Calling Audibles Part XV: A Sam’s Town and Hotel Casino Christmas
… Mary was about to be delivered… there was no room in the inn… Mary laid her baby in a feeding trough among the sheep and cows… wise men and working men followed a wild star to come and see this baby.
Christmas is a time of paradox and contradiction.
In a world so full of paradox and contradiction, we have tried to turn away from the sharp edges of Christmas. If you believe the commercials, Christmas is about electronics, jewelry, and lots and lots of decorations. Christmas is about getting what you want and giving others what they want—and it is built from the mentality of accumulating more and more stuff.
If you believe the Bible, Christmas is about chilling austerity—God entered the world by way of a tiny helpless baby born far from home with questionable paternity among the dust, straw, and manure of a stable. His first bed doubled as a feeding trough for cows. His mother was a teenager who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. And only a few people even noticed when he came into the world.
Jesus was born in the quiet, in the dark, in and among ambiguities we can barely get our minds around.
For the last four years, there has been plenty of room in the inn for the UNC entourage at Christmas time. We’ve traveled by car, bus, and plane to get to these Christmas destinations. We’re fed well, we are entertained, we get new clothes, we get gifts, and we get attention. Far from the austerity of Jesus’ entry into the world, we have spent Christmas the last few years in the midst of abundance.
This year, however, the paradox of Christmas is far from drowned out by the noise of your typical bowl game experience. This year the contradictions and sharp edges are persistent. The pain and the possibility in it all are impossible to avoid.
We’ve listened to the new AD from UNC tell the VIPs at this bowl what an outstanding coaching staff this is. And we hear all that knowing that this coaching staff has already been dismantled. After this bowl game this outstanding staff is gone. This is an outstanding staff that has been dismissed from duty. Job well done in difficult circumstances has gotten them fired. Sound paradoxical? Sure does feel that way to all of us.
We enter our hotel this year off the quiet streets of Shreveport, LA. The smoke from the casino is overpowering. The blinking lights of the casino flash over a downtown several decades past its prime. Like many southern cities, there are the remnants of a complicated past and a difficult present in the midst of warm hospitality and signs of resilience. The kindness of people is real. The complexities of life in America today are visible. There is happiness and grief in this place. Sound contradictory? Those contradictions are impossible to escape.
We are here with people who we love and care about and we know that our time together is short. After the game tomorrow everything changes. We can’t stop the clock. Nothing anyone says or does will change the bottom line. These players know that. They will work hard to finish this season strong and then they will move on because they have to. And we will do the same. We won’t move on without sadness about saying goodbye; we won’t move on without gratitude for the blessings of these relationships. Sound conflicted? The contradictions are excruciating at times.
Christmas Eve is a sacred time in the life of a Christian. Often at bowls players are taken by bus to places like arcades, movie theaters, and malls to entertain them on this holy night. This year they went bowling.
John and I always find a way to get to a church service with our kids. Any players who wanted to this year could leave the bowling alley and come to church with us. Twenty-six of us went to worship with the congregation of First Presbyterian Church of Shreveport. The pastor, Pen Peery (a UNC alum), wore a Tar Heel tie under his robe. The ushers had reserved seats for us in the front of the church.
We heard the magnificent story of the Incarnation, shared communion, and with candles lit in that beautiful sanctuary we sang Silent Night together. I couldn’t help but feel the power of the paradox we all embodied in that moment—a family albeit fractured, believers wondering what this could all mean, and children of God enchanted by a moment that passed all too quickly.
When we got back onto the bus one of the players said, “I really needed that.” Another said, “It feels like we’re a family.” All the way back to Sam’s Town we sang Christmas songs. We laughed and enjoyed each other. What a gift!
When we came back into the hotel we ran into some of the players’ parents and families who had just arrived in Shreveport. They wanted to talk and share their feelings about all that is happening with the football team right now. The tears we shared together were just as real as the joy we had shared with the players on the bus ride home from church.
All of it felt like what is absolutely right about college football. And this situation is being torn apart by what’s wrong with college football.
The paradoxes just keep showing themselves. The contradictions multiply.
Christmas at Sam’s Town Hotel and Casino gives us less and more. And God meets us there with gifts we barely imagined even while we are not getting what we want. We can’t get others what they want either. All of us are asked to trust in a future we can’t see.
A baby born in a barn is more powerful than the mightiest king. God’s abundance comes in an austere moment in time.
