I will post this on Saturday, January 12th; the day the Green Bay Packers take on the San Francisco 49ers in the second round of the playoffs. These are two of the elite teams in the league, but after Saturday one of these teams will be finished for the season. After all of the off-season conditioning, the gruelling summer training camp, the weekly grind of film review and practices in preparation for an upcoming opponent, the highs and lows of victory and defeat, the come-from-behind "gut check" wins and the crushing losses - after all that, one team's season will fall short of the goal of winning the championship. The winner will move on and again the difference between exhilaration and disappointment will come down to one game. And for many fans it's just as dramatic.
Bart Starr - 5 NFL Championships
Joe Montana - 4 NFL Championships
I have followed football and my team the Packers for over 30 years. As a fan I've experienced the fortunes and misfortunes of my team as well as some fantastic football games generally. When I was younger I used to "live and die" with my team, as they say. If the Packers won a game on Sunday afternoon then my whole week was better. If they lost, well that put a damper on the following week. As I've grown older I've learned to appreciate the game as a game. My life doesn't depend on the outcome. A Packer victory is still a great joy and a loss is a disappointment, but it's a sport and for every winner there's a loser. The game of football is still a lot of fun whatever the outcome.
God doesn't lean
It's probably natural that when players or fans feel they have such a personal stake in the outcome of a game, they'll implore divine assistance. There's a famous play in football called the "Hail Mary." As most of you know, this is a play of desperation where the quarterback throws a long pass into the endzone, with only seconds left on the game clock, in the hopes that one of his receivers in a mob of the opponent's defenders will catch the ball, thereby scoring the winning points in the game. The play became widely known as the "Hail Mary" after a playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and Minnesota Vikings on December 28th, 1975. Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach heaved a game-winning touchdown pass as described above in the final seconds of that game. Staubach is a Catholic and after the game he told a reporter about his desperate pass, "I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary."
Regarding the Cowboys, their previous stadium had a domed roof with an open space over the playing area. Cowboy fans said the hole allowed God "to watch his favorite team."
I've read that in the old days some Polish patriots declared, not completely seriously I assume, that God spoke Polish.
Once when I worked at Ryder Logistics & Transportation I had a discussion with a co-worker about politics. He and I basically shared the same opinions on politics, but at one point in our conversation I remarked that "we have to be careful not to think that God is a Republican." My co-worker responded, "No, but we know which He leans."
Well, of course God doesn't lean. If anything, we ought to be "leaning" toward God. God is not a political partisan any more than He's a fan of a particular sports team. But in our politics we ought to consider how to act in the light of God's will.
As far as sports go, sport should be an occasion of good-natured competition and play. It should bring out the best in both participants and spectators. Learning to deal with defeat can be healthy; it can humble us, can cause us to dig deeper into ourselves in order to improve our game, and we can learn to appreciate greatness in our opponent (the Vikings' Adrian Peterson running for 199 yards against my Packers in the regular season finale being a good example of this). Victory can be instructive too: we can learn to be gracious toward our defeated opponent. Or, if we have serious personal shortcomings, hopefully in the glow of victory we will see that our personal defects are still there. The people that we hurt still hurt; the time we've wasted on selfishness is time still lost; our destructive habits are still lurking there. Those things put winning a game into perspective.
So on that note, let's enjoy some great football.
No comments:
Post a Comment