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When your team - pick a sport, any sport – has dropped out of contention for recognition, you tend to wax philosophical about the entire issue of collegiate athletics. So I thought I would take the opportunity to spend a quiet evening with Dr. Edward Ray from Oregon State University. Dr. Ray is President of Oregon State. He came there after a stint as Provost at Ohio State University. I assume that one of the attractions at Oregon was the ability to keep the monogrammed dinnerware – but I digress. I wanted to talk with him in his “other” role: Chairman of the Executive Committee of the NCAA.Dr. Ray, Ed, may I speak frankly?
I don’t understand this creeping divinity in the locker room. I was watching a football game last weekend and noticed some interesting body painting. I don’t mean the multi-colored nouveau commedia dell’arte we see on the fans in the stands. Rather, I chanced to glance up during a close-up of one of the players. Within the black patches under his eyes was stenciled 5:32 or 7:28 or something. I doubt it was a bit of code from the playbook or the time when he was to enter the game. I am assuming it was a "chapter:verse" biblical reference. I must further assume that the coaches either approved or allowed it.
The eye inscription apparently takes its place alongside the finger-pointing to the sky and clusters of players on bent knees and heads bowed before or after a game. All these various rituals seem to constitute an obvious religious rally in support of one team or another, or perhaps a specific play or commercial sponsor. I don’t really know, but it bothers me.
I understand, Ed, that a number of NCAA schools are private institutions, perhaps even with a religious affiliation or heritage. Mine isn’t, despite the rumors that a former coach smuggled bibles into the Eastern block and required prayers before games. On paper we are still a state school and separate from any church mandates. So I don’t understand all the religious hoopla. Or Footballa? Or swimmingla?
I don’t have a problem with any student-athlete’s personal religious beliefs. Believe me, it would require divine intervention for me to survive five minutes as a participant in any organized collegiate contest. I guess what bothers me is the implication that God, one, takes sides; and two, cares.
Mark Twain did a far better job addressing the “God takes side” notion than I ever could. He gives voice to the unspoken side of the prayers for victory by creating a scenario where a pastor has just led his flock in a prayer asking God to lead the young soldiers in the congregation to victory. A stranger appears to voice the mandatory, but usually unspoken, corollary:
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief . . . Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet. . ."Mark goes on and on in that vein, Ed. He was, after all, dying and had lost much of his good humor. But you get the idea. When you ask for God to weigh in on your side, you are also requesting some divine smiting of the foe. Sadly, the practice remains common in warfare – but in football? “Lord, let their awesome quarterback go down . . . nothing career-ending, Lord, just a little torn ligament – maybe a slight concussion.”
The notion that God would smite Duke or Carolina come basketball season is a seductive theology from my position here on poor side of Tobacco Road. Still, the whole idea of God on the hardwood seems to either trivialize the deity or deify the sport. Both are unseemly. Both are poor lessons to parade before student-athletes and their fans. Maybe you could bring this up, Ed, with the rest of the committee? After the benediction? Thanks, I appreciate it. God bless, and y’all come back, y’hear?
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