My latest: on athletes and public faith, in CT

My latest column for Christianity Today is called “Penalty or No, Athletes Talk Faith.” Just in time for the Olympics! Alas, I had to cut the opening two paragraphs on the 2023–24 Boston Celtics, the recent champs who may be the most religious NBA team in years. Thankfully I did get to include this paragraph:

In Game 1 of the 2014 NBA Finals, LeBron James—at the time the best basketball player on the planet—had to leave prematurely due to cramps. Why? The stadium was slightly warmer than usual. He’d been known to request ice-cold air conditioning wherever he played, so much so that fans speculated that the opposing team, my beloved San Antonio Spurs, kept things warm for a competitive advantage. True or not, the Spurs won the game and the series both, all because the league’s MVP couldn’t keep his muscles from spasming.

I even got to mention the famous anecdote about MJ peeking at his teammates during Zen meditation. They’ll let me write anything!

What does any of that have to do with God, faith, or CT? Read on to see.

NBA thoughts

I don’t have a single original thought about the NBA. Either I’m cribbing on what I’ve heard others say or making observations so obvious I guarantee you there are dozens of columns, podcasts, and tweets making the same point.

But I’m in NBA playoffs mode, so indulge me.

• The NBA has never been so flush with sheer talent. It’s astonishing.

• This season + the playoffs are so clearly a passing of the torch from the previous generation of stars to the next that you’d think they scripted it. Steph didn’t make it, KD got swept, Kawhi’s injured, Jimmy’s injured, Harden and PG are in danger, Westbrook’s washed and pressing, Dame’s not the same, LeBron is on the verge—even as SGA and Chet and Ant and Tatum and Jalen and Paolo and Isaac and Luka and Jamal and Jokic and Haliburton and Brunson are all cookin’. Not to mention my man Wemby waiting in the wings.

• Guys somewhere in the middle, in between the old and the new: Kyrie, who’s still got it; Anthony Davis, who’s killing it; Embiid, who’s pushing himself through injuries; Giannis, who’s still the best on the court when he’s well; Zion, who is a force of nature but can’t stay on the court.

• Did I mention LeBron? Turns forty in December and there are still stretches where he can impose his will on the offensive end. Even as I write he’s everywhere on defense, willing his team to survive. TBD.

• Good for New York, betting on Jalen Brunson and reaping the dividends. A pox on Dallas for failing to realize what they had. And yet, they gambled on Kyrie and it’s somehow paid off!

• The league has got to figure out the replay rules. Allowing coaches to call for a reply indefinitely unless and until they’re unsuccessful makes no sense at all. Just like the NFL, there needs to be a finite number of replays per team. Perhaps one per half, a second if your first is successful. But stop the hoarding and stop the rewarding random, low-stakes replays that function as timeouts with an upside—if the replay is successful, they’ll just grind the game to a halt on the next play! Oh, and no coach replays in the final two minutes. The point of sports officiating isn’t to get everything perfect. In fact, bad or sketchy or doubtful or questionable calls are part of the game. Let the game breathe, let it flow, let it move, even with the tradeoff of fewer replays and corrections of bang-bang plays. We can do this. [Update: Apparently my cursory knowledge of the replay rules was inaccurate. Most of this they’re already doing. My only addendum now: No coach challenges in the final 2-3 minutes of the game, just like in football; everything comes from above, and it’s got to be obvious, airtight, and game-affecting.]

• Back to the next generation: They. Are. So. Fun. And they’re confident! They’re not afraid! Anthony Edwards isn’t intimidated by Durant, nor is Jamal Murray by LeBron, nor was Sabonis by Steph and Draymond. These guys play with joy and abandon. The future is bright for the NBA.

• That said, we need some competition in the East. Absent injuries, it’s the Celtics to lose, even granting the Brunson/Knicks factor. In the West, though, it’s another story entirely. I could see the Nuggets, the Thunder, the Wolves, even the Mavs or (if I squint) the Clips making the Finals, or at least legitimately competing for it. The competition is so fierce. Every single night there’s a great game or a duel between old and new stars. It’s must-see TV!