No audibles needed here. Today feels like a day to just listen and give thanks for the contradictions.
Merry Sam’s Town Hotel and Casino Christmas.
Calling Audibles Part XIV: Touchdowns for Jesus
What is impossible for us is possible for God. ~Luke 18:27
“Tell John Kasay that God doesn’t care about football. She’s a baseball fan.” This was the witty retort of a minister friend of mine back in the late 1990s when my husband, John, was coaching for the Carolina Panthers. We had lost a big game to Tampa Bay. Kicker John Kasay had missed a field goal that could have won the game in the last few seconds.
When asked about the missed kick in a post game press conference, Kasay suggested that the wind suddenly changed and that God must not have wanted the Panthers to win that day.
Tim Tebow is not the first NFL player to put God at the center of the way he understands and interprets football. Everyone knows that, right?
My husband, John, spent twelve years coaching in the NFL on four different teams. Every team had players who were committed to regular public pronouncements about their Christianity. We saw situations where team chemistry was strengthened by faith and we saw situations where team chemistry was fractured by faith.
In the places where it seemed to divide, faith fed an ethos of exclusion and judgment. With almost 100 players on a football team at different parts of the season, the law of averages tells us that there are people of diverse faiths on every team. But there is a chilling effect on people being “out” about their faith when one way of believing is held up as the only right way.
In the places where faith seemed to strengthen the team, it enhanced everyone’s ability to connect, to persevere, to put things in perspective, and to kindle generosity and compassion. Those were places where there was room for non-conformity to one way of believing.
With all this talk about Tebowing, I am wondering what offends so many about Tebow’s brand of Christianity? What could it be that hits a nerve for us when athletes bring God, or more particularly, Jesus, onto the playing field?
Does it boil down to simply a theological disagreement? When we assert that God has chosen one team over another, we are assuming the God uses God’s power in a particular kind of way. Perhaps it is the suggestion that God would use God’s power in this way that offends.
Because I am a pastor and theologian, people often ask me if it is ok to pray for wins. I say “sure as long as you’re praying for the same team I am.” All kidding aside, I confess, I do pray during football games. On my best days, I am praying for peace, for calm, for good things to unfold. I am praying for the players and the coaches. I am praying for everyone to enjoy, to do their best, and to be safe from injury.
In desperate times and in the heat of the moment, I’ve have prayed for things like touchdowns and wins. Who hasn’t uttered prayers that are theologically inconsistent when the going gets rough?Of course, we all know that God has more important business to attend to than who wins a football game. I don’t personally know Tim Tebow, but my guess is that he would agree. I would add, too, that if God worked in such a mechanistic, puppeteer-like way that God was engineering wins and losses then we would not have children with distended bellies in Africa or war or children who are abused by the adults who are supposed to take care of them.
At the same time, another version of the idea that wins and losses are beneath God that goes something like “I don’t think Jesus gives a crap about football” does not quite cut it either. Jesus’ ministry was much more skillful than that. He didn’t go around saying, “I care about this, but I don’t care about that.” He moved about in the world with an utter immediacy to who and what was in front of him.
I believe that if Jesus were here today in his ministry on this planet that he would make it his business to encounter something that holds our attention and elicits our passion that way football does. I have a feeling that Jesus would be able to inhabit football stadiums much like he would inhabit modern day churches—with compassion, with hard truth, with an offer of healing, and with some parabolic wisdom that would knock your socks off.
With all the ways NFL football players can be almost deified in our culture I would rather see a player who acknowledges that there is a higher power at work in his life than one who makes it all about him. That awareness about our own power and the limits therein can be life-giving.
The issue of power permeates the college game when it comes to how faith takes up space. In college these issues morph from how we feel when players express strong beliefs on a gigantic stage into the ethics of how faith is navigated in settings in which there are power differentials. As troubling as some of the expressions of faith we encountered in the NFL were (like when I got kicked out of the wives’ Bible study for expressing a different interpretation of scripture), the abuses of power that we’ve experienced in the college game are much more problematic.
In college football there are some prevalent streams of Christianity that course through most teams. These particular ways of interpreting and embodying the Christian faith are not problematic in and of themselves. They become problematic when people with more power than the players (e.g. coaches or other staff members in football programs and athletic departments) endorse that particular expression of Christianity and put pressure on the players to adopt it as their own.
