Rock n Roll 17th Hole

I haven't played a round of golf since my honeymoon, and like a lot of other things I used to follow in my younger days, I don't really watch a lot of professional golf anymore.  But every few years the wife and I like to journey up to the big city as the Korn Ferry PGA tour comes to town.  Wow, that's really a terrible name, I know...but watching golfers on the AAA tour is still an impressive thing.  They're on the way up or on the way down or chasing a dream that will never happen, but they do it all so well.  Today we walked 18 holes behind a random guy who shot a 62, with a chip in off the green, a near-albatross, and most impressively an 18th hole 60-foot downhill putt from the fringe to save par.  I'm always in awe of people who do what they do far better than anything I do.  

But somewhere around the 8th hole as we were heading back towards the clubhouse I could faintly hear off in the distance Gettin' Jiggy With It.  At first I thought it was a loud car going by, then perhaps a stereo from one of the houses that line the golf course.  But it soon became evident that the music was pumping from one of the hospitality portals on the 17th hole.  Lots of loud music continued to follow, alongside occasional trivia questions, promotional reads for the tourney sponsors, and a DJ getting an increasingly drunk crowd (who likely never saw any of other 17 holes) hyped.  

Throughout the rest of the round from various spots on the course I could continue to hear the music and the DJ to varying degrees of loudness...all the while the golfers in our group were rock solid, one bogey between them through the first sixteen holes.  The seventeenth hole came about, with the giant grandstand holding thousands of drunk people behind the green paying no attention to the quality that was before them, the thing they were ostensibly there to see, and my golfers finally cracked: two of them bogeying putts that they had not missed all day as they tried and failed to concentrate amongst the dull roar of the drunks around them.  I really, really felt bad for them.  Yes, I know, all the golfers had to endure the same thing.  But why on earth does it have to be like this?  

Go to almost any sport now and there is rarely silence anywhere.  Between pitches or as the basketball teams walks the ball up the floor or as the centers face off, there always has to be those 15 seconds of LOUD LOUD LOUD.  It's like our world has told us that we aren't capable of enjoying anything on our own anymroe, that there has to be a pounding soundtrack to the moments of our lives.  I don't like it, but hearing this on a golf course knocked a bit of the magic out of the day.  These are top-level professional athletes (yes, even minor leaguers are unbelievable in their skill levels).  Why can't we be trusted to enjoy what they do without all the fake artificial noise?  As much as I loved watching our golfers today, I really hated that 17th hole.  

Why 'WE' Suck

Sitting here watching Sporting Kansas City lose yet again tonight, a long, perfect line in their quest for a winless season.  This comes after a weekend in which I watched my daughter's JV soccer team get outscored a combined 12-0 in three tournament games in 24 hours (miraculously we won one of those three in a shootout against a team slightly worse than us).  And I am a longtime fan of the 2015 World Champion Kansas City Royaals, who as of this writing are 4-15 and may break records for incompetence this season.  Yes, this is maybe the universe balancing out the fact that the Chiefs have won the Super Bowl twice in four years and I we get to watch Patrick Mahomes do amazing things every fall Sunday.  But right now the most of the teams that I can say that I genuinely support (Shrewsbury Town FC doesn't count as I've still never seen them live, thanks COVID breaking out in March 2020) are hot garbage.  

Yes, sports doesn't mean as much as it used to.  My favorite team for the past decade has been whatever teams my kids happen to be playing for.  And with anything besides my loved ones, I know that I'm rooting for laundry.  But still, sports helps shape our lives.  And so why does it have teo be so bad?  Why do I hate watch them with a special sports anger towards Khiry Shelton?  

So since it would be unkind to dissecte my daughter's soccer team, and the Royals I still have not watched in person, let's look at Sporting KC.  Why do 'we' suck?  

1. MLS is different than it was a decade ago.  It has almost twice as many teams, and investment in many teams, old and new, far outstrips what SKC is doing.  We still act like being a mid-major club is good enough.  That we still have this mindset now makes it seem like we can't compete.

2. We have done a poor job in turning over the squad.  Even as we haven't developed and then kept decent youngsters (e.g. G Busio, potentially great here but floundering in the Italian second division), we hold onto guys who have stayed around too long like Graham Zusi and Roger Espinoza, and we allow Khiry Shelton to think he's a major component of this team.