• That said, the injuries are such a bummer. Zion, Giannis, Dame, Randle, Kawhi, and Jimmy. Not to mention Porzingis, Murray, Davis, KCP, Luka, Haliburton, and Embiid all hobbled or less than one hundred percent. It would be a truly historic playoffs if none of these guys was hurt.

• That said, I’ll take it. I don’t have the time or margin during the regular season to watch much if any NBA. But with the semester waning and the summer approaching, I can find the time for a playoffs like this. See you in June.

Cheering for Monty Williams

While you, like me, are enjoying this year’s NBA playoffs, and while you, like me, are cheering for a Suns–Hawks Finals, remember what kind of man is coaching Phoenix. Just under seven years ago Sports Illustrated wrote an extensive piece about Ryan Anderson, who at the time played for the New Orleans Pelicans. The story was about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Anderson’s girlfriend, and the personal and emotional fallout afterward. Monty Williams, now coach of the Phoenix Suns, was the New Orleans coach that year. Here is how Williams, a devout Christian, responded to Anderson’s crushing shock and grief:

Pelicans coach Monty Williams hurrying in with a team security guard and finding Ryan slumped on the carpet, his back to the door, unable to rise. Williams dropping to his knees and hugging his player, the two men rocking back and forth. . . .

As a crowd milled outside the apartment complex, Williams and the security guard hoisted up Ryan, who was limp and drenched with tears and sweat, too hysterical even to walk. They dragged Ryan to the elevator and then into a waiting car, the tops of his feet, still wedged into flip-flops, scraping the asphalt so hard that his toes still bear thick white calluses more than a year later.

As they drove in silence, Williams kept thinking that it was fine if he blew a game, but he couldn't mess up now. Once home, he huddled with his wife, Ingrid, and Ryan in the family room, praying. Ingrid's brother had committed suicide recently. She knew not to say it was going to be O.K., because it wasn't. "This is going to be hard for a long time," she told Ryan.

That night, as the family pastor came and went, Ryan cried so much that it felt as if he were dry heaving or bleeding internally. Each convulsion ripped his insides apart.

Around 1 a.m., at Ingrid's urging, Monty brought one of his sons' mattresses down to the living room. There the two men lay through the night, Ryan curled on the sofa and his coach on the floor next to him. When Ryan wanted to talk, they talked. Otherwise there was only his muted sobbing. Finally, just after the sun came up, Ryan fell into a fitful sleep.

At the time, I learned of the SI piece via Deadspin, which similarly quotes this excerpt. Go read the rest here. (And read this, too, if you can stand it.) And as you’re following the conference finals, and when you notice that poised, intelligent, humane man on the Suns sidelines, send him a cheer or a prayer or good vibes or what have you. This Spurs fan is hoping he reaches the finish line.

Dame, ACU, sports, glory (TLC, 1)

Two years ago I wrote the following in a short tweet thread, in response to Damian Lillard's walk-off buzzer-beater to win Portland's playoff series against Oklahoma City:

What's revealed by Dame's buzzer-beater walk-off series-winner, and the hoopla surrounding it since, is something simple but often forgotten in today's analytics-driven journalism: People do not watch or play sports for the sake of technical proficiency. They do so for glory.

What Damian Lillard did was all-caps GLORIOUS. The stakes, the moment, the narrative, the beef with Russ, the degree of difficulty: People watch what is often sheer monotony in sports for a single, once-in-a-lifetime moment just like that.

Paul George's comments after the game that "it was a bad shot, though nobody's going to say it," was true but seriously beside the point. Of course it was a bad shot! If by "bad" we mean "having a low probability of going in," it was definitionally bad. And yet it went in!

Watch the video, and look at the reactions: OKC's, the crowd's, Dame's teammates, and Dame's own. Sheer, stupefying, lightning-struck glory. Athletes devote the entirety of their lives, soul and body, to be ready for a moment like that—and not, say, to finish 4th in MVP voting.

Sports journalism's in a weird place, drawn in a few directions: hyper-analytics; First Take stupidity; Twitter cleverness; athletes-as-celebrities gossip. What I'd love more than anything is a recognition of what makes sports great, and matching prose to the glory of the thing.

