Sports as Life

Retired pastor Randall Nathan did not pay much attention to Pastor Patty's sermon Sunday. She probably thought he didn't like it, since he glowered through the whole service. Actually, he was thinking of Cratchit State's basketball loss Sat. night to the hated A&M team. The Tiny Tims led all the way, and then lost it in the last minute. That was enough to make anyone glower.

To make things worse, the A&M fans did one of their usual anti-cheers, complete with finger motions, to indicate just how tiny they thought the Tims were.

Cratchit is the first university in the state, founded back in 1800 something, when Mitch Cratchit was governor. Ted McDill, the state senator from the little town of Hope's Promise, had tried to get the new state prison located there, since it was bound to be more beneficial to the local economy than a university. Crime was much more prevalent than reading. But Glen Beckmann grabbed the prison for Faux City, by selling Gov. Cratchit, at such a ridiculously small price that it amounted to bribery, some hill land that he claimed contained gold. McDill had to take, with poor grace, the new state university. The folks of Hope's Promise named it after the governor, in hopes of getting a nice little endowment from the gold in "them thar hills." Of course, the gold never panned out, but it turned out that the hills were great for persimmons. Cratchit created a vast persimmon fortune, but his only contribution to the university was his collection of the roots of the various varieties of persimmons, as the basis for the university's now famous persimmon laboratories. By that time, though, the university was stuck with the name of Cratchit, and Bertha, Mitch Cratchit's wife, had insisted that the athletic teams be called the Tiny Tims, so they were stuck with that, too. Now the university has about 35 thousand students, but crime is still more prevalent than reading.

Randall Nathan was sure that Pastor Patty was preaching well. The people around him all looked uncomfortable. But he was thinking of how sports have become the only metaphor for life. We love our teams, and if they don't win, we get disgruntled. We get angry. We glower. Then, sometimes, we fight the fans from the other teams, in the stands or in the parking lots. It's OK, he thinks, to love the Red Sox or the Packers or the Tiny Tims, to feel your own fortunes rise and drop with theirs. Even if the players on the Cowboys are criminals, or those on the Yankees are cheaters, if they are your team, you still support them and want them to win.

When you take that over into church or politics or the economy, though, and you want your team, the Republicans or the Democrats, the Baptists or the Catholics, the Straights or the Gays, the laissez-faire capitalists or the regulated capitalists, to win, even if they are crooks, even if their policies are bad for the world, that's NOT OK. That's where we are, though. We choose up sides, and regardless of whether our goals are best, or our ways to get those goals are best, we just keep cheering for "our" side.

By the time the Postlude started, he was glowering worse than ever. He had the very uncomfortable feeling that he was on the wrong team again, the ones who know what the problem is but don't know what to do about it.