3. The guys we do bring in like Erick Thommy and Remi Walter are solid players (I mean, they are at least better than Khiry Shelton), but nobody that will really push the team towards greatness.  We need solid players, but when do ever sign somebody that really changes things?  

4. Khiry Shelton is still on this team.

5. Too many injuries for a small squad mean that when Alan Pulido gets hurt, Khiry Shelton plays a lot.  

6. We don't have the players for Vermes' 4-3-3, but we still continue to play it, just as we did a decade ago.  Formation is not the biggest problem with this team...but somewhere there needs to be a recognition that just because it worked in olden days, that doesn't mean it will work now.  

7. Finally, as I watch SKC try to chase this game tonight, we just brought Khiry Shelton on as a substitute.  Somehow I don't see this wroking out well. 

(10 minutes later, watching the end of the game)

Yep, we lost again.  Dang.

On Sports Fandom

 It's hard to be a sports fan these days.  If your team tries to be decent members of society, they often end up being hot garbage on the field.  Instead, we are glad when our team picks up the all-star free agent who is free because he threw his pregnant girlfriend down a flight of steps six months ago and we hope that at least for the rest of the season he can keep from being a complete dirtbag, at least in public.  Rooting for decent people is nice...but winning is everything.  

The World Cup began this week.  It's being held in November and December instead of it's traditional summer place, because it's being held in Qatar, a place that most of us couldn't place on a map until three weeks ago.  And it's held as the frost settles on our cars each morning because in Qatar if it was held in summer players would literally die on the field because of the heat.  

Thing is, lots of people have died to build the stadiums in Qatar.  And the survivors, mostly people from India and Bangledesh imported to provide the brute labor needed to build such things, have been repeatedly documented to be living in squalid living conditions and often cheated out of their negotiated wages.  They're basically slaves, living as slaves in a nation that currently has the highest GDP in the world becuase of its oil revenues.  

Of course, now the matches have started.  We've watched England put a half-dozen past Iran, Saudi Arabia upset tournament faves Argentina, and our household team the USA underwhelm again.  We don't really care about those other stories now, as long as we get our sports.  

And maybe that's how it's supposed to be.  We live in a world of trouble and misery and maybe these kinds of games keep us from thinking about things too much.  I'll watch, but it's just not as much fun as it ought to be.  

Track Meet

I am writing from my daughter's first middle school track meet.  It's 75 degrees and sunny and hardly any wind...a perfect day for a track meet.  It's the first meet she is in, and she is running the 1600 meter and then an hour or two later the 800 meter.  That's a lot of running for her first meet.  Saturday I went over to the track with her and I walked while she ran.  At one point I decided to run with her after she had run 4-5 laps, and she took off.  I ran about a half a lap with her and then I was done...I don't know if it was fat old me, or young fast her, but it made me feel a lot better about how she might do today. 

In the end, I don't really care whether she wins or loses, I just want her to have fun and do her best.  I think she will be fine, really, but the dad within me thinks...GO...you can do this!  As parents we get older and fatter and at some point we decide to realize that we are not going to do much more athletically and we hand things off to our kids.  So we vicariously live and die with them.  We scream at officials, we celebrate their victories, and some day we pay off admissions officers at universities to ensure they get into a good college. 

This is why when somebody asks me now what my favorite team is, I no longer say the Royals or Sporting KC or the Chiefs.  It's whatever team my kids happen to be playing on.  The older I get I don't understand why people get so crazy about rooting for laundry.  Celebrate who you know and enjoy the rest. 

7th grade B-level basketball

My daughter is playing middle school basketball this year, and she made the B team, which is about right.  She's tall and has a good instinct on defense and passes the ball really well, but her ball handling is suspect, her shooting is shaky, and her rebounding is not mean enough.  But fortunately she is on a team in which her intangibles keep her playing...the team just seems to play better when she is on the floor.  Before last night they were 6-0 and only one game had been competitive. 

