It hit me a couple of weeks ago, when I was in Bloomington, Ill., for a speaking gig. In fact, it was my first speaking gig. I was a nervous wreck—folding my dinner napkin until it was a shredded mess, going to the men’s room repeatedly, that sort of thing.
There was a young father at my table, a guy with a couple of school-aged kids. This guy was a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan. He had on a Cards polo ($29.99), a wristwatch ($14.99), and a fitted ball cap ($21.99)—an officially licensed father. He was telling me about watching baseball with his son.
“Whenever anyone hits a home run anymore,” he said, “my son will immediately proclaim ‘Dad, I bet that guy’s on steroids.’” We had a nice chuckle at that around the table; and then the conversation spun, as it inevitably does, into a discussion of who is or isn’t on steroids.
That’s when it struck me. As sports fans in this country, we no longer debate the best running back in NFL history (Walter Payton, for the record) or who will win the Super Bowl. Rather, we set the over/under on what week Terrell Owens will flake out and ruin the Cowboys (week 5, for my money). We are raising a nation of cynics—little snark merchants fed by a steady diet of wit, wisdom, and sarcasm.
I thought about my own bio—nicely printed on green paper and positioned at every place-setting that night—that included the terribly impressive fact that I wrote for ESPN.com Page 2 (which may well have invented the marriage of sports and cynicism). The seat of mockers is warm and inviting in our culture; and, while funny, I regret many of the things I’ve published on Page 2.
Needless to say, these thoughts didn’t make me feel any better.
Unchecked Ego
I’ll never forget walking into my first big-league clubhouse to cover a Major League game. I hadn’t gone the usual journalism-school-newspaper route, so I was unaccustomed to the unwritten code of the big-league locker room. I was there to interview one player, who was seated at his locker in a largely empty but palatial room. There must have been 100 plush chairs arranged around the room. I pulled up a chair and got my interview but on the way out was confronted by a PR assistant with a brand new suit and lots of hair gel.
“You know you’re not allowed to sit down anywhere in the clubhouse,” said Hair Gel. “Some of the other writers are talking.”
It was my first brush with the unchecked ego inherent in pro sports: a culture that, of course, trickles down to the youngest among us.
On another occasion I was in a casino in Mt. Pleasant, Mich., to interview a Christian fighter named Chris Byrd for ESPN.com. Together, after his fight, we watched the public dismantling of Mike Tyson at the hands of Lennox Lewis. Tyson didn’t just get beat. He got beat down.
I had heard Tyson speak before about his struggles, about Jesus, and how Jesus would approach Tyson if He were on Earth today. Tyson was summarily written off as crazy for those comments and others. But driving home that night I felt profoundly sad for him—and ashamed of the fact that although I had written and talked extensively about the man, I had never prayed for him.
In a way I think Mike Tyson may be closer to salvation than a lot of the million-dollar-smile pro athletes we routinely hold up as pillars of the faith. As well as anybody I’ve ever met, Tyson realizes his own sinfulness, brokenness, and need for redemption. Tyson, in some small way, gets it. “It” being that boxing isn’t the sum total of who he is as a human being. “It” also being the fact that at 39, after a long, 20-year career, his first professional life is over.
So what do we do with this? What do we do with the nonstop stories of (insert athlete name here) missing classes, arrested with a gun, stripped of his title for juicing, caught with a hotel room full of hookers, etc., etc.?
’m pretty sure the answer isn’t to writefawning articles about how if we say our prayers and eat our vitamins we can end up as “blessed” 20-something athletic millionaires with trophy wives. Needless to say this realization has made my work as a “Christian sportswriter” tough at times.
But the answer isn’t to stick our heads into the sand or run, either. The Lord gave us sports (see Jacob wrestling with the Holy Spirit in Genesis, Paul’s references to “the race”) for our enjoyment and edification. Sports are fun. Sports are an opportunity (caution: evangelical jargon coming) to “be in community” with men and women in intense situations. Sports, also, are opportunities to practice being bold and courageous.
Winners and Losers
The talk that night went better than I thought it would. In addition to some nice sports stories and a little bit of shameless name-dropping, I think I was able to talk honestly about the reasons I love sports. Reasons like sports being the only segment of society I’ve experienced where racial harmony actually exists. Reasons like the feeling of walking out of a locker room with sore muscles, knowing you’ve just done something that most people can’t or won’t. Reasons like the feeling of growing up and buying a pair of Big Ten football tickets to share with your dad.
Emergent types probably love sports because of the “story,” “the journey,” or “the meta-narrative.” I love them because they are concrete—with a winner and a loser—in a postmodern society where everything is negotiable. Are we going to save the world by sending tall 20-year-olds on “evangelistic” basketball trips to Europe, or by telling our kids which athletes the church says it’s OK to root for? Of course not. We still need to make an impact the old-fashioned way— by being salt and light in our churches, our offices, and on our teams; by knowing the Scriptures and standing up for them; by having the courage to be hated by a world the Bible says won’t understand us.
But it helps to realize that we might be one bad decision away from being like the athlete shown on “SportsCenter” getting stuffed into the back of a police cruiser, the kid who will be a punchline in somebody’s column the next morning. But the funny thing is, I know that guy. I played with him, and I’ve interviewed him. I’ve been him, too, at least in private. And you know what? He’s not a bad guy. Not a bad guy at all.
