This is about the separation of church and sport. Just this week, former Newsday colleague Bob Keeler, via his Substack newsletter “Peace of Mind” (you should check it out), thoughtfully questioned the Chicago White Sox one-game promotion of offering specially ticketed spectators a papal miter—it’s a pointy pope hat—emblazoned with the team’s insignia, based on the fact that new Pope Leo XIV, a native of Chicago’s South Side, is known to be a Sox booster.
There was a lengthy report in the New York Times about the characteristic connection of an American lad to his hometown team, as it applied to the former Robert Prevost. And how the Sox, in a typical bit of American capitalism, have seized on what the Times described as a promotional and marketing “Godsend.”
Keeler, citing “a pope who loves baseball and hates war”—and a U.S. president who “clearly loves war”—wrote that he is “rooting for the Chisox” because of that Leo link. But that “the unusual promotion [of the pope’s miter] leaves me with mixed feelings, to put it mildly. Those pointy hats have always turned me off. They seem sharply out of keeping with the way Jesus described his vision for the leaders of his movement. Somehow, I can’t get it into my head that this bit of show-off haberdashery was what Jesus had in mind when he prescribed servant leadership.”
A parable: As a sixth grader, I signed up for the Little League team at my Catholic grade school, my first participation in organized sports. One of the first admonitions from our gangly, soft-spoken coach, Mr. Buck, was that there would be no supplications for the Almighty to come to the aid of our team. (And, by extension, work against our opponent.)
That lesson actually predated the increasingly common custom of baseball players gesturing toward the heavens after hitting home runs, NFL players praying in the end zone after scoring, victorious jocks in various sports thanking The Lord for helping them make winning plays.
William J. Baker, in “Playing with God,” argued that such public displays amounted to “an athlete using a moment to sell a product, like soap”—in effect merely calling attention to the athlete’s accomplishment. Such conflating of godliness with an athlete’s heroics once led to a British newspaper posting the headline, “Leave me out of your petty games.—Love, God.”
Just to be clear: Victory and personal stardom hardly are against my religion. And when University of North Caroline students ask, “If God isn’t a Tar Heels fan, why is the sky Caroline Blue?”—isn’t that more like acknowledging another member of the appreciative audience (i.e., a fellow fan) as opposed to invoking the Puppet Master? It doesn’t work as a boast of salvation.
To trivialize faith and religion by hinting that God confers success on the more moral team, the more moral player, may not be staying in one’s lane with athletic endeavors.
I would argue that my Little League coach—God bless Mr. Buck—understood that if the outcomes of at-bats and games indeed are determined by God, wouldn’t that equate athletic failure and defeat with somehow already being on the road to hell? Isn’t that getting into the foothills of a flimsy evangelism?
In 1959, my then-hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, were about to commence play in the World Series. (Against, by the way, those self-same Chicago White Sox. The future Pope Leo was only two years old at the time, so his interest in the eventual outcome is unknown—and not to the point, anyway.) There I was in my seventh grade class at Our Lady of Peace grammar school, where the nun who taught the class determined that it wouldn’t hurt anyone if we all listened to the first game on the radio.
There absolutely were no prayers offered. It was just baseball. And when the White Sox scored two runs in the first inning and seven in the third, on the way to an 11-0 victory, Sister’s reasonable reaction was to switch off the radio and get on with our general education.
That the Dodgers ended up winning the Series in six games was exciting stuff. But redemptive? Soul saving? If only.