Last night, though, we played a team that frankly was not as good as at least a couple of the teams we had beaten, but we had practiced only once in the past week due to holidays and weather conditions.  And for the first half we looked like we hadn't touched a ball for weeks.  We took bad shots, made bad passes, and looked out of sorts on defense.  So at halftime we were down 10-2.  Second half we came alive and things started to click again...the other team couldn't hardly get the ball up the court, we were passing well, we were getting rebounds.  But for all the effort they put in, they simply could not score.  Easy shots rimmed out.  Shots that looked good would take three or four bounces on the rim before coming out.  Nothing would fall, and eventually the final was that we lost 13-11.  I would guess that we missed somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 shots in the second half; Lizzy missed at least 4-5 that normally she would make, and the girls were bummed out. 

But somewhere there is a lesson in failure.  Nobody wants to lose the game, but down the road it will probably be a good thing.  At times the girls were getting a little bit overconfident, if not cocky.  I have seen this in teams I have coached in the past, and in teams I have coached against...too much success makes you sloppy.  You stop thinking that you need to get better, that you need to put in the work.  The girls had a practice scheduled at 6am this morning to finish out the week, and I'm sure that there were some tired bodies and tired minds when they got there...but hopefully 10 minutes in they were back to working hard.  They've got three weeks left of games, and maybe this will be the beginning of them really taking off. 

My NFL end

As we get older in life we have to make conscious decisions about things to give up in this life.  Because there are many things we add in maturity that are More Important (spouses, children, jobs, houses, faith), many of the things we were raised with lose their importance.

In recent years I gave up college football (there were many negative reasons to give it up: athletes getting ripped off, many dull games, games were far too long, no real champion, why are colleges involved in this?) and except for the Royals I have gradually given up following any major league baseball.  There are just too many games, and I just don't have time to follow 25 players on 30 teams.  Of course, I could say that since I only follow the Royals I don't follow any major league baseball.  Zing.

It was hard to give up both of these things in my life: baseball was part of my upbringing, and for many years most of my Saturdays were dedicated to college football.  Especially when I lived on the west coast, Saturday football would start at 9am and many days I would watch the better parts of four games before the day was done.

The NFL, however, has been a relatively more recent addition to my life.  I didn't grow up having a team, as the closest team was the Cowboys and I picked up my older brother's hatred of them, and the Chiefs never seemed worth rooting for.  Only when I hit my mid 20s and was not far from Kansas City and had many friends rooting for what was often a good team (Derrick Thomas, Joe Montana, Marcus Allen, Neil Smith) did I jump on the bandwagon.  But never was it a huge thing for me...I didn't live or die with the Chiefs like I ever had rooted for the Royals or the Sooners.

I have also developed a growing fascination with soccer in recent years.  I'd much rather go to a Sporting Kansas City game than a Royals or Chiefs game, and I'd much rather spend a Saturday morning watching EPL soccer than a Sunday afternoon watching the NFL.  I'm not sure exactly when things changed...part of it may be that after 40 years of baseball and football it seems to dull to me...soccer is something new, even though I played it as a kid.  I enjoy learning the nuances of the game in a way that is something like learning a second language...it's not natural, but it's fun when it starts to make sense.

The NFL in many ways is a greatly entertaining product, but I'm just about done with it.  The Chiefs have been bad enough that they haven't been must-see for years, but now that all this information about head injuries is coming out I'm not sure that I can keep watching.  Just as I don't want to watch MMA because the point of it seems to be to hurt somebody else, the idea that football leaves so many people with debilitating injuries makes me squeamish about supporting it.  I decided a few years ago that my son would not be playing football (there's plenty other games out there to make him tough without squashing his brain), and so maybe it's also time to give up the NFL as well.

The season starts in a few weeks, and it might be tough to escape it.  But there are enough projects around the house to be done that I think I can get by without it.

Vicarious Vics

My 7-year old daughter is playing Upward basketball.  I like the program for the most part...it's positive and encouraging.  They look to get the kids involved, even the ones who don't really understand what is going on.   When a kid makes a mistake, they'll stop and try to explain what happened.  They pray with the kids, they try to help them remember what is important, they teach the idea of sportsmanship.

Of course, there is always the problem of parents who live vicariously through their kids, who act at the games like they have serious money riding on the outcome.  Because Upward is an outreach program of some sort for the church that sponsors it, they allow kids to be involved who may come from homes where Christian values are not encouraged.  And occasionally this will mean that there is always at least one Vicarious Vic in the crowd.