When one has more power than someone else in a situation (like the power to effect one’s playing time, scholarship, status as a student), then one must be careful not to abuse that power. If a coach tells a player that he would be playing better if he would accept Jesus as his Savior, that is an abuse of power. If someone addresses the team at a mandatory meeting at a state university and tells them the team will win more games if they all follow Jesus, that is an abuse of power.
Such abuses of power are also an affront to the remarkable ways that God works in and through each of us. Faith is a journey unique to each person. Why does it seem sometimes like religious people have the most trouble trusting that God is at work that way? God doesn’t need us to force our religion on other people. God is working it the way God works. We may be a blessing along to way to someone, but you and I are not the reason someone changes his/her heart. God is.
There is too little tolerance in college football for differences in faith experiences. There is too much tolerance for the ways faith is used to chide players and is enlisted to manufacture team unity. Football teams aren’t that different than churches or any other system made up of people. Insistence on spiritual conformity is going to lead to alienation, hurt, and resentment for some people. There are ways to be faithful that let people have space for their own experience. God is that big!
God is calling audibles all the time—reading where we are and what defenses we have up. God knows how to see us and be responsive in just the ways we need in each of our lives. The audible in big time football could be to let faith be what it is—a powerful force of which humans are not in charge. If a player wants to score touchdowns for Jesus, that’s his call. If God has anything at all to do with football, then the end zone is big enough for all our religious differences, even the ones we don’t completely understand.
Calling Audibles Part XIII: Call It, Run It
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you…” ~Galatians 1:6
Apparently Coach Todd Graham, who left the University of Pittsburgh suddenly this week to become the Head Coach at Arizona State, had a promotional video on the Pitt website while he was still the Head Coach. In it he said that what he loved most about coaching at Pitt was his relationships with the players.
Word has it that Graham didn’t tell his players face to face when he left to take the ASU job. Instead he had an assistant forward a text telling them he had to leave right that minute for his dream job and God bless. The players who have responded in kind have generally not been kind to their erstwhile coach, choosing words like “liar” and “Judas” to express their hurt.
True to form, the Internet chatter has turned white hot with accusations about Todd Graham and others like him. They are hypocrites, the chatter chastises. He only cares about himself, others accuse.
I do not personally know Todd Graham. He may be exactly what people are saying about him. If he is, he isn’t the only football coach with a hyperactive ego and attachment issues. If he is not, he’s not the first football coach to be distorted by the Internet, media outlets, and the general public. I remember hearing one sports radio host in Chicago explain that John was too distracted by the four kids that he had to do a good job for the Bears. We had one 3 year old at the time. But because that was said on the airwaves, all of the sudden everyone believed that we had four kids.
The more interesting dynamic to dig into here, however, is not about media distortion or Internet hyperbole; it is about the nature of coaches’ relationships that matter in big time college football.
A quick list of relationships that matter would include relationships coaches have with their families, with their players, with university administrators, with boosters, with fans, and with the community at large. These are all the relationships that form the bonds that create a strong football program. Ironically, all of these relationships are causalities of many of the normal operating procedures in big time football.
Consider for a moment a player like Nelson Hurst, tight end for the UNC Tar Heels. Nelson went to Mississippi State his first year only for his coach to get fired at the end of the season. The next coach that came in did not really see much of a place for Nelson, so Nelson decided to transfer to UNC where his brother James was being recruited and thought highly of the coaching staff. Nelson redshirted his sophomore year due to NCAA rules for transfers. In 2010 Nelson got to play for Butch Davis and his staff. Then before his junior year Coach Davis got fired. His junior year he played for a different Head Coach in Everett Withers, even though he had the same Offensive Coordinator and the same Tight Ends Coach (Allen Mogridge). Nelson caught a touchdown pass and was an asset to the offense this past season. Now his senior year he will have his fifth Head Coach of his college career and an all new staff. By the way, he’s also had four Athletic Directors during his college career so far, too.
Can such fluid and volatile conditions create and support relationships that matter?
To say that it is difficult is an understatement. To say that it is frustrating and even heartbreaking sometimes is also only a superficial description of a dysfunctional dynamic. Todd Graham’s abrupt departure from the University of Pittsburgh is just a symptom of deep and abiding habits in big time football. Habits like impatience, grasping, short sightedness, and breaking promises are par for the course. These habits are not confined to football by any means. Football embodies much of what American society is like—for good and for ill. In America we often rush to decisions and judgments at the same time we love instant gratification. In football, this leads to decisions made without ample time and without ample and inclusive conversations to take into account the deeper and wider effects of our choices.
