded type. McCutcheon poses these questions not by charging bias, but by pointing to his own story.

It's sad and scary to think that one of the most successful, accessible, and popular players in baseball right now (and one of its most marketable players, if MLB could ever get its act together) would have been playing football if he hadn't torn his ACL in high school. But you have to wonder if his story is all that unique, except that those potential stars do end up lost to the game.

McCutcheon recognizes the tremendous hand-ups he got in being picked up and largely funded through the system of "travel teams" that increasingly rule the roost as far as those kids with baseball talent who get drafted or make it on to prime college teams. For McCutcheon, as he notes, college baseball was really not an option; with even the best baseball scholarships only covering 70% of tuition and costs, and McCutcheon not coming from a family that could even pay 30%, it was pro ball or bust.

A similar story with a different track belongs to Giancarlo Stanton, the man-mountain power hitter of the Florida Marlins. While McCutcheon got lucky coming from a poor part of a small town in Florida, Stanton flew under the radar in another baseball hotbed, southern California, where he was overlooked by the travel teams abounding in that region. (You need to get fairly deep into the story to get to Stanton's high-school experience.) Old-fashioned high-school success, and one scout who saw what nobody else saw, were his ticket to pro ball, and even he allowed that if he weren't well on his way by his third year he might well have turned around and tried for college football.

As it happens, both Stanton and McCutcheon are black. And, to be honest, most of the kids whose parents can afford to pony up the costs of those exclusive travel teams are white. On one level, this looks a bit like yet another example of the unspoken, systematic exclusion of blacks from equal opportunity, in this case opportunity in the chosen sport of Jackie Robinson, of all things.

There are, though, other cases that cut against this particular grain. McCutcheon's teammate, shortstop Jordy Mercer, came out of a rural Oklahoma background, one in which if you played sports, you played all of them; his high school no longer fields a baseball team.

I'm not a parent. I can't claim to understand the motivations of parents who direct their children towards whatever sport as an extracurricular activity. (I was a band geek myself.) One presumes that part of the encouragement has to do with physical activity, with learning to play with others well, teamwork and camaraderie and all that. One also suspects, though I can't know this, that if you play a sport or sports (much like playing an instrument or painting or acting or other such endeavors), if you apply yourself and develop your talent, you can go as far as that talent and desire takes you. Basically, this sounds like what we tell our children about what endeavor they choose, be it high school activities or choice of major in college.

To the degree that sports turns out to be another venue for disappointment in that respect, I guess it simply starts to reflect the larger society in which it is situated. To the degree that a sport like baseball increasingly draws its players from a pool determined even in part by who can afford it as opposed to who is good enough; and to the degree that a sport more generally accessible -- like, say, football -- comes with the caveat that it might well destroy your brain; what, then, are these games teaching the young people that play them?

In this regard I'm extremely curious to see how this proposal plays out.  Sporting Kansas City, one of the more successful franchises in Major League Soccer, is seeking to develop what's called an "academy team" in the far west Kansas town of Garden City, as a part of its ever-expanding academy system.

Unlike other sports franchises, soccer clubs tend to develop extensive youth programs, including affiliated academy teams as well as youth teams more directly connected to the team. (Several of SKC's direct youth teams were big winners in one of the more recent tournaments for the different age brackets.) These teams and affiliated academies are very nakedly all about developing players for the major-league franchise; any other benefits are decidedly secondary. Still, it might lead to a college scholarship here or there, and even if your team eventually doesn't put you on its pro roster you're in a decent spot to catch on elsewhere. (SKC has several such "homegrown" players on its current roster, including Erik Palmer-Brown, who skipped his high-school graduation to play on the US under-20 World Cup team.)

The interesting thing about the Garden City potential academy is its very deliberate targeting of a demographic that would not fit into the profile of privilege suggested above. Garden City, and other nearby towns like Liberal and Dodge City have very large Hispanic populations, attracted in previous decades by opportunities in the meat-packing industry. SKC coach Peter Vermes alludes obliquely to the same kind of privilege tending to dominate soccer in the US in a way that perhaps it did not in his native Hungary, while directly wanting to work against that with the Garden City academy.

Let's be clear here; SKC is looking for players for SKC. Their principal hope is that some streetwise soccer kid from Garden City or Liberal will make SKC better in five or ten years. And yet, if this project comes off, that naked ploy to grab better players might just take some kid places he might never have dreamed of going. I have no idea what kind of life that becomes, or if there's even a sliver of education that is even possible in such a context.

What we ask of sports for our young people, or of our young people for our sports, is deeply due for examination. As a pastor you might be expecting me to complain about traveling teams taking kids away from Sunday morning worship services, but frankly my interests and concerns go a lot deeper than that. It's a huge topic, and one that could be a blog all to itself. But nothing is beyond questioning here, so questions will get asked when the need arises. Hopefully I'm not the only one asking.

