My Sports Cup Runneth Over

It was just about exactly a year ago that I drove my son and a carload of stuff down to register for Harvard Summer School. While in the parking search that is a perennial part of visiting there, we came upon an enormous protest taking place on the Cambridge Common. There was a sea of green and yellow and plenty of shouting through megaphones, most of it in Portuguese. People, entire families, kept arriving, walking vigorously towards the event. It took us a little while to figure out that this was about Brazil and the World Cup — to many, a glaring example of misplaced priorities– coming in 2014.

Might there actually be something wrong, really pernicious, about a country spending millions to host the rest of the world in multi-million dollar stadiums while basic human needs like health, housing, education go woefully wanting? Aren’t sports supposed to put us on a level playing field and then lift us all up, providing something worthy, something pure to reach for?

Up here in New Hampshire, my new state, the motorcycles were doing plenty of roaring around, the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee were filling up, but – as far as I could tell –nobody was gathering to object to a sporting event on another continent that hadn’t even started yet.

Now, of course, it has started and if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to fit watching some games into your schedule. Unabashedly. After all, the couch and the TV are all warmed up already, what with the veritable feast of contests we’ve had over the past month or so. Oh my, has it ever been a wonderful time for sports fans!  NHL playoffs — with night after night of thrilling overtimes — interspersed with NBA playoffs that culminated in the triumph of those awesome Spurs (with players from Argentina, Brazil, the Caribbean, Australia, France, Italy, Canada, New York, Los Angeles and, of course, New Hampshire) who can teach us all about the beauty of teamwork and the magic that can result when everybody gets to touch the ball. Add to this a baseball season in full swing, the French Open for us tennis enthusiasts, and yes—let’s just agree that golf is still officially a sport—the PGA Open at Pinehurst.  Whew.  It’s a good thing that most of the action took place when darkness fell outside and we came in from our own exercise, because so many of these June evenings have been so beautiful. The whole thing has kind of reminded me of our bookshelves (unorganized still as they are) full of volumes about sports of all kinds.

OK, I’ll try not to get carried away here: I know and respect the fact that there are many—thousands, millions even—people out there who don’t go in for this kind of thing AT ALL. You may even be one of them, actively contributing to the amount of overall knowledge and goodness and love in the world and not caring one whit about sports; how can I argue with that? And there are lots of other valid reasons not to pay attention to games, some of which include the need to fight for daily survival.

However, speaking only as one who has been steeped in sports from an early age and definitely way before becoming a clergy spouse, I have to say that there’s a certain inspiration, or maybe just a kind of quickening of the pulse, that I keep drawing from athletics –- from games I’m playing in as well as from faraway contests that have nothing to do with me or anyone in my family. It’s not religious, exactly, and I balk at using the word “worship” to describe the experience, but there definitely are some parallels.

The first chapter of Michael Mandelbaum’s book, The Meaning of Sports, published is 2004, is titled “A Variety of Religious Experience.”  Close to the beginning, we come upon this passage:

Sports and organized religion share several important features.  Both address the needs of the spirit and the psyche rather than those of the flesh. Neither bears directly on what is necessary for physical survival: food and shelter. Both stand outside the working world. And team sports provide three satisfactions of life to twenty-first century Americans that, before the modern age, only religion offered: a welcome diversion from the routines of daily life; a model of coherence and clarity; and heroic examples to admire and emulate. (p.4)

Hmm…maybe this is what I should say to explain why I often opt to go to tennis clinics on Sunday morning?

“Heroic examples”  — now, that’s stretching it, at least on the courts where I play; but “diversion from the routines of daily life”  — yes, definitely. During these past sports-filled weeks, too, looking forward to a game on at night, and perhaps also to watching it with my son, really could give me a boost during the day. Take us away from the humdrum—the dishes in the sink, the ungraded papers, the lingering annoyance from what somebody said a while back—please!

None of which, of course, solves the problems that the World Cup protesters have rightly been speaking out about—some for at least a whole year. Yes, multi-million dollar stadiums built in the midst of unaddressed chronic poverty can’t be right; nor, for that matter, can astronomical salaries for coddled professional athletes or steroid use or cutting academic corners in college or an array of other ills that we all know persist in this arena. Those of us who love sports, who jump in ourselves and watch and encourage our kids to do the same, have an obligation to not look the other way when fair play and justice for all get compromised anywhere around the globe. If sports are part of the problem, then they ought to shape up and become more part of the solution.

Do I hear an “Ole Ole Ole” to that? If you’d like a little reminder about the glories of soccer, just to get you in the mood, then listen here.