Todd Graham is not the only one who has broken promises to people. Presidents and Chancellors do it, too. Athletic directors do it. Recruits do it. Colleagues do it. The way big time college football works, the engines are fueled by such contingencies. Who knows what can happen at any given time? Some would say the pressure and tension created by these dynamics is what motivates the over the top hours that coaches work.
But in the best-case scenarios, the motivation for that kind of work comes from a place other than fear of losing one’s job or grasping for the next best thing. Hopefully more people involved in big time football than not are in it with more noble intentions than what is in it for them. Some passion, some love at the core of all this effort and expense must have a redeeming purpose. For me, it gets back to what is most basic about this work that my husband does—building relationships that matter. Relationships that matter can inspire people to be their best selves. Relationships that matter can inspire people to work for a shared goal and put their own needs aside. Relationships that matter can make a bunch of individuals become a winning team that does things together that no one expected.
I can testify first hand that coaches who really do care about their players do build and maintain relationships that matter. Many times, however, despite their best efforts the relationships are fractured and trivialized by the way this business works.
My seven-year-old daughter is trying to sort out what it means that her Dad will not be coaching at UNC for the Tar Heels next year. She keeps asking where we will go and who will go with us. “Will Bryn go with us?” “What about Gio and Marquise?” She goes down the list of all the players that she knows and loves wondering how these young men fit into our lives now. I tell her that they’ll still be here playing for the Tar Heels. We’ll always love and care about them, Dad just won’t be coaching them the same way anymore.
I wonder what the audible could be in big time football when it comes to how much these habits conspire against relationships that matter. Why is it so difficult for people to believe that football programs are only as strong as the relationships that make them up? Maybe this audible is about not calling an audible at all. Maybe we should get back to something so basic that we’ve forgotten how potent it can be. How about running the play you called? After all, a man is only as good as his word.
Calling Audibles Part XII: Reading Tea Leaves and Twitter Feeds
Chapel Hill is abuzz with predictions that a new football coach is on his way. Twitter feeds suggest possible timetables and scenarios while everyone waits for some official word.
For my family and the other current coaches’ families we pretty much knew this day would come when they fired Butch Davis back in July.
Many people came up to us when they fired Coach Davis and said things like “I’m so glad your husband didn’t get fired and that you all get to stay in Chapel Hill.” It is hard to explain to people that, while John and the other coaches did not get fired when Coach Davis did, firing the Head Coach in this situation simply meant death by a slower means for the assistants. When the Head Coach goes it usually follows that all the assistants go, too. In this situation, since they fired Coach Davis when they did, they needed people to coach the season so we were retained. Everett Withers wasn’t the only one with an “Interim” tag before his name. They could have put that before everyone’s title back in July.
Every game week there were tea leaves to read—how did the team look, what’s the talk around town, do we have a real shot at staying or will they clean house here no matter what?
Now the tea leaves and twitter feeds leave less and less to wonder about when it comes to what’s next.
Just five years ago it was my husband and the other coaches coming to UNC who were creating the same buzz. People were excited about a new stage in Carolina football. We were excited to be here and we were very touched by how kind and supportive everyone was. The coaches have done what they were hired to do at UNC. And there is a lot to feel good about. Even so, as guess work gives way to predictions and predictions give way to rumors, which give way to some new reality, what is unfolding here does not feel good to us now.
One Twitter feed I saw yesterday, written by someone we have done business with in Chapel Hill, read something like “I am sorry to see the current FB staff to go, but I am excited about a new coach and ready for the healing to begin.”
I wonder whose healing gets to begin when the new coach gets here? The players who have dealt with two years of upheaval and uncertainty and now face another season of transition and change—does their healing begin? The coaches who are uprooted and wondering where the next stop is after doing a good job here and serving this university well—does the healing begin for them? The coaches’ families who have friends to part with, houses to sell, and more unknowns to face–does our healing begin?
If there’s one thing I have learned about healing it’s that you don’t do it alone or in a vacuum. If you are healing, but I am not, your healing will always be compromised. We are that connected with each other. The harm that has happened at UNC will not be healed simply by bringing in some new faces. Healing is not a surface dynamic and it doesn’t stop with superficial wounds. Deep healing gets to the places where the real harm has found a home. And it keeps rooting out the offending source of infection and harm until real change occurs. The healing may or may not begin here with a new football coach—it depends on how willing people are to look at the real wounds and the chronic diseases.
