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Where there is sports, there is scandal.

Some recent examples: Football phenom Terrell Owens and sultry starlet Nicollette Sheridan glorified illicit sex in a pre-game network teaser. Baseball stars Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds (of the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants, respectively) admitted they illegally used performance enhancing steroids. And there was the All Star Wrestling Match (Ron Artest's Five vs. The Obnoxious Fans), for which the warm-up match was the Detroit Pistons vs. the Indianapolis Pacers.

All generated a great deal of press and outrage this past fall. Ah, but that's old news by now, having been superceded by Minnesota Vikings Randy Moss's fake-mooning of Green Bay Packer Fans and … well, you name it. And there's bound to be another before Superbowl XXXIX exhausts us all.

The problems of sports run deep and wide. One well-known writer has said, "Television threatens to engulf many of the inherent values of sports," and "Throughout our sports programs there is an undue emphasis on violence." Another book summarizes the problem of modern American sports culture: "cheating, rule violations, ego exaggeration."

There is nothing new under the sports sun. The first two quotes come from James Michener's Sports in America, written nearly 30 years ago. The last quote is from Tony Ladd's and James A. Mathiesen's Muscular Christianity (1999), and goes on to note that these problems "came to fruition in the 1920s and affected sport for the remainder of the twentieth century." And the first part of the next century, we might add.

As Paul put it in Romans 1, too many athletes are "filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are … insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil … foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless." Okay, he was talking about idolaters. Unfortunately, too often the athletic shoe fits.

The temptation for Christians—especially in this Superbowl season of super-hype—is to drone on that things have gotten out of hand, that sports is a waste of time at best and as a form of idolatry at worst, that winning has became too important, that we take sports way too seriously.

I beg to differ. The problem is that we no longer take sports seriously enough.

Signal of transcendence
Sports is supposed to be a form of play. Catholic scholar Johan Huizinga, in his classic Homo Ludens, said play is "a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being 'not serious,' but at the same time absorbing the play intensely and utterly … It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner."

The great Green Bay Packers coach (and amateur Catholic theologian), Vince Lombardi, put it well: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." This doesn't mean "win at any cost," or "do anything to win," because, as Huizinga notes, play proceeds "according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner." But when one is absorbed in play "intensely and utterly," the game will be played as if winning is "the only thing"—as if there is really nothing more important in the world at that moment than the game itself.

And play, according to scholar (and devout Roman Catholic) Michael Novak is "the first act of freedom. … The first free act of the human is to assign limits within which freedom can be at play. Play is not tied to necessity, except to the necessity of the human spirit to exercise its freedom, to enjoy something that is not practical, or productive, or required for gaining food or shelter." Or multimillion dollar contracts.

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February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49