Book Commentary -- Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America

Diane Roberts, Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. New York: Harper-Collins, 2015.

More book commentary, while I'm completely blocked on an Ash Wednesday message...for tomorrow.

Have you ever had the experience of hearing a speaker with whose argument you agree, and whose basic points you readily acknowledge as valid and factual, and yet all you can think as they continue to speak is "oh, good LORD, get ON with it already!!"? That's roughly the experience of reading Diane Roberts's Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.

Roberts is a darling of the NPR crowd and contributor to the likes of Oxford American (vouching for her Southernness cred with a particular crowd) and the Guardian (international credibility). She's a faculty member at FSU (where she also studied, along with a degree from Oxford), after some years at the University of Alabama. And she's a college football addict, the type who tosses around phrases like "these are my people" when talking about college football and its fans. This after conducting a thorough and thoroughly snarky dissection of everything those fans love and represent.

The book is, cleverly, divided into four quarters with a pregame, halftime, and postgame. Each quarter has five chapters organized around a general theme, with the exception of the third quarter, on gender and college football, which inexplicably has only two. The other three quarters touch on the tribal hatreds of college football, religion (read: Christianity) and college football, and race and "Southernness", respectively, although the last chapter of the fourth quarter diverges somewhat into the saga of Bobby Bowden's fall at FSU. (The "halftime" chapter mostly focuses on the hazing/murder of the drum major of Florida A & M University's Marching 100 in 2011, with a few mentions of other band misbehaviors.)

Clearly all of these subjects provide ample fodder for one who wants to take college football apart, and Roberts pulls out all the stops in doing so. She doesn't spare her beloved FSU by any means (the Jameis Winston debacle gets a major airing-out) but plenty of schools get skewered.

For those who know Roberts's NPR commentary or other writing projects, the voice will be familiar. It may come off a bit more strident than in some cases. Possibly this comes, one might suspect, with taking a hatchet to a phenomenon to which one has already declared one's loyalty and unwillingness to give up. The whole tone of going on and on and on gets more than a little annoying.

There are parts of the book that are actually indispensible. It is particularly touching and harrowing when Roberts returns to her experiences tutoring athletes at FSU lo, those many years ago, young boy-men given to arrogance on the field, not always able to live up to that bravado when confronted with things like classes that are beyond their capacity. When the humans who are both at the center of and decidedly at the bottom of the pecking order in college football come into focus, the book is actually compelling.

Of course, there is one issue that Roberts somehow manages to dance around for most of the book's longer-than-it-looks length, one which this blog doesn't allow you to overlook, of course -- the issue which is largely unavoidable in football these days. And yet largely, it is avoided here, or made mostly an object of snark.

It seems that Roberts mostly regards the "concussion crisis" as (a) the ultimate bogeyman that will finally undo the NCAA (possibly, I guess), or (b) the ultimate bogeyman that will take away her beloved college football. Of course Roberts would never be so gauche as to say that directly, but that's about the only thing one can draw from her few comments on the subject. You would think that an academic thinker like Roberts might do more with the brain-trauma issue -- connect it to the racial issue, as more affluent (and frequently more white) players might have the luxury to pull a Chris Borland, while poorer (and frequently blacker) athletes will see themselves with fewer options. But really, Roberts just doesn't seem up to the task of confronting that issue squarely.

But I suppose when one of the key phrases of her "pregame" is "I accept and embrace my Inner Barbarian," and she waxes poetic about being unable to quit the game the way one can't quit a bad boyfriend, that was probably too much to hope for.

[An aside: stepping back from Roberts's tome, this seems like a place to point out a basic ethical principle at play here. For her being a college football addict is an identity, one bred into her over pretty much her whole life. For any Christian, though, this is an excuse, not a reason. From the point of view of this blog (seeking to understand and act on football and its damage to children of God from a Christian-ethical viewpoint), we have to do better than retreating to talk of identity. After all, people who are actually following Christ, or even trying to do so, have a higher identity, do we not? And when that identity (for which the word "Christian" used to be useful before becoming overly politicized) comes into conflict with any of our other human identities, or when those human identities demand of us compromises that cannot be squared with our allegiance to Christ, then which allegiance is supposed to win?]

Don't hate the player...hate the system

Aaron Rodgers's season ended much earlier than he hoped.  After a return from injury for the Green Bay Packers' final regular-season game -- a win that got the Packers a playoff spot -- he was unable to  pull off the first-round win against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL's latest version of the Ice Bowl.

I'm certainly in no position to know what Aaron Rodgers does with his time in those first days after the season's over.  Rest, I'd guess.  But at least on occasion, it seems he uses such fame as he has for good things.