I doubt that kind of healing work is something that the “tweeps” and fortune tellers of the world are interested in at this point. The adrenaline rush of a new face, a new day, a new reason to cheer and feel good about their school is enough to keep the twitter feeds feeding and the tea leavers reading.
Between the lines and behind the wonderment of it all, we’re all still here, living in this community albeit for the short term. You might hear about where we’re headed before we do! Just remember not to believe everything you read. The real lives in college football are not reducible to 140 characters or to the rumor mill that rules the internet.
The most important information I got yesterday was not from any tweet or internet rumor. The wisdom I received was from two different players’ fathers—they are the ones who really sent the healing balm our way. More than the twitter feeds and tea leaves, these men spoke from real experience and from lives touched. They reminded us about what’s true and good about the football life. Both of them reached out in their own way to say thank you. Their words mean more to us than anything else we could have received. We came here to be a part of young men’s lives in a way that could make a difference. And we came here to help usher in an exciting new day in UNC football at the same time. The twitter-speak may not be able to put that into words that translate. But these fathers sure did.
As far as the audible for big time football, when it comes to days like this, I am not sure what to call. Whatever the play, we can’t escape the loss.
Calling Audibles Part XI: Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air
~ from Shakespeare’s Macbeth
The witches who prophecy Macbeth’s ascent to the throne in Shakespeare’s tragedy warn us at the beginning of the play that human lives rise and fall by both temptation and strange twists of fate. Macbeth’s actions hasten his own death as he sets in motion death upon death in order to realize the prophecy that he will be King of Scotland. By the end, Macbeth’s wife is dead from guilt and madness and he has lost his mind. He muses as to whether life means anything at all. Even so, he continues to fight until Macduff decapitates him in the end.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Friends are foes, and foes are friends. Truths are lies, lies become truth. Such epic and tragic reversals are not just reserved for Shakespeare—they resonate with us because they are a part of the fabric of human life. Perhaps football is so provocative, so beloved to so many because it plays out these deep patterns and profound tragic structures of human life in such clear relief.
Like Macbeth’s tragic and impatient lust for power, there are many who yearn so much for positions of power, prestige, and wealth in football that they do not hesitate to hurt or destroy others in the process. This yearning for power and all that comes with it can overtake any commitment to honesty, to fairness, and even to friendship.
Football is a harsh business. Trusting people is a difficult thing to do. And meaningful, lasting friendships are hard to build and maintain. The very structure of how things work in football conspires against such friendships.
The NFL is a business, pure and simple. And people are climbing and grasping and working to position themselves just as they do in other businesses. There are plenty of people in the NFL who are not such graspers and climbers, but the system tends to reward those who are willing to do “whatever it takes” to get to the top. In a highly competitive business, these win at all cost mentalities are often coveted for what they can achieve even if only in the short term.
We left the NFL five years ago because we believe life in football can and does have higher meaning and purpose and we wanted our lives to reflect those beliefs with more integrity. The higher purpose in college football is, of course, that players are a part of a university campus, they are working toward a college degree, and many of them are playing for the love of the game. Only 2% of college football players will play in the NFL. While the lure of playing in the NFL motivates many of the players who work so hard on Saturdays for their schools, college football also has a higher purpose because it is part of a larger system of values. These values, in the best case scenarios, function at the same time that football is played at a high level and people care about winning.
The NCAA investigation at UNC has opened my eyes to many, many things about college football that threaten its “higher purpose” in university contexts. Anyone who follows football these days knows the litany of issues and ills that face the sport:
- should players get paid?
- how can the NCAA regulate and police all the rules in college football?
- are head coaches paid too much?
- do players get meaningful degrees?
- are concussions an acceptable by-product of the game?
- what are the accountability systems in place in college football for both universities and the NCAA? Are they effective?
- is the BCS system fair? flawed beyond repair? replaceable by a playoff system in Division 1A?
- does football belong on university campuses at all?
These questions are all complicated and there are no easy answers to any of them. One thing is clear to me, however, after being up close to all that has happened at UNC the last two football seasons. What ails football may sound unique and particular to this sport that America loves so passionately. But, at its very core, the disease of this sport is no different than the sicknesses that threaten to afflict us all in human life: greed, dishonesty, abuse of power, and short sightedness.
