Without a passion for play, a person is never fully alive.
To understand American culture, you must appreciate the gigantic impact of sport. Most newspapers devote an entire section to it; millions of dollars are spent daily for sports equipment and entertainment; huge stadiums across the land accommodate the millions who attend sports contests. Even our universities, the centers of intellectual development, are great arenas of sport culture.
The best way to understand sport, however, is not by studying its economic or social impact. Rather, observe the life of a child who has just discovered a sport.
I know an eight-year-old who is playing in his first year of organized baseball. Each night he sleeps in his uniform. Before closing his eyes, he repeatedly pounds a ball into his glove and then places it on the nightstand beside him. One morning he woke his parents when, pretending to circle the bases after hitting a home run to win the World Series, he crashed into a coffee table.
God has so created human nature that many are drawn to the magic of sport. Sport is one expression of our need for roots, play, passion, and excellence. That is why it matters.
Roots
It was May of 1958. I was seven years old. The Dodgers had just moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and my dad took me to see them play. It did not matter that our seats were at the top of the stadium, an immense distance from the playing field. It did not even matter that the Dodgers played poorly and lost. On that night, I imagined myself to be the happiest seven-year-old in the world.
From that time on, I collected every piece of material I could find on the Dodgers. My room was littered with baseball cards, team pictures, game programs, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles about my favorite team. I memorized the statistics of every player. I listened to almost every game on the radio, including announcer Vin Scully’s pre- and postgame interviews. Even though the Dodgers finished a disappointing seventh in an eight-team league, I never gave up hope. Throughout the entire season, I kept thinking we would turn it around. There was not an ounce of cynicism in my seven-year-old heart regarding my team. Even though it hurt me each time they lost, I was as loyal and optimistic about the Dodgers as a person could be.
Even better, I knew my dad loved the Dodgers, too. My fondest memories of him go back to those games. Not an emotionally expressive person, he saved some of his best moments for the Dodgers. He would get upset when the Dodgers lost a close game and excited when they won, and his son found that wonderful. I admired the way he would overrule my mother and insist that the radio broadcast of a big game be played during supper. I also liked those occasions when my parents had guests over, and my dad would slip away to my room to check the score. We were both serious fans, and our attachment to the Dodgers helped to bond us closer together.
Bonds to my father, bonds to my team. I was, I must emphasize, far more than a spectator. Even though I was not physically on the Dodger team, I was still a participant. I cared too deeply to be anything less. To be rooted to a team, to use philosopher Michael Novak’s term for this process of attachment in sports, meant experiencing disappointment and elation. I emotionally risked myself each game, but especially on those nights we were playing the San Francisco Giants, or were in the middle of a late-season drive for the pennant. I was fully alive during those games.
God has made us as people with a need to be connected. Sport begins to answer this need and trains us for even deeper attachments—allegiances to family, to friends, to God, and to his people. There is something enormously healthy about living in a world of clear and absolute allegiances—at least during a two-hour game. No one has to interpret for rooted fans or players what they are feeling. They know precisely. The basic elements of human nature are allowed to surface. The lid is taken off bottled-up emotion. We are consumed with a singular intention, and that is for our team to do well.
To be rooted is, certainly, to risk going too far, to become fanatical. Extreme partiality has led many a country, religious group, or individual toward disaster. Yet, the dangers associated with being impartial and detached may be even greater. I know some extremely dedicated—some would say fanatical—fans. Without exception, they are healthy and enjoyable men and women. They have a twinkle in their eye and a zest for living. Since they know how to play and to be rooted, they seem to enjoy life a little more than most of us.
Being rooted need not cause us to be so small-minded or subjective that we cannot look beyond our own team. As Novak writes: “Sports fans are often quite objective about the strengths and weaknesses of various teams and players, despite their loyalties. I would much rather argue the merits of Notre Dame with an ardent Alabama fan than argue politics with extremists of the right or of the left. Any day.”
