That Championship Season

When I see men place so much stock in rough-and-tumble physical activities of the long-ago, I feel sad.

The coach and four members of his state champion basketball team are five such men in the Pulitzer Prize play in 1973. The team gets together every year on the anniversary of their win, and That Championship Season takes place at their twentieth reunion.

Though they are still under forty, these former stars of the court spend most of their time looking back. Life is behind them. Everything else pales in comparison with that championship season. But by their Big Two-Oh anniversary, the Big Win from  Long Ago is proving to be a thin thread for holding together the loyalty of the starting five who once swore “all for one and one for all for always.”  This could be The Last Reunion.

I saw the play in a small theatre in lower Manhattan and afterward wound up on the same uptown subway car with one of the actors in the original cast.  We talked about the show, and he said the author, Jason Miller, based the play on middle-aged men he knew in Pennsylvania. As preparation for doing the play, Miller took the cast to his basketball-loving home state where they visited bars frequented by men much like the characters in the play. These true-life former jocks were still cursing each other for mistakes they made on the court decades earlier.

Even with this testimonial from the actor, I tended to think Miller’s play as greatly exaggerated. People don’t get that worked up over a ball game and stay worked up for twenty years. But then, I think of where I live.  Less than twenty miles up the road, the football stadium at Clemson University seats eighty thousand fans.

More than thirty years ago, the Clemson team was declared national champions after a post-season win at the Orange Bowl. Ever since, that championship season has been a benchmark for football patrons.  On the twentieth anniversary of the Big Win, a newspaper quoted someone as telling the winning coach, the 1981 Orange Bowl win was the greatest moment of his life. This not from a former player but simply an ardent fan. 

Our local newspaper publishes a sports magazine dedicated to Clemson teams. The Orange and White is named after the team colors. Many papers sell metal containers readers can mount on posts at the street near their mail boxes so the carrier can put the daily paper in a safe, dry place. For several years, those containers in our town were orange and white. The containers carried no mention of the teams, but the colors conveyed a silent message for many athletic boosters. 

Win, lose, or draw, clothiers cash in on team loyalty, selling orange wearing apparel: pants, shirts, sweat suits, T-shirts, caps, and, for all I know, underwear. On home game days, many fans are seen around town  before and after the game wearing some or all of the above. 

My thought after the Orange Bowl and twenty years later was, “Let us pause briefly while everybody says, ‘Who cares?’” I am probably in the minority with this attitude, but that doesn’t bother me. I voted for George McGovern in 1972. 

I guess I’m missing something. A dear friend who played high school football tried to explain the intense sense of belonging and unity among the eleven males out there on the field, especially in the huddle and as the ball is snapped into motion. Fine, I wanted to say, To what purpose? 

Granting the unity among those eleven males in the huddle, how does that spill over and bring capacity crowds to an eighty-thousand-seat stadium? No doubt, a fair percentage of the males in the crowd are alumni of some team. But a bunch of them aren’t. And then there are women. And little children. Many of them in the same orange outfits. Again, To what purpose?

It starts in high school or junior high if not in elementary school. Coaches promote and principals support the idea of making the athletic mascot the symbol for the whole school, not simply the sports teams. Marquees in front of schools typically carry logos depicting the Raiders or the Bumble Bees.  I frequently pass an elementary school whose electronic marquee proudly calling attention to the Panthers. These and other hostile critters are intent on boogering up their enemies. This is probably are an accurate depiction of the purpose of the athletic teams but not of academics or the choir or band.

Many boys are initiated into this All-American Obsession at the peewee stage. Some midget teams play in a little park in our neighborhood. I can see and hear them at times as I sit at my computer.  I heard a coach, trying to get one little guy to come up to team expectations, tell the boy, “I know you want to have fun, but this is serious.” 

I well remember the last time I was in a football stadium. It was a year or so before the team up the road was declared national champs. My wife and our sons and I were living in Waco, Texas, and my older brother-in-law, a Baylor football fan, had an extra ticket for one of their home games. I accepted Jeff’s invitation to the game for two reasons: I loved him like a brother, instead of just a brother-in-law, and I didn’t want to turn down the opportunity to spend some time at his side in an activity that meant something to him. 

I guess I inherited a defective sports gene. I’m the only son or son-in-law in my generation who doesn’t connect with football, Sports fever took with the rest of the guys, but not with me. Actually, I couldn’t have played football in school if I had wanted to.  Our whole family spent most of the fall months in cotton patches of West Texas while most other school kids were in the class room. On the other hand, if my older brother and younger brother had been in school, I’m sure they would go “gone out” for sports.

I transmitted that defective gene to at least one of my two sons. Number One Son never got into athletics. Number Two Son played basketball and soccer on church teams in grade school and junior high and still keeps up with college and pro stuff, especially the Georgia Bulldogs in the state of his birth the Bulls and Bears in his adopted city of Chicago.

Because I am not mucho macho, I wish jock types had something more significant in their store of  memories than perfect or flawed hand-offs or lay-ups in a football or basketball game twenty years ago.  Yes, I feel sad when I see men place so much stock in rough-and-tumble physical activities of the long-ago. If an able-minded, able-bodied person clings to past achievements, even those which ennoble and enrich the greater society, this suggests a lack of meaning in life in the present. I treasure many aspects of my past, but I try to build on the past as I seek meaning in the present. 

If those who must look back to find meaning for life got involved in a civic club, church, mentoring, or local politics, these activities might help them find meaning in the present.

The Bible contains athletic references, typically likening life to a race.  The challenge always is for the Christian to discipline himself or herself as a follower of Jesus:

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14). 

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,  looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted (Hebrews 12:1-3). 

In one final passage, notice St. Paul uses the double image of running a race and a boxing match: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.  Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air;  but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).