These symptoms of human affliction are as old as human life itself—Cain killed Abel, after all, because he thought there were not enough blessings from God and inheritance from Dad to go around. Cain lived in a world of scarcity, so he got his just deserts the only way he thought it was possible—he eliminated the competition.
Ironically, in football the resources are not getting scarcer, they are multiplying rapidly. Football is generating more and more money, millions even billions of dollars a year. Yet, the problems associated with its inequity and fairness are not getting better, some would say that they are getting worse. Why in the face of such abundance is the scarcity model– the foul is fair model, thriving?
There is a remarkable lack of fairness and a high tolerance for foul being fair in big time football. If that wasn’t the case how would we have gotten to such a place of inequality—where the young men who generate the revenue have few rights and little to no access to the fruits of their labor? How would we have gotten to a place where rules and regulations have taken the place of relationships and trust? How else would we find ourselves in repeated firestorms of firings, suspensions, probations, and other punitive modes of operation?
These habits of relating to one another do not build strong institutions or communities. They create faulty and illusory values that tend to shift and change to serve those who have the most to lose. All the rhetoric and commercialism in the world cannot mask those truths forever.
Macbeth himself literally lost his head from the horrible ambitions that possessed him after he heard he would be king. Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Like a spell, we learn to live with this skewed reality “just in case” we might find our way to the top of the heap. And we become blind to the distortions of privilege and prejudice. So often football holds up a mirror to us that reflects the larger perils and promises of being human. This “foul is fair” mentality is no different.
A man I met recently at a lecture I gave shared copies of several letters he had written to Chancellor Thorp about football at UNC. This man aligns himself with former UNC system President Bill Friday’s sentiments that football is a problem that must be reined in by the keepers of high academic standards and integrity. In one of his letters to Chancellor Thorp the man I met suggested that football be taken out of the university system and that the Rams Club run it outside the purview of the university. This way students and alumni could still enjoy the excitement and loyalty of having a team, but the university itself would not be sullied by the unsavoriness of it all.
I have heard several white academic elites express this opinion in the last few years. They want to know why universities are dirtying their hands with the likes of football. They believe universities are watering down academic standards, compromising their integrity, and threatening the reputations of institutions of higher learning by having football programs. Their remedy is to somehow distance themselves—sequester the university, protect it from the evils that football brings with it.
I could not disagree more passionately with this sentiment for how to fix the problems there are in football. Why is creating sports enclaves for football more palatable that dealing with the real problems in which we all share? I fear that privileged whites sometimes would rather work at their church’s soup kitchen and give a sandwich to a poor black man than find ways to live in truly equitable communities with the bulk of the young black men who play college football.
And what of the rhetoric we hear on many university campuses today about diversity and multiculturalism. How are these rhetorical values put to work in the questions of how to solve the problems that football brings to light? I have not found those values to be operative in the conversation.
I am deeply saddened by how depersonalized, even dehumanized, so many of the players become in the conversations about these problems. Fair becomes foul, and foul becomes fair. The ones who put their bodies on the line to make football teams thrive are largely blamed for the ills that afflict it. Foul becomes fair when we build a whole regulatory culture around stereotypes and out of touch, elite mentalities.
As a white person myself, I confess that I use to be one of those academic elites and I would have never dreamed of suggesting that college football players should be compensated beyond a scholarship for their work. My mind has been changed because of intentional decisions on my part not to sequester myself from people who are different than I am. It is from the reality of relationships that I see things anew. If integrity is increased in football, I realize that could mean less for some who have so much. But I choose a world any day where integrity is a real value, not simply a word we throw around to make ourselves feel better.
Calling an audible here will take a lot of courage when the game is going so well for some. Playing fair means sometimes you will lose. Playing fair means you have to work hard and play together as a team. Playing fair means you make a commitment for the long haul. And playing fair means you have got to be able to trust those around you to recognize and call foul when they see it.
I don’t believe life is a series of accidents or strange twists of fate as suggested by the witches in Macbeth. We are all both created by and helping to create the causes and conditions of our lives together. That means your actions matter and so do mine. And that means, too, that the world’s bent toward love and justice is a more excellent way than the one toward greed and dishonesty.
The audible here can be no accident, no busted play. It is not arbitrary. For big time football to play fair there must be deep and collective intention to resist temptation and to listen to more voices than the ones who tell us what we want to hear.
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