Play
Most of us spend our early years immersed in play, and the rest of our lives pretending it never happened. The joy and laughter of childhood often are replaced by a grim and serious approach to life.
As a young boy, I assumed my adult play would come through being a professional baseball player. When that did not work out, I did the next best thing: I became a coach. I am paid to direct a group of men who play a game dressed in uniforms that look like underwear. I am part of what someone has called the toy department of life. What I do is intensely serious, and yet it is not. On a cerebral level, coaching does not appear to compare with other careers I might have pursued. But on an emotional level, I cannot find anything I would rather do.
When I was 11 years old, the Cuban missile crisis occurred. For about two weeks I went to bed each night wondering if I would eat another breakfast. Having planned to wait until I was an adult to become a Christian, I now decided that I’d better adjust my plans. Meeting with my dad one evening, I told him that I needed help in how to get right with God. I also asked him if there would be baseball in heaven. He said, “No, but there will be many things better than baseball.” This was not the answer I wanted to hear.
I did not question my dad, because I was still at the age where I thought adults were always right. Also, I wanted to take care of this matter of where I would spend eternity before the missiles started flying. But I was disappointed. I could not imagine how heaven could be very exciting without physical play. I envisioned heaven to be very peaceful, but at age 11, peace was not my priority.
While I do not exactly imagine heaven to be a baseball game, I now think heaven will be as exciting and playful as baseball, only more so. According to John Powell, Saint Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is the person fully alive.” I have yet to meet a person fully alive who does not have an affection for play. I believe we possess a natural physical exuberance, and that this is an aspect of God’s image in us. Unless we have discouraged these urges, I think we naturally delight in repetitious and seemingly nonpurposeful movement. This is why young boys or girls can shoot baskets in their driveway hour after hour for no particular reason other than that they enjoy it.
Just how does shooting endless baskets relate to the image of God? G. K. Chesterton put it incomparably: “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy.”
As Protestants, we have an especially hard time with play. Historical forms of movement like dancing have been looked upon with suspicion and even condemnation. While our attempts to control the body have resulted in the prevention of abuses, I am sure that we have lost something in the process.
Sport is one way to stay in touch with our playful spirit. It encourages us to nurture a healthy sense of fantasy and imagination. It shows us how to be playful ascetics, people who can be intensely focused and yet lighthearted at the same time.
Sport also encourages us to appreciate the play of others. To watch intently someone else play is not merely to be a spectator, but also a participant with that person.
The player I have most enjoyed watching is the recently retired Michael Jordan. He can do things with his body that I have seen no other human do. At times he has appeared to break the laws of nature. Just as a lively piece of music causes a person to move his foot or body rhythmically, Jordan’s best plays also demand movement from me. If I am sitting on a chair watching him contort his body while suspended in air, I find myself twisting with him. He brings a smile to my lips, an amazement at what the human body is capable of. He represents the physical potential of humanity and reminds us once again of God’s creative strength. Appreciating Michael Jordan’s play is a way of enjoying what God enjoys.
Passion
Sport stirs the passions of all classes and ages of people. It appeals to blue-collar workers and to intellectuals like George Will and Michael Novak. Three generations can watch a game together and feel the same emotions. The 10-year-old who has played in a Little League game knows precisely what his 60-year-old grandfather is feeling when a batter comes to the plate in a pressured situation. This is not always true of art, where the difference in education and maturity can make it difficult for a young person to identify with an older companion.
Sport expresses passion. Sport sides with Byron and Keats over Pope and Swift. It prefers a Beethoven to a Bach, a Pascal to a Descartes. It agrees with Pascal that the heart has reasons that the reason can never know. It also teaches that we are creatures full of contradictions and ambivalences. Sport cautions against the Enlightenment and its emphasis on the perfectibility of human nature. It reminds us that we are not machines, but full-blooded people capable of deep feeling and emotion.
Sport can quickly bring out the best and worst in us. Plato said that more can be learned about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. Sport demands that we use not only our positive emotions, but also channel our more aggressive and baser instincts. The challenge is to give our passion enough freedom to energize us, yet restrict it enough that harm is not inflicted on ourselves or others.