So my daughter is one of those kids that needs some encouragement.  She's a bit of a slow adapter...she's played two seasons of soccer and the first year she really didn't get it.  If she kicked the ball, that was good...but by last year there were times where she looked like Gareth Bale flashing down the wing.  Not always, of course, but she generally understood what was going on: 'if you have the ball, try to score it in the other team's goal...pass the ball to your teammates...if the other team has the ball, try to kick it away.'

When she started basketball, then, we knew that there was going to be a learning curve for her.  She hasn't played much, and though her coaches look like they know what they are doing and are encouraging the kids to have fun, she's a bit behind.  On defense, she knows to put her arms out and try to do something that looks like guarding whoever she is matched up with.  But on offense...not so great.  Though we have worked with her on dribbling, it's not a sure thing yet.  If she has the ball in the open court as if she is a point guard, she will take 3-4 dribbles and stop, not quite sure what to do.  If she somehow comes across the ball in a crowded spot, she's likely to just pick the ball up and run with it.  Even at her level, that's still not allowed.  Her shooting is more like an overhead throw.  Some of the other kids her age are much more advanced...they can dribble, stop, and shoot and pass.  But for Elizabeth, she's just not quite there yet...next year she may be Chris Paul with the ball, but for now, she's got a lot of work to do.

So last Saturday she had a couple of incidents where it was obvious she was out of her depth.  One time she ran with the ball.  But the guy in the row behind me who was videotaping every minute of the game for posterity's sake, when his daughter is the next great star, had a play-by-play account of everything that she (and other kids) did wrong, and he was not shy about expressing them.  "Oh, come on ref...she's travelling.  Jump ball!  You gotta be kidding me."  Remember, these are 7- and 8- year old girls.

As much as I hope that my kids enjoy sports, I want them to keep some perspective about it all...and this will not be easy with Vicarious Vics around.

Should Christians be sports fans?

I'm reading a book called 'Among the Thugs' by Bill Buford, a book about soccer hooliganism in the 1980s and published in 1991.  Fascinating account of what it's like to be an extreme sports fan.  It makes me not quite sure I want to go and spend some time in England watching soccer matches someday.  I don't want exactly want to be knifed or have people pee on me from above because I'm some kind of American wanker.

It makes me think something of sports fandom, how dangerous to the soul it might be.  Maybe there is not this kind of extremism or violent mob mentality in American sports, but the sociological questions of what it means to be a true 'fan' are fascinating.  Last night we went up to my evangelical Christian university's gymnasium to see the men's and women's basketball teams play basketball against another university.  It wasn't a terribly interesting game, but to watch sports fan scream at officials, yell at the opposing team, and act like this is of vital importance makes me think.  What are Christians to really think about sports?

For most of the last few centuries sports was held at arms' length by the organized church.  It was viewed as being frivolous, as edifying body rather than spirit.  But in the late 19th century the YMCA started to appeal to youth with the idea that sports was important for both their body and their mind.  Promoting this idea of 'virile manhood', churches and church-related organizations started pushing sports, thinking that it wasn't just enough to preach.  Naturally much of the 'religious' element eventually got pushed out...would anybody consider the "Y" a 'Christian' organization now?  Probably not.  But they certainly have some good waterslides...

Now that my children are getting older, they are starting to play sports.  It's not that they are that interested in them yet, but we want them to try things.  So Elizabeth is now playing 'Upward' basketball.  It's a fascinating operation they have...they teach kids how to post up or execute a good cheer even as they are trying to get them to hear a word of Scripture and teach character.  I can't really find anything wrong with it...but over time, will Upward move away from the Christian foundation it is trying to promote? Will its emphasis on outreach eventually mean that it doesn't stand for much at all, so as not to offend?

The idolatry of sports is one of the great dangers to the modern church.  We have so much free time, so much discretionary income in our American culture that we have the means to obsess about what a group of men wearing a certain uniform do.  In some cultures it turns them into lunatics that go rampaging through European cities.  Others have a less dangerous activity, perhaps, but their passion is just as strong.  It overcomes churches, it divides families, it makes a mockery of those of us who claim that we are to be serving God first and foremost.  Lord help us to keep sports in their rightful place.