Good Things Happen...?

I love basketball.  I just can't help it - those fifteen years of playing around the clock, around the year got down deep in my bones.  Today I recall fondly my multiple stages of sports fanaticism - reading Sports Illustrated cover to cover; shooting baskets for hours in the hot, stuffy hayloft; brooding over losses and dreaming about wins; beginning friendships that still exist today. 

Yet as some of you know, I've had my share of wrestling with the game, or more, wrestling with what the game is about.  Beginning about my junior year in college, or actually the second semester of my sophomore year, right when I was getting into Religious Studies, things started to look different.  Maybe it was that I'd reached a new level of brain development or, after twelve years, I was getting burned out.  More likely, I was waking up to a new world that went far beyond winning and losing and rendered such basketball-like paradigms quite troubling. 

Oh, there are the usual responses to my objections.  It's a game; it's supposed to be fun.  It teaches values like hard work and teamwork.  Sports bring communities together.  It helps cheer people and/or society up, providing relief and enjoyment in a serious and/or boring and/or stressful world.  Or for the more theological, we live in a fallen world and therefore must participate in institutions that are broken, even as we recognize their brokenness.  Yes, I've thought of and even tried to believe most of them.

Thus, the struggle rages inside of me.  Basketball has shaped my very being, but so has faith and critical engagement with the systems we participate in every day.  This year, I gave in to the young and innocent, sports-loving me.  I have watched basketball more in the last two and a half weeks than my last two years combined.  It's been lovely, really lovely, almost a return to self. 

Underneath, though, the skeptic reigns, and these darn coaches and players don't help much.  In a t.v. interview after their victory over Kentucky for a trip to the Final Four, Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale said this, "It's like (one of my players) said the other day: Good things happen to good people."  Really?

This is asinine in light of homelessness, poverty, racism, heterosexism...  Read a little Cornell West, Wendell Berry, or bell hooks, why don't ya, and then get back to me.  And yet it's one of the myths that props up our cultural fascination with competitive athletics.  Does it really take a good person to win a championship?  Really?

Sports would be better off if words like "deserving" were eliminated from athletic discourse.  

I wrote a paper last year about basketball.  It was for a theological ethics class, and I still consider it one of my last and greatest masterpieces.  I wrote how language affects our realities, how the words we use influence what we see and think.  For example from a theological perspective, to use words like battle and fight to describe an athletic contest frames competition into a harsh, oppositional worldview.  Is that really what we want from our sports?  Do we really want to be celebrating at the expense of another team or community?  One of my best friends from college recalled this notion after a particularly upsetting loss by saying, "Well, at least the other team is happy."  Think about that, next time you're upset when your team loses a game.  

I believe strongly that our sports could use a little more empathy.  That, and new metaphors to help us see new possibilities and new ways of being together on the basketball court.  What if, instead of battling, we were dancing?  Think about it: to win, you need someone else, a partner.  To score on a defense, you need that defense.  To be able to celebrate a victory, you, by definition, need the team that lost.  In basketball, we are ever indebted to those on the other team.  It's kind of like Paul's notion of indebted love, which is what I argued in my paper.  Think about that, next time you win a championship.