Passion in sports can get out of hand, can even become dangerous. But this tension is what creates excitement. It helps make sport exhilarating and potentially healthy.
Sport helps us rediscover as God made us: people of passion and play, who hunger for connection and excellence.
In the film Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell, the Olympic champion and missionary to China, said, “I feel God’s pleasure when I run.” Anyone who has played a sport understands what he meant. To participate in sport is to be emotionally engaged, to gain a respite from the dominance of the mind. It means to be childlike again.
People will do things in an athletic context they will not do anywhere else. They will embrace, slap each other on the back or butt, even cry on occasion. Some come to the place of wanting to win for their teammates as much as for themselves. To care deeply, as spirited teams do, is to become filled with passion and courage. Sport, then, helps us rediscover ourselves as God made us. We are people of passion. We care. We cry. (Jesus wept.) We laugh. We feel the extraordinary elation of winning, the sinking agony of loss. In a world of committee meetings, sport injects pure passion and reminds us of how to be ourselves.
Excellence
Excellence permeates sport. Year after year, athletes surpass what has been done before. Sport really is proof that records are made to be broken. Johnny Weissmuller of Tarzan fame established more than 50 American and world swimming records in the 1920s. Today, scores of 13-year-olds swim faster. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954. Within one year, this formerly impossible barrier had been broken repeatedly.
Athletes and sports fans are well educated in what is excellent and what is not. Statistics help because they numerically define levels of performance. But the true sports fan knows that numbers can never tell the whole story. Just as the connoisseur of music hears sound dynamics and interchanges that many miss, the sports fan appreciates the subtleties and intangibles of a game that the inexperienced spectator does not recognize.
Many people equate excellence in sport with winning. An extreme desire to come out on top has led to myriad abuses not only at the professional and collegiate levels, but even among organizers and coaches of youth league athletic programs. It is clear that wherever winning is emphasized, dangers exist. It is also clear that winning is not always a true indicator of success. A team can play poorly and still win, or greatly overachieve and still lose.
Yet winning is still a powerful force for excellence. As the late Bartlett Giamatti said while president of Yale: “Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man or woman’s sense of satisfaction and well being. Winning is not everything, but is something powerful, indeed beautiful in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.” Winning may be an imperfect measure of excellence, but over the long term it may be one of the best.
Effort is difficult to measure accurately, both for players and observers. While athletes may make a complete physical effort, they may stop short of full emotional commitment. Championship teams tend to win close games because they display a more consistent level of emotional courage than their opponents. Even when a Joe Montana in football or a Magic Johnson in basketball had not played a great game, they still had the confidence that they would find a way to win in the last seconds. Such athletes are able to raise their level of play when it is most needed.
Three years ago I coached a player with this kind of spirit. During his two years, we won 60 games and lost only 7. No matter who we played, he was confident we would come out on top. He displayed an emotional drive and relentlessness that raised the intensity level of the entire team. Whether we played a weak opponent or a very strong one, he competed the same way. Whether it was the first practice of the year or the last, he was completely committed to excellence and to winning.
To excel consistently in sport requires an integration of mind, body, and emotions that may not be found to the same degree anywhere else. By providing such examples of the spirit to win and excel, sport makes a real contribution to our world.
Winning isn’t everything, and neither is excellence. In fact, away from the world of sport, excellence may be an infinitely varied thing, impossible to define. Nevertheless, the love of excellence and the desire to do whatever we do “as unto the Lord” are fundamental Christian attitudes fostered by sports. I would not argue that there is great overlap between Christian virtues and sport. The locker room is not a particularly godly place, and someone who is superbly devoted to sport may be—often is—far from the kingdom of God. All I would claim is that sport reveals, and nourishes, part of what it means to be a human being. It is a natural grace that we should enjoy and encourage. We need more than sport, far more. We need Christ. But life without roots, play, passion, and excellence would be less than fully human, and therefore less than what God intends for us to be.
Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.