Rodgers has made appearances for an organization called Raise Hope for Congo, an organization that points to the desperate situation in that country in which what one might call "conflict minerals" are found (think "blood diamonds," but with items like tungsten, tin, tantalum -- materials for the manufacture of electronic devices, like your cell phone or maybe even the MacBook on which I'm typing out this blog industry).  Warlords, financing their war machines with profits from those minerals, using rape as a weapon of war; it's all there.  And Rodgers, who turned out to have a teammate from that troubled country, put his Cal education to use and studied up on the conflict, and now seeks to use that learning, and the fame that comes with being a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, to motivate college kids to do, well, something about it.

Good.

You didn't think the whole NFL was evil, did you?  (And before you ask, no, I didn't believe the whole NFL was evil, smarty pants.)

Rodgers is hardly the only pro athlete to use fame and/or fortune for good.  Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, went so far as to establish an orphanage in Zambia with his wife, and to write, presumably with some help, a book about it (one which also gives expression to his faith).  For his charitable work Kershaw won baseball's Roberto Clemente Award, named in honor of the Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder and humanitarian who lost his life in a plane crash trying to deliver relief supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake in late 1972.  The latter simply goes to the point that athletes doing good isn't a new thing.  Your favorite (or least favorite) player might just be doing that kind of good right now without your even knowing it.  

So there is all this good being done by people whom we pay money to watch play games.  Why, then, does someone like me feel compelled to tilt at the windmill of how sports cuts against the grain of serious faith all too often?  (As usual, I do feel compelled to point out when others with more audience than I seem to grasp this; I only wonder if #9 is too low.)  

For one, there are certainly bad apples in the games we watch -- the Richie Incognitos of the world -- and they often grab our attention.  But many of the most difficult problems that sports cause to the person of faith, those things that give pause no matter who much we don't want to watch, are not that easily attributable to the doings of any one individual or group of individuals.

C.S. Lewis, in one of his prefaces to The Screwtape Letters, offered the following take on how that book's concept of Hell took shape:

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Something probably akin to what Hanna Arendt called "the banality of evil," it points to the degree in which the evils of much of the twentieth century -- or those we see -- have their origins in hidden, 'clean' places like shabby offices or gleaming corporate towers.

I would also add that these sources may not even intend evil in the world.  

We see phrases such as "systemic evil" or "systems of oppression" used for this phenomenon in more contemporary times.  I would also submit that many of the most oppressive or degrading aspects of sports these days are also systemic.

Football locker rooms are intense places; keeping dozens of high-charged personalities in any sort of cohesive order is probably a task too tall for any one coach, maybe even for a whose staff, so the coach counts on team "leaders" to keep watch over the younger players.  So, when a bad apple manages to get himself counted among those "leaders," who's going to keep an eye on him?  

Or let's pick on baseball.  Some of the most outstanding talent in the game hails from one or another corner of the Caribbean, especially in the Dominican Republic.  With sometimes-inconsistent control of such things as birth certificates or other medical records, it becomes easy for a player, under the guidance/exploitation of a buscone, to present a false name and fake documents to MLB scouts (the younger the arm, the more valuable the prospect) in order to enhance his prospects for getting signed to a rich contract.  Hence Roberto Hernandez becomes Fausto Carmona; Juan Carlos Oviedo turns into Leo Nunez; and more.  That's if you're good enough to have a chance, and if you can withstand the culture shock of relocating from the DR to some small minor-league town that's colder than you can imagine.  If not, you just go back to your life, probably a poor one.

These are hardly the only examples.  Systems that drive you to lie about your condition when you've been found to have a concussion, so you can get back into the game -- even knowing what the world now knows about concussions; the college basketball phenomenon of the one-and-done player, loosely connected at most to any kind of academic endeavor; the corruption that has been known to seep into bidding for Olympic games or World Cups; name your favorite example.  

Systems seem to thrive on depersonalization; it's easier to ignore the mounting evidence of the damage football can (repeat: can) do to the human brain and send out a damaged player to resume play when he's a jersey number or position abbreviation instead of a person; when the kid in the DR is a sixteen-year-old with a 90-mph fastball instead of a person with a name; when people become simply cogs in a machine, before they are people.  

And therein lies the rub.  Where do we, the ticket-buyers, fit into the system?  

Let that one roll around in your head for a while.

Incognito no more: bullying in the NFL and elsewhere

Seriously, NFL, you shouldn't have.

Not even a week ago I struck out on this foolish errand of blogging about sports stories and where Christian faith intersects with them (or, as the subtitle above suggests, doesn't).  Somehow the NFL saw fit to christen my efforts with stories that could probably give me a year's worth of fodder if I were so inclined.  Slow down, NFL, somewhere along the way this blog needs to get around to baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer, the Olympics, collegiate athletics, youth travel teams, etc.  Quit hogging the oxygen.

Rest assured that the ongoing story of football's struggle with the increasing awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) will get into this blog.  For now, this Rick Reilly column will provide an intermediate reflection.  I've been bothered by this for a while now, as this post from my original blog will hopefully suffice to demonstrate.  The recently released book League of Denial is loaded in my Nook reader and I'm working my way through it when my academic reading allows (which, admittedly, isn't often), and I did watch the Frontline documentary.  The news of apparent diagnoses of living former players such as Tony Dorsett will get attention, and sometime soon, hopefully.

