Why We Love Football
It's a warm and hazy day, and Frank and I are at our sons' Little League practice, watching baseball but talking football. Nothing could be more typical of metro Pittsburgh in June. The Pirates, at 10 games below .500, are ambling toward their 15th straight losing season. The Steelers' training camp starts in six weeks. Hallelujah.
Frank knows football, and certainly knows western Pennsylvania football. He is Frank Namath, nephew of the man who some 40 years ago made our steel town, Beaver Falls, almost a household name. When "Uncle Joey" got big, Frank tells me, his mother had to move out of town and into a tiny house on a hill that overlooks it. Strangers from all over the place had been besieging her, gawking, poking, prodding. She, blue collar through and through, found herself suddenly the mother of an icon—presumably no easy thing. Especially here.
How do we love the Steelers? Let me count the emblems. Running on any given day through our old residential neighborhood, I see Steelers flags, camp chairs, license plates, decals, posters, mail boxes, bumper stickers, and articles of clothing—including my own T-shirt. When I, a lifelong Steelers fan living five hours from Pittsburgh, came out to interview for a job, I was astonished—and delighted—by all of the Steelers paraphernalia. Back home, my black-and-gold-bleeding brother-in-law (to whom I once gave a Steelers cutting board for Christmas) referred to my landing a job in "Mecca."
How to live with all this devotion? When the Steelers made their remarkable, improbable Super Bowl run two years ago, the atmosphere across the region was electric, all day, all night, each week bringing a new level of primal voltage, powering countless parties, conversations, ...
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Mike
Paul, Your wrong about more kids getting hurt in football. Look up the stats!!! You will find the all american sport of soccer as #1.
Dr. D, Atlanta, GA
This is a great essay! I passed it along to my husband who expected another guilt-inducing lashing by a well-intended Christian spoil sport. I believe a wise wife will learn to love sports if her husband does. My husband taught me to love college football, college basketball, and gave me custom golf clubs and private lessons early on -- and I am sometimes a bigger sports fan than he is! While all the other wives are whining somewhere to each other about being sports widows, I am enjoying God's beautiful outdoors, growing closer to my husband (and our college-age children), having screaming good fun -- and being admired by all the men whose wives will not join them. "An excellent wife, who can find?" Well, maybe I am not exactly an excellent wife, but being a great sports fan sure makes my husband think so!
Scott McCarty
Terrific article (!!)--about how the Christians in the USA have become just like the world. LAODICEA §§ I am glad the Apostle Paul wrote what was interesting and helpful for our lives in Christ. The Lord Jesus had plenty of enthuasme; He could have taught some lessons from the gladiator world, but he had something better to teach. Sports was my god while growing up in NE Georgia, and I have to be careful today as an evangelical missionary in France not to let the sirens of sport dominate me. Why don't we let II Corinthiens 5 : 10 set the standard ("bad" in the Greek means "vain, worthless, unprofitable") ? Will Jesus ask us which team we idolized ? Do we have the same zeal to win the lost-- Hell is a reality mostly forgotten--for whom Christ suffered !!