One of my former sports coaches was in the habit of giving our team crazy motivational speeches. On one such occasion he told us a story about how he had prepared his children for the upcoming Easter egg hunt. He hid some Easter eggs around the house and made his kids look for them. While they were hunting for the eggs he taught them to use the elbow to beat out other kids who were reaching for the same Easter egg. His goal was to teach them how to win the Easter egg “competition”. I don’t remember the point of his motivational speech, but I remember being shocked.
This competitive crazy ethic that the coach was teaching his kids is what Shirl James Hoffman in his book Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports describe as the dark side of sports that is so pervasive in American culture (and German as well). One of the most shocking points is how uncritically everyone including Evangelical Christians accepts sports “dark side” practices.
What exactly is sports “dark side”? Here are some examples from my own life. Frist of all, there was the volleyball tournament that I participated in where a parent screamed at his child missing a ball. On another occasion, when I was 15 years old, I went for the first time to a 1. Bundesliga football match – Eintracht Frankfurt against Borussia Dortmund. I was cheering for my team in a mixed fan block when one mid-aged man asked his friend to punch me in the face. Luckily nothing happened. My dad told me to stop cheering. There is something terribly wrong when a 40 year old man is thinking about punching a 15 year old boy in the face for cheering for the wrong team. Another experience I had occurred during a high school basketball game in the ghetto (one of my friends grew up there) where the crowd cheered “one, two, three, shoot the referee.” The final experience happened while I attended Baylor University. Patrick Dennehy, a member of the men’s basketball team, was shot by his teammate Carlton Dotson. During the investigation of the murder the university discovered that Coach Bliss had illegally been paying Dennehy. Furthermore they also uncovered that the coach failed to report some of the players failed drug test. Coach Bliss tried to cover up his illegal financial practices by asking an assistant coach to make Dennehy look like a drug dealer. These are just a few examples from my own experience and I could give many more.
Hoffman, also commenting on the dark side of sports points out that “Higher education no longer pretends that its sport programs are about education; they are quite simply about money. Public pressure for entertainment, not educational service, has its grip on the power centers in colleges and universities, and when winning is all that matters, there is an undeniable logic to players and coaches cheating and to administrators looking the other way.” (8) Furthermore he notes that “Gambling on college sports is a major growth industry that poses serious threats to the integrity of games, often making athletes targets of organized crime.” (8) Moreover, “Excess and mean-spiritedness are infecting sport at the lowest levels. Games that should be played for the pleasure of participation are hijacked by coaches and parents bent on turning them into something seen week in and week out on television. When a father in California is sentenced to 45 days in jail for beating and berating a coach for taking his son out of a baseball game; when a dentist sharpens the face guard of his son’s football helmet so that he could slash opposing players; when a police officer pays a pitcher $2 to hit a 10-year-old Little League opponent with a fastball during a game; and when the father of a 12-year-old hockey player beats his son’s coach to death outside the hockey rink – oddly enough because he thought the coach was encouraging rough play – it is fair to conclude that youth sports, like those played at a higher level, have lost their way.” (10-11) These examples from Hoffman and my own life should suffice to show that something has gone wrong in our sports culture.
By now it should be clear that current sports culture values are not compatible with the Christian worldview. Hoffman writes, “Variously described by those inside it and outside it as narcissistic, materialistic, self-interested, violent, sensational, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy, hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic, the culture of sports is light years removed from what Christians for centuries have idealized as the embodiment of the gospel message. The Christian worldview is based on an absolute, immutable, justice-loving God. The worldview of sports is based on material success.” (11) Out of these two opposing worldviews Hoffman forms his key research question: “How Christians, and especially evangelicals, have managed to live in these two diametrically opposed worlds, even to the point of harnessing one to serve the other.” (11) Hoffman’s hope is that Christians learn to think Christian about the social institution of sports. The problem is that we don’t think Christianly about the domain of sports. We are buying into practices (ways) that are not compatible with our Christian values. Hoffman highlights these contrasting values when he writes , “sport, which celebrates the myth of success, is harnessed to a gospel which consistently stresses the importance of losing. Sport, which symbolizes the morality of self-reliance and teaches the just rewards of hard work, is used to propagate a theology dominated by the radicalism of grace. The first shall be last and the last first, but not in big-time sports.” (14)
In order for us to counter sport’s culture’s destructive values Hoffman calls for “a collective Christian imagination to guide their thinking and approaches to sport.” (20) He calls us to set aside, “a host of other imaginations: consumer imaginations that value sport only as it can advance the financial or public relations interests; military imaginations that conceive of sports as battles between armies pledge to fight to the death; and therapeutic and propaganda imaginations that value sport only as a tool for achieving some practical end.” (20)
The sad reality is that we often let our sports culture exert a stronger influence over us (i.e. using elbows to win the Easter egg hunt) instead of letting our Christian values shape us.
What does it look like to think Christian about the social institution of sports?
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