The Super Bowl is approaching, and, to be honest, my family is not that excited. In the span of a week, we suffered two big losses as sports fans: my alma mater Notre Dame fell to Ohio State in the college football national championship game, and my husband’s Buffalo Bills got beat for the fourth time in five years by the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship (hence our lack of excitement about Sunday’s game).
Moments like these provoke existential questions like: Why am I a fan at all? Is my fandom a waste of time and energy that should be spent on other, less worldly, more worthy pursuits?
While potential spiritual gains of playing sports might be more obvious–developing perseverance, the capacity to work as a team, and so forth—the benefits of following sports are less self-evident.
I explored these questions with my 16-year-old son and some of my students in my Theological Foundations course in the wake of the anguish of defeat. While there are good reasons to question the value of modern fandom (exorbitant salaries, prima donnas, sports viewing crowding out Sunday worship, etc.), I believe a strong case for sports allegiance being a worthwhile way to develop community and virtues, especially fortitude, empathy, humility, and spiritual abandonment.
Made in the image of a Triune God, human beings are made for relationship. As Pope St. John Paul II once said, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.” Sports fandom has provided a way of communing with my family, my classmates, and many other human beings with whom I would otherwise have little in common. My maternal grandfather went to the University of Notre Dame and worked as a college football referee, and my dad also grew up cheering for ND, so passion for Fighting Irish football runs deep on both sides for me. As a child, watching and pulling for the squad in the shiny gold helmets bonded me with my grandparents, parents and siblings and strengthened my sense of identity as an Irish Catholic. When I had the opportunity to attend ND, my fandom instantly connected me with the other 13,000 current ND students and the thousands of alums who had matriculated before us.
I’ve experienced a similar phenomenon beyond ND football. Shortly after graduation, I married a fellow ND alum who was also a diehard Bills fan, having grown up just south of Buffalo. The saying goes that when you marry a person, you also marry their family—and, for me, that included his family’s fandom. Adopting the Bills gave me a way to bond with my spouse’s family and for our nuclear family to stay connected to my husband’s roots, even though we ended up settling hundreds of miles away in Kentucky.
Regarding courage, the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes fortitude as, “the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good…[it] enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions” (1808). Sports fandom cultivated this very thing in me as a young person. Growing up, my dad fostered a passion for University of Louisville basketball in his children in addition to zeal for the Irish. (Lest you worry and think he was only obsessed with sports, my dad also imparted a great love for God, humanity, learning and many other things in his children.) He was born and raised in Louisville, but he and my mom settled in Northern Kentucky, close to Cincinnati, after they graduated from medical school. Most of the population were rabid University of Kentucky fans (Louisville’s staunchest rival). We were a few red dots in a sea of blue.
This was particularly challenging because I came of age during a stretch when Louisville struggled and UK was totally dominant, winning two national championships while I was in middle school. My male classmates mercilessly teased me for being a Cardinal fan. Ultimately, I’m grateful for this bit of torture, because it taught me to stay true to something even when it’s unpopular. I proudly practiced a mild form of civil disobedience when my sixth grade art teacher made us make a UK sign for a project. She told me I could not have red paper to make a Louisville sign. I made a UK sign, as ordered, but cut out and pasted on “UK is #2” instead of #1. These experiences prepared me to stand strong as I defended my unpopular religious beliefs and morals in high school, college, and beyond.
As to empathy, a growing body of research suggests that reading fiction helps us better understand and share in the feelings of others as it helps us enter into human experiences beyond the scope of our own lives. I think there is a similar benefit to following a sports team. I am sometimes truly amazed I can be so affected at a physical level by events taking place in stadiums hundreds of miles away with people I have never and probably will never meet. My great-grandmother actually had to tape ND games and watch them after she knew the results because it was too hard on her nerves to watch them live. As for me, I get clammy hands and stomach aches when games are tight; I shout in jubilation when a player makes a great play.
Similar to reading, tuning in to a game is a way of entering into the experiences of others. It’s said that “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” Well, a fan plays a thousand games. You feel it all with the team–their crushing defeats, their valiant triumphs. And this is more than just a vicarious experience. With wins come genuine opportunities to be gracious (obviously some fans miss these opportunities by being so obnoxious, but that’s neither here nor there). And when you lose, you get to be humble and congratulate the opposing fans on their success, even if the words taste like vinegar.