Don't take me out to the ballgame

Today we got an answer to an age-old philosophical question: if they play a baseball game and no one is there to see it, does it make a sound?
Answer: yes, but only if it's televised (or on radio, I suppose).
Because of the civil disturbances in Baltimore, the Orioles had the first two games of their series with the Chicago White Sox postponed. Presumably because of a desire not to lose too many games (that would likely require making up, considering that the Orioles and White Sox are both likely playoff contenders), today's game was moved up to 2:00 p.m. and played in a stadium with no spectators. This weekend's series against Tampa Bay, scheduled for Camden Yards (still one of the best stadiums in baseball), is being moved to Tropicana Field (not as bad as people make it out to be, but still one of the worst), although Baltimore will still function as the "home" team, batting last. (This I don't understand; these two teams are division rivals and had at least four more series to come; it seems like it should have been possible to swap out a future series at St. Pete rather than have the Orioles totally lose the home dates. But I'm no expert.)
It is not unprecedented for sports to be disrupted by civil unrest (the term used for events in Baltimore by Orioles announcer Gary Thorne, who did not use the term "riot"; his broadcast partner Jim Palmer floundered a bit, referring to "a riot or whatever"). Watts, the Rodney King unrest, the MLK assassination and other examples of civil unrest in the past have caused serious disruptions in baseball schedules. Baseball seems the most subject to these disruptions, possibly because more of these events seem to happen in the hot-weather months of baseball season, and maybe more because the everyday schedule of baseball is more susceptible to disruption (unless the unrest happens the morning of a football game, such a once-a-week event may be less likely to be affected and have more opportunity for the situation to be calmed by game day, for example). The NBA has known some disruptions in the past, however.
As for today's game, though there were no spectators admitted, the game was in fact televised. (I didn't watch it live, but I -- as an MLB.TV subscriber -- am able to watch it after the fact.) It was by all evidences a strange experience. The broadcasters were doing their usual professional work, but on occasion were clearly distracted by the circumstances. A Chris Davis home run in the first inning was met not by the cheers of a home crowd, but by the surprisingly noisy clattering of the home run ball in the right field seats. A clutch of spectators gathered to follow the game at one of the stadium's (closed and locked) gates, occasionally being shown on camera; exactly how much of the game they could actually see is questionable.
Nobody's idea of an ideal situation, to be sure.
But then, what would have been the better answer?
Adam Jones, the Orioles' center fielder and acknowledged "face of the franchise," spoke to the media before the game. Unlike a lot of athletes (or fans, for that matter) Jones seemed to get that a game in such a situation has only limited "healing" powers. "This game needs to be played," Jones said, "but [Baltimore] needs to heal first." Jones's background, growing up in a troubled part of San Diego, seems to have influenced his view of the events around him, even as he performed the publicly-mandated straddle of condemning the violence while understanding the conditions that provoked it; Jones knows those conditions better than most.
This is a place where baseball (believe it or not, given my sporting predilections) actually falls well short of its professional competitors. Football, for all its depredations (and I have chronicled them obsessively here), still has a reach among poor youth (an opportunity to get out of the ghetto/sticks/sugar cane fields and into college if nothing else). Basketball has an extremely prolific tradition of providing a way out for inner-city youth, even if that reputation may slightly exceed the reality. Baseball, on the other hand, has on the youth level increasingly become the province of pricey travel teams and programs that are a stretch for middle-class kids to afford, much less the poor of either urban or rural residence. Jones is an exception, increasingly, at least among US-born players (those who hail from Caribbean or South American countries are a quite different case).
Back to the game at hand; was it possible to play a game today (with the curfew in place, a game tonight was out of the question) and trust that it could be carried off safely with crowd in place?
I don't know. I have my doubts. The dynamics of a situation boiling with mistrust simply would not have given me any confidence about a game going forward without incident.
On the other hand, it's not hard to find a TV carrying the game. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were folks in the city starving for exactly that kind of distraction or relief for a few hours amidst the cleanup.
I have no answers. Nothing is ideal, nothing is going to turn out the way anybody would want.
For what it's worth, the Orioles won 8-2.

(p.s. one bit of humor; at one point the announcers decided to announce the very silent game in the manner of golf announcers, with the appropriate "golf whisper" voice.)

Finding (something like) joy in highly imperfect teams

By all means this blog should be a daily affair.

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

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

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

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

All of those should be addressed.

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

Fortunately, other sports have come through for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Side note: RFK Stadium has seen better days

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

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

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

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

Mandela, fan hope, and desperate churches

Upon the death of Nelson Mandela earlier this week it was almost impossible to get a word in edgewise in social media, amidst the tweets and Facebook statuses of quotation or tribute.  This is all well and good and appropriate.

