c. 1996 Religion News Service
(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.)
(RNS)-It’s become something of a bad joke when sports announcers tap their microphones and proclaim:”Ladies and gentlemen, the starting lineup.” Chances are that the ladies and gentlemen are about to be introduced to at least a couple of players who have put in another kind of appearance lately-in a police lineup.
Dallas superstar Michael Irvin now faces felony cocaine charges. Elsewhere in the National Football League, Seattle Seahawks receiver Brian Blades recently pleaded”no-contest”to manslaughter charges in connection with the shooting death of his cousin. The recent NFL draft featured not one, but two Nebraska football players who got into trouble for assaulting women.
But there are exceptions, including basketball great David Robinson of the San Antonio Spurs. His story is both uplifting and deflating, for Robinson, a born-again Christian and positive role model, is being ridiculed by some for supposedly not being the right kind of fellow to lead his team to victory.
Why? Because of his better qualities.
Sports Illustrated’s April 29 cover story on Robinson made it clear that he is the kind of sports hero that many parents pray for. He was, for one thing, a true”student athlete,”having majored not in Fruit Basket Preparation at a middling diploma mill but in mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy. After making the All-America team his sophomore season, Robinson could have transferred to another school, but he stayed on and fulfilled his service commitment.
His pro career has been similarly stellar. He was chosen the National Basketball Association’s most valuable player last year, and he was an original member of the 1992 Olympic basketball”dream team.”Robinson’s coach, Bob Hill, calls him the NBA’s greatest asset, adding,”If my kids grow up to be half the man David is, I’ll die happy.” Yet some analysts consider Robinson’s faith and character to be a liability. A recent”60 Minutes”profile revealed that agents told Robinson that being a Christian could cost him some commercial endorsements. Some sports writers and fans complain he isn’t mean enough to lead his team to an NBA title.
Sports Illustrated writer Leigh Montville summed it up:”A traditional knock against born-again athletes is that they don’t have a win-or-else passion for their games (I gave up that gopher ball because it was God’s will, not my mistake.)”Robinson may have an awesome jump shot, but his unwillingness to perfect the head-butt is apparently seen as a shortcoming.
Only time will tell if Robinson will lead his team to championship glory. But the negative response to his virtuous character tells us a great deal about modern sports.
Winning has become so important that we are willing to excuse the most loutish, and often criminal, behavior in our athletes. Just as saddening, in my view, is that we have come to accept brutality not as a rare by-product of some games, but as a necessary component of victory.
One would think, indeed, that David Robinson was being called on to thrust a trident through the neck of his opponents, as if modern basketball were a variation on the Roman games. Perhaps, in a sense, the comparison is too close for comfort.
Sports writers and sports fans have become accustomed to the bench-clearing brawl, the swinging of intercontinental ballistic elbows, and the foulest language this side of Cell Block D. It appears that playing aggressive, yet clean, ball just doesn’t cut it these days.
Brutality in sports is nothing new, nor is a vigorous response to brutality without historic background.
Sports analyst Michael D. Smith writes that at the end of the last century a media campaign against football violence, led by the Saturday Evening Post and The Nation, resulted in the programs being dropped at several colleges, including Harvard. Smith also reports that none other than then-President Theodore Roosevelt called representatives from Princeton, Yale and Harvard to his office and threatened to shut down their programs if they didn’t clean up their acts.”Brutality and foul play should receive the same summary punishment given to a man who cheats at cards,”Roosevelt said.
David Robinson may be from the old school, but the old school has a way of coming back into style once people realize what the new school is teaching. The problem is not that Robinson is not in step with the current code of sports behavior, but that the code is out of step with Robinson.
LJB END COLSON