And now to spiritual abandonment. The “Serenity Prayer” is one of my favorites: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Being a sports fan has been an exercise for me in learning to recognize and accept what I cannot change and to practice abandonment in the face of these circumstances. Obviously, the gravity of whether your team wins or loses is far less and quite different from issues such as whether a sick person is going to get better, whether a loved one is going to overcome addiction, or something of this nature. But again, like with courage, sports fandom provides a sort of training wheels practice experience for learning the virtue of spiritual abandonment. We learn that many times in life, we cannot change the result. We can only pray.
And if you are wondering if I am implying that it’s okay to work the rosary beads during a football game, I absolutely am, especially if you’re cheering for Our Lady’s team. In the words of the great ND coach Lou Holtz, “God doesn’t care who wins a football game, but His Mother does.”
You may think this piece is, in the end, a failed attempt to give a justification for my family’s outsized devotion to football. And you may be right. I’ll be the first one to admit that sports fanaticism can get out of hand and take up more than its fair share of our minds and hearts. In that sense, losses are a good correction that makes us reflect on our priorities and keeps our fandom in its proper place. It’s a sad existence if our joy in life really rests on worldly success and the actions of people we cannot control.
However, kept in its proper place and lived well, I think sports fandom is a beautiful thing. It is a way of being in communion, a partial fulfillment of the desire we have as human beings desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and a way to grow into the people God created us to be.
So here’s hoping that the game this Sunday is a moment of communion and an opportunity for growth in virtue for Chiefs fans, Eagles fan, and sports fans everywhere.
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Sunday football is most likely a disordered passion for most who enjoy it. How passionate and how much time is spent thinking about the “game” vs Mass or Heavenly things? How much is the Lords day organized around going to or seeing the game? Living in a football city very much disordered in people’s lives.
Such you should use your skills and talents to glorify God? Absolutely. Chariots of Fire captures that struggle beautifully. Also a large number of our faithful brothers have been both coaches and players.
The fact that football takes place on Sunday though could be argued is by devilish design to pull those away from the Lords day.
In 1995, Ignatius Press published this book:
A Catholic Perspective: Physical Exercise and Sports
Publisher’s description:
Robert Feeney
This book is a new and spiritual way of looking at exercise and sports. It offers a sound philosophy of sport with insights from St. Thomas Aquinas on exercise. This book is easily the best and most thorough volume on the subject. Illustrated with 50 photos of Olympic greats, John Paul II, Pier Giorgio Frassati and others. “This collection of Catholic wisdom is timely indeed and will surely prove helpful to Catholic coaches and sportsmen, and to everyone interested in healthy play and honest competition. I commend Robert Feeney’s attempt to explain the distinctively Catholic view of sport.” —George Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia
The cover photograph is of Blessed Giorgio Frassati, who will be canonized in April.
I have not read this book carefully, but I recall noting that it began with a discussion of just what a sport is. I skimmed the text for the word “football”, but was not able to find it. I think the author made a strong point, in a subtle way, through omission.
Many human activities, including crossing the street, involve some degree of risk. Football, on the other hand, is a predictable source of permanent brain damage, and ought to be condemned, along with boxing.
They used to turn lions in with the convicts now we have the NFL.
Personally, I find the men’s NCAA March madness to be some of the best sports out there (fast moving, many upsets common)- better than say the NBA which is so predictable.
Where we live they turn a bull in with the convicts. Seriously. It’s part of a prison rodeo.
No bull?
Was watching a Dragnet rerun recently and the episode was about an ex con who pulled another safe cracking caper shortly after being released, and left his get out of jail card there on purpose; when he was picked up and interrogated by Friday, he finally admitted he couldn’t handle the outside, and to be honest they needed him on the prison team for the upcoming softball season.