My mind, not surprisingly, went to one of the ways in which Mandela demonstrated an unusually cagey and creative understanding of how to bring people together.  There are two different movies -- a documentary, The 16th Man, and a more Hollywood effort, Invictus (with Morgan Freeman as Mandela, also starring Matt Damon), which recount the story of how Mandela, relatively new leader of a still-fractious and uneven South Africa post-apartheid, made a concerted and emphatic display of public support for South Africa's white rugby team as a means of bridging the gap between himself and white South Africans, who ranged from fearful to suspicious to angry, and of nudging black South Africans away from their own suspicions.  One can quibble about the long-term effectiveness of the maneuver, but in the moment it was an inspired and savvy move.

To me it seems that Mandela (who was apparently a boxer in his younger days) grasped something about the effect of sports and sports fandom that has, at times, the power to be good.  By no means does it always work out that way, but there are times that a sporting event has (at least in the short term) transformative and unifying powers that the church only wishes it could experience.

Whatever else may be true about a sporting event, it's unpredictable.  You might think that just because the Yankees are perennial powers and, say, the Royals are not, the Yankees should always beat the Royals; still, on any given day, the Royals might just beat the Yankees.  This glimmer of hope, no matter how unlikely the upset or how little it might matter in the grand scheme of life (or even in the grand scheme of a sporting season), makes a game an opportunity for a particular kind of bonding in hopes of that unexpected outcome, that small shining moment.

That bonding can cut across lines that would prove uncrossable outside the stadium (including, quite often, in the church).  The flaming lib and the Tea Partier unite over that unbelievable double play or no-look pass and thunderous dunk, without worrying about political affiliations.  It's temporary, to be sure, but it's not any less striking for that.  If it happens enough times, maybe it turns out to be less temporary after all.

No, it doesn't always turn out well.  Fans can turn ugly, seemingly at the drop of a hat.  Maybe the ultimate manifestation of this (aside from online flaming done under the cowardly cover of anonymity) is the post-championship riot.  Bizarrely, this is often the work of the winning team's fans.  I don't understand where this comes from; is it a consequence of forgetting that you didn't do a damn thing to help your team win?  Or something like that cowardice of anonymity, giving the weak-minded permission to behave like an ass because they're part of a crowd?

Still, I have to acknowledge that I've felt that strange passion, that sweep of hopefulness and despair and then unexpected hope again, even if it was a meaningless late-season game for a last-place team.  The unexpected connection has power, no matter how small it may be.  It has that momentary effect of exaltation, of something like joy; and if it urges the fan on towards the experience of real joy, so much the better.  Even today, as the only person in the whole sports bar watching and trying to will Sporting Kansas City to the MLS Cup win (and they did win), I could see the sellout crowd at Sporting Park (some of whom would probably terrify me in real life) and take on some form of shared passion.

Mandela picked up on something, from who knows where, and found a way to break down a little bit of mistrust in a deeply divided and mistrustful nation.  Of course, it helps that the rugby team did cooperate by winning the championship.  One has to suspect, though, that Mandela might have felt he didn't have a whole lot else to work with at the time, and made a play with what he had available.

What, then, is the church's excuse?

Too often, it seems, the church teeters towards resembling the more hopeless or even destructive effects associated with fandom.  We get tribal, sometimes destructively so.  We look at declining attendance numbers and disappearing societal status and plunge ourselves (active verb) into despair.  Despite being the faith tradition that sings "my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus's blood and righteousness," we tend to act as if our hope is built on something less, something far, far less.

This leads, circling back around to sports, to some odd intersections between faith groups and games.  One Christian tradition will, in a bizarre way, somehow cling to the hope that because our quarterback is better, our church style must be better.  Or we transfer our religion-like passions onto the playing field (remember where this blog gets its title: "football isn't a religion, it's way more important than that").  Feats of physical strength take the place of spiritual humility and wisdom (does anybody else remember the "Power Team"?).  More effort is put into displays of religious zeal than in practice of that zeal.  Writing as the second week of Advent approaches, I can't help but see some parallel in the impatience of many churches or Christians with the waiting and anticipation implicit in that liturgical season and the horribly impatient stance of so many fans for their team (Cubs fans excluded, I guess).  Win. Now. Or Else.

I have to suspect that Mandela was not so naive as to think a rugby championship was going to "heal" South Africa, that there was much hard and painful work left to do (and still is even at his passing).  The church isn't going to be reformed (in the manner of Calvin's reformata et semper reformanda) by quick fixes or feats of strength, any more than the Seattle Mariners are going to win the World Series just because they signed away the Yankees' second baseman.  The work is hard, but we have a hope that is so much more than any earthly hope.  If a mere rugby team could work for Nelson Mandela, why in the world are we in the church so poor at acting like we have an even greater hope?