The Sportsball God
Unlike other members of my family, I grew up loving sports. My obsession began with baseball—its magical symmetry, its mathematical rhythms, its easy cadence when broadcast over radio. I ate it up, much to my parents’ befuddlement.
When baseball ended in the fall, I turned to football and basketball to pass the time. By happy coincidence, my late adolescence and college years coincided with a golden age for the teams at the only major university in my home state of Arkansas. My friends and I would go to games, chant “Woo-pig! Sooie!” with the crowd, and more often than not, come away with a Razorback victory. Once the NCAA tournament rolled around in March, we skipped class to watch the Hogs. When they played in prime time, we held watch parties. Basketball was a thing around which we gathered, one of the many strands woven through our friendships.
I miss those days. But I can never go back to them.
On the one hand, I see why college athletics has such a draw for people. Alums remember their youthful glory, the more exciting and less complicated lives they lived once upon a time. For others—particularly in rural states—the college mascot is a marker of cultural identity. Around here, by God, we root for the Hogs. Or the Jacks. Or the Tide.
So it goes.
But life so far has had a way of moving me on from many simple enjoyments, including the NCAA men’s tournament. A stint at a church in Little Rock put me in constant contact with people who hung their emotional well-being on the performance of 20-year-old college students. Seven years at a mid-major university across the state showed me how much tax money went into “feeding the pig” over in Fayetteville, often at the expense of other institutions.
Rooting for a college team, it turns out, is not so simple after all. There’s a moral component to it, one that doesn’t always settle well.
I thought moving to a small NAIA school would be better, given that the stakes are so much lower. We don’t have millions of dollars in corporate sponsorships rolling in. None of our athletes will ever go pro. Since we know and live among the members of every team in close quarters, we are not just cheering for a jersey. We are encouraging friends.
That, I think, is how it should be.
The problem is that, even in a place like Mitchell, sports now have such an outsized role in American life that they are not a thing among other things, but the One Thing above all. Every youth pastor I talk to laments the frantic schedules their kids keep, the practices and travel and off-season leagues that leave no time for retreat or reflection or even the slow growth of deep friendships. At the university where I work, athletes are told that, whatever their other interests may be, the team comes before everything. Failure to abide by that rule can result in verbal reprimands, lost playing time, and even corporal punishment disguised as “extra conditioning.”
My coaching friends say I’ve got it wrong. Athletics, they argue, teaches commitment and discipline and leadership. It shows kids how to overcome adversity and work together toward a common goal. I’m with them, in theory. But in the reality in which I live, I don’t see it. I have worked with some coaches who allow students to develop through other areas of interest. More often, however, I have found athletics to be inflexible in terms of other commitments. Accountability and other life lessons are great—but only so long as the sport takes priority over all other things.
No wonder. Today’s students have grown up in an environment that pins their worth to sports. Athletic competition is a god in American culture, one with ultimate power and authority over the lives of its adherents. This god suffers no rivals. You don’t negotiate. You simply obey.
In his last year of little league baseball, one of my sons was benched for missing practices to attend church camp. When I called the coach to ask what was up, he said, “I just don’t like the kid, okay? He wasn’t with us. He’s not a good teammate.”
He was 12.
As often happens, rejection turned out to be a gift. Zachary threw himself into band and became an all-state trumpet player. He plays with one of the best high school jazz ensembles in the Midwest. His musical mentors at DWU and at Mitchell High treat his education as an end unto itself, not simply a pathway to eligibility. They push him hard, but they encourage him to be a more well-rounded human, one with a variety of interests, friends, and connections.
To them, he matters for more than what he can produce. Every kid deserves as much.
I no longer watch March Madness, nor do I follow any other college or high school sport. I feel the loss of comradery, the lack of the tribe I used to belong to. I wish I could have part of it back, that I could unknow some of what I have learned.
More than that, however, I wish that I could un-deify sports. As a contextualized activity, they could do a lot of good. As a god, however, they have done what all idols eventually do. They have become a tyrant that, like it or not, has turned the tables.
This god doesn’t serve us. We serve it. We even cheer as our children are sacrificed upon its altar.
So I say, death to the sports ball god! We can and should do so much better.