Sports today has as the expression goes has “gone over the top”. While I like sports, particularly baseball, now days way too much time and money is spent on sports. There is way to much emphasis from everything related to it, including the over the top idolizing of players, the growth in salaries, where stars are making $10 of millions per year. However that’s the entertainment world we live in. As Catholics we really need to spend more time in Eucharistic Adoration, Praying the Rosary etc. Frankly I have little interest in this year’s Super Bowl, will watch for only the commercials. For sports, glad MLB Spring Training is starting soon, it should be a good year for the Detroit Tigers, I hope.
Will add when I was growing up I lived at the baseball field, Valley Field. So will I criticize todays sports craziness, I am glad I was able to spend my youth playing sports, especially baseball. PS My favorite sports player was Al Kaline, someone who provided a proper balance in being a top player, while providing an excellent example of someone to look up to, a real class act.
I grew up in Northern Illinois, and my parents were…wait for it!…fans of the sport of figure skating. We lived in the area where the great Janet Lynn trained (the Wagon Wheel Lodge in Rockton, IL), and almost everyone was a fan, especially my parents (although my mother preferred Peggy Fleming!).
Both of my parents grew up during the Great Depression, and one of the sports that they could afford was roller skating. Both of them continued to skate after they got married and had children, and we even had a roller skating rink in our basement (the record player was mounted up on the wall near the ceiling) and would regularly host skating parties! My brother and I would occasionally wear those metal skates that fastened onto our shoes, but most of the time, we would sit on the stairs and watch.
I think that’s why they enjoyed ice skating on TV. They didn’t ice skate (even then, ice skates were more expensive and so was “ice time” at a skating rink). But they still loved the sport.
My late husband grew up ice skating on frozen lakes while his dad sat hunched over a hole ice fishing! After we were married and our daughters were old enough, after enjoying “The Battle of the Brians” in the Calgary Olympics, he took our girls to an ice skating rink (in North Carolina, of all places) and enrolled himself and the girls in Learn To Skate classes. Amazingly, the girls stuck with it, and in their 40s, are still skating, coaching, and competing in the beautiful sport of synchronized skating. (Google it–it’s currently never on TV other than Peacock, but there are plenty of videos–look for “Haydenettes”, the best team in the U.S.
My dad was a fan of skating until he died–when he first saw synchronized skating teams, he asked (as many of us do)–=”Why isn’t this on TV?!!” In his 80s, he actually considered buying a pair of ice skates and giving it a try! (I told him NO! and he complied!).
I don’t skate–I want to keep my bones intact. But I still love the sport, especially synchronized skating which I devoutly hope will be in the Olympics before I pass away.
I see some danger in being a “superfan” of any sport (mainly the overconsumption of food and alcohol/drunk driving after the games), but for the most part, I think it’s a wholesome activity that does most of us more good than harm. It certainly brings people together in a time when many of us spend more time on isolated computer communication than in-person relationships. Go, Kansas City Chiefs! (Although I do agree that the Buffalo Bills were amazing this year!)
Signed my son up for T-ball @ $50 fee. First game, he eventually hit the ball and was goaded into running the bases. As he rounded to third, he caught sight of the monkey bars and headed directly to them, never looking back at the coach who was yelling instructions. I breathed a sigh of relief and a prayer of thanks for not having to spend the next dozen years following him to his games, esp since they’re usually during planting and haying season. Both boys did play youth soccer and that was kinda interesting.
Per Newsweek:
Super Bowl LIX is finally here, and a Christian singer will be performing “America the Beautiful” at the pregame show.
Lauren Daigle is set to perform alongside jazz musician Trombone Shorty at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. The Louisiana native is a renowned contemporary Christian music singer and songwriter.
Please explain why ND is the “Fighting Irish” when the founder, Father Sorin was French Canadian? The order of Priests at ND, the Fathers of the Holy Cross is not an Irish order.
See “What’s in a Name: How Notre Dame became the Fighting Irish” on the school’s site.
Thanks. I always wondered where the nickname came from. Years ago, on the way to Chicago, I stopped in South Bend and toured the campus. The golden dome, touchdown Jesus and the beautiful chapel, all magnificent. The kids who go there, don’t know how lucky they are.
I don’t follow the NFL but I do enjoy college football.
Go Gators.
🐊
People want bread and circus more than God