But it's impossible to look away, like a gruesome road accident, from the mess involving the Miami Dolphins this week.  The improbably named Richie Incognito is temporarily (one presumes) suspended from the team for the apparent bullying of a teammate and offensive line-mate, Jonathan Martin.  If the transcripts of the phone calls from Incognito to Martin, the tweets and other contacts, are true, we know at least that Incognito is not at all above using racial epithets to inflict pain, that he doesn't know when to quit, that he's a monstrous freeloader, and that he has some of the most disgusting fantasies about how to treat another human being ever put to electronic preservation.  Martin, on the other hand, has come off pasted with adjectives ranging from "intellectual" to "soft" to "weak" or worse, depending on which former coaches or teammates you hear.  We've been indulged with stereotypes about football players from Stanford (Martin) as too "thoughtful" for the apparent cesspool of ignorance that is the NFL, as compared to the Nebraska (Incognito) types (thereby proving that cheap and dishonest stereotypes can be fabricated for pretty much any differentiation between human beings you can imagine).  We've had the all-important pronouncement (from the Dolphins' general manager no less) that Martin should have slugged Incognito, as well as all manner of other nonsensical blather from other Dolphins personnel with the requisite circling of the wagons around the besieged Incognito.  We've had a funny takedown in true Man Up fashion of the whole Man Up culture perceived as the root of dysfunction, and the requisite invocation, in so many words, of the hoary and threadbare cliche that You Will Never Understand Because You Never Played The Game, from someone I'm not sure ever played the game (as if "understanding" would in any way render Incognito's words and actions as morally pure or ethically justifiable).  I'm not quite sure whether this constitutes genuine irony or something else, but the only place on sports media behemoth ESPN's web empire that has genuinely managed to engage in questions about what this sorry debacle says about manhood and sports comes from espnW, typically that niche of the site dedicated to women's sports.

By now you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering when the whole faith issue gets blended in.  Or, if you know your British or American church history, perhaps you've already put it together.  Either way, the sad truth is that the church in particular has been, frankly, part of encouraging this particular sports culture for a while now, at least a century and a half.

The Apostle Paul (or deutero-Paul if you're into that sort of thing) was occasionally prone to drop in athletic metaphors in exhorting readers or hearers to live into their calling in Christ -- "press on toward the mark" in Philippians 3:14, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race" in 2 Timothy 4:7, and others.  (There is also the injunction to "glorify God in your body" in 1 Corinthians 6:20; I have to wonder if 300-lb. offensive linemen were really what Paul had in mind.)  From that slim start the church has made a veritable if sporadic cottage industry of equating physical fitness with spiritual piety. For our purposes it is probably sufficient to point to the Victorian-era vogue for "muscular Christianity" (make of it what you will, to the degree you trust Wikipedia) as a genesis for the modern entanglement of the church with sport as a means to manliness.  If some of its earlier advocates saw "muscular Christianity" as a means to protect the weak, its later manifestations (particularly in the US) didn't necessarily carry over that concern; rather, it became something of an opportunity for pride (as most any kind of spiritual striving can do), a near self-parody in the hands of a group such as the PowerTeam (anybody else out there remember them?), and the launching pad for such evangelical celebrity athletes as Tim Tebow or Jeremy Lin.  It lives on to some degree in modern organizations like Athletes in Action or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, in benign or positive ways as far as I can see.  To some degree, indirectly it becomes a cudgel in the hands of neo-Calvinists such as John Piper or Mark Driscoll.

Where, then, will the church's witness come from when bullying -- an act increasingly found unacceptable in society more broadly -- rears its vicious head in the most popular of American sports?  Are we waiting for the currently team-less Tebow to speak ex cathedra?  When bullying (under the supposedly more harmless guise of "hazing") ends up with children taking guns to school, drunken frat boys plunging from balconies, or marching band members (!!!) beating their drum major to death, can an evident bully like Incognito (a man with some serious self-control issues in his past on the field) simply wait for this to "pass" and get off the hook without provoking some manner of self-examination among the faithful who also get their entertainment from the game?  Or do we engage in some sort of tortured attempt to teach our kids that bullying is wrong, but we're still going to go drop bucketloads of money to go watch the bullies play?

One more ESPN columnist, in one of those fanciful "stories from the future" columns writers resort to occasionally, speculates that the events of the most recent week in the NFL -- the Incognito/Martin scandal, plus the Dorsett story, an avalanche of injuries and the scary health issues faced by a pair of coaches -- will mark the beginning of the end of the NFL if not the game of football.  I think Mr. Fleming overestimates the conscience of the American football fan.  Am I wrong?

I don't think so.