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And a team's crucial loss became the occasion for sadness years later. The memory of the last out of the 1962 World Series still haunts me: Had Willie McCovey's line drive been two feet to the left or right of Bobby Richardson, the resulting single would have won the series for my San Francisco Giants.

In either case, the fan's joy or despair is about the athletic contest between two teams. It has little to do with the relationship between the game and the spectator.

And here's the point: When sports are viewed as mere entertainment, ethical and aesthetic boundaries collapse. As I noted in an earlier column, Catholic scholar Johan Huizinga's definition of play applies to sports: "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."

But for Canseco, the game becomes an arena for individual athletes to strut their excellence to entertain an audience. So players showboat after touchdowns and dunks to ensure fans get their money's worth. And they start taking steroids to jack the ball out of the park, because home runs excite the fans.

On the other hand, if we can remember that sports are primarily a contest played "according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner," it becomes pretty difficult to justify the clandestine use of drugs to enhance one's performance. And if the contest is in large part about testing yourself against other superior athletes in play that is absorbing, then dances and fingers in the sky and mooning to get a laugh or a cheer from spectators are just plain silly and out of place.

Ceasing to speak about sports as "entertainment" will not solve all the problems that plague modern sports. It will, however, help us to think more clearly. And clearheaded thinking—much in short supply these days in the sports world—would go a long way toward restoring some of the integrity and old-fashioned manners of the games that mean so much to us.

Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today.

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February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49