I guess there is some football game on Sunday.  American football that is.  Our small group Bible study is getting together and some of us will watch it.  People seem to think that it is something big, but it is nothing compared to what the rest of the world calls football.  Just wait until 2010 in South Africa.  But I digress…

So once again the United States comes to a halt on a Sunday to watch a sporting event.  I reflected on this last year and yesterday a discussion started on the Puritan Board about doing this on a Sunday.  It does of course revolve around not just issues of the fourth commandment but the second as well.  I found it interesting how that crowd was about evenly split, it seemed to me, between watching and not watching.  A while back Ethics Daily had an opinion piece on “Has Sports Become A Religion In America?”  (See above about the sport the world is passionate about if you think Americans are the only ones.)  On NPR yesterday there was an interview with Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Bob Dvorchak where he said that their football team was more important than religion and how it unites the Pittsburgh diaspora that resulted from the shutdown of the steel mills.

Well, to keep things in perspective I have seen three positive stories about football and community in the last few weeks that I would like to share with you.  Only one is explicitly Christian or covenant community, but the others could be as well.

Lions vs. Tornadoes high school football game
(H/T A Reforming Mom)  In his Life of Reilly column for ESPN Rick Reilly had a great story a few weeks back about a Texas high school football game between the Lions of Grapevine Faith Christian School and the Tornadoes of Gainesville State School.  It is important to understand that the Tornadoes play no home games, have no cheerleaders, and really no spectators cheering for them at games.  Gainesville State School is a maximum security youth facility.  So Grapevine Faith specifically scheduled a game with them and then shared their crowd with them as well.  Half of Grapevine’s cheerleaders and supporters were on Gainesville’s side of the field cheering them on as if they were their own team.  In an e-mail to the fans the Grapevine coach wrote: “Here’s the message I want you to send:  You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth.”  And they sent that message.  The article quotes one of the Gainesville players in the huddle of both teams at the end of the game as praying “Lord, I don’t know how this happened, so I don’t know how to say thank
You, but I never would’ve known there was so many people in the world
that cared about us.”  And the Gainesville coach told the Grapevine coach “You’ll never know what your people did for these kids tonight. You’ll never, ever know.”

Update:  Just after posting this and double-checking the links I notice that Rick Reilly has posted an Epilogue to this story today.  It turns out that word got around about this, like really around, and the NFL commissioner brought the Grapevine coach to Tampa for the game on Sunday.  You have to admire the quote from the coach: “I hate it that this thing that we did is so rare.  Everybody views it as such a big deal. Shouldn’t that be the normal?”

Tony Dungy keeping community together
(H/T my friend and fellow soccer ref Jim over at APC Blog)  With Tony Dungy’s retirement from coaching ESPN ran an article about his character, and yes about community.  It was about the 1997 season when he was coaching at Tampa Bay and after the team had a great start to the season his kicker started missing and costing them a couple of games.  While the fans and press were up in arms to replace the kicker, what Dungy knew was that the kicker’s mother was dying of cancer.  Dungy stuck with him through the bad games and once called him into his office and simply told him “You’re a Buccaneer. You’re part of our family. You’re our kicker.”  That unconditional acceptance was what Michael Husted needed and his kicking returned to form the next game and Tampa Bay made the playoffs.

The touchdown belongs to the whole team
A couple of weeks ago, before the conference championship games, I heard an interesting radio commentary by Diana Nyad about Arizona receiver Larry Fitzgerald.  Her observation was that when he scored a touchdown, it was not about celebrating by himself in the end zone in front of the fans, but going back to the other ten players on the field who helped make the touchdown possible and celebrating with them.  Again a community ethic and she says that Fitzgerald says his mother wouldn’t want it any other way.

(The one and only pro football game I watched much of this year was the championship game Arizona won and I did get to see Fitzgerald make a couple of great plays and score touchdowns.  True to Diana Nyad’s commentary he did not put on a show in the end zone.  But he did linger there with arms raised for a few seconds and then, true to form, the TV cut away before I ever saw him jog back to his team mates to celebrate with them.  Maybe I’ll see more on Sunday.)