I stand by all of that. Every day that analytics makes further inroads not just on backroom GM decision-making but on the whole public culture of professional (and amateur!) sports is a step in the wrong direction. Sports do not exist for "wins," Ringz, or championships. They certainly do not exist for statistical supremacy. They do not even exist first of all for the display of physical excellence and bodily self-mastery and the combat of competition. They exist for people to behold unpredictable epiphanies of human glory. All the other goods of sports are contained therein.

Which brings me to ACU, where I teach. My colleague Richard Beck wrote up a nice appreciation of our "little ol'" basketball team's dethroning—decapitating? horns-sawing?—of the University of Texas in the NCAA tournament. Watching our team upset UT in the opening round, by icing two free throws to go up by one point before stealing the inbound pass as time expired, put me in mind of Dame's walk-off buzzer-beater. Sheer pandemonium, wild release, pure glory: the reason why we do this in the first place. That glory spread like wildfire across sports media and social media alike, and rightly so. How often in your life will you see something like that?

It would have been wonderful for our guys to have won the next game (and the next, and the next...). But that loss doesn't remotely diminish the glory of the initial upset. It happened, it always will have happened, and those players will be the toast of west Texas for a long time to come. Good for them.

A comprehensive list of undefeated teams in the NBA

Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, Philadelphia 76ers, San Antonio Spurs.

Just sayin'.

A clarification on the NBA, China, and free speech

"Free speech" is a legal concept: whether the state in any way muzzles one's ability to speak or whether it responds punitively based on the content of one's speech.

Within civil society, an organization (for profit or not) is not a "player" in the realm of free speech. Organizations place all kinds of controls on one's speech within the workplace and, in certain respects, outside of it. These can be reasonable or unreasonable; they can fairly or unfairly applied. But they are run of the mill, and have no bearing on "free speech."

Whether or not Daryl Morey is disciplined or even fired by the NBA for his tweet in support of Hong Kong has nothing to do with free speech. This isn't a free-market point, along the lines of "the NBA is free to do whatever it likes; it's a business, and Morey is an employee." That's technically true, but not my point.

Let me put it this way. To respond to the crisis elicited by Morey's tweet with the claim either that the NBA is mitigating his free speech by apologizing to China or that the NBA would be suppressing his free speech if it disciplined or fired him is a non sequitur. The legal freedom of expression accorded to Morey as an American citizen is untouched by the NBA's response to him.

But more important, the NBA and the entire ecology of fans, writers, and commentary that surrounds it wants the NBA to retain the ability to discipline its employees for certain kinds of speech. Five years ago Adam Silver terminated Donald Sterling's ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers based on a recording of something he said privately to another person. What he said was in no way illegal. What it was, rather, was immoral. And the NBA ecosystem responded, rightly, by calling for his removal from the league. That was a good and necessary thing to do. But it, too, was not an infringement upon Sterling's freedom of speech, even as it was a direct disciplinary response to private speech, offered freely, subsequently made public.

If an owner or a player were to tweet or write or say aloud something similar to Sterling's racist comments, I have no doubt that (a) he would be disciplined and (b) the NBA "community" would applaud the disciplinary act. Which means not only that the NBA has this power and that this power bears no relationship to free speech. Above all, it means nobody wants the NBA to lack this power.

The issue in the Morey–China Kerfuffle, then, is a matter, not of free speech, but of ethics. It's a moral question. And the political is contained within the moral.

The moral question is whether it is right for the NBA to muzzle the public speech of one of its employees regarding an international situation wherein there is a clear morally correct position, when to affirm that position will entail loss of revenue for the league in the millions or billions of dollars.

The related political question is whether the NBA is being consistent—in moral terms, hypocritical—in encouraging its employees to engage in public speech regarding domestic issues that are highly controversial within the nation, when such speech is unlikely to cost the league any loss of revenue while also discouraging the aforementioned revenue-losing political speech.

The question beneath that last political question is an interesting one, and it's less related either to ethics or to capital. That question is: What is the range of acceptable political positions the NBA or any similar organization is willing to permit to be expressed publicly without disciplinary response? Accordingly, what are those concrete political positions the public expression of which would (rightly or wrongly) call forth censure, financial penalty, suspension, or termination?

I anticipate that the next battle along these lines will be closer to home, both literally and figuratively, manifesting just outside of the League's particular Overton Window; and that that battle, though it will involve less money, will be far more bitter than the present one.