Sports: The New American God, by Paul Shirley

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, it became clear that sexual misconduct between priests and young boys was and had been widespread in the Catholic Church.

On November 5^th of this year, a former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University stood accused of sexual misconduct with young boys. A few weeks later, a longtime assistant basketball coach at Syracuse University was fired as allegations of similar depravity swirled.

The sins of the Catholic Church caused widespread anger. But that anger now seems tame in comparison to the deep feelings of betrayal reported by those who’ve followed the events that have tarnished Penn State football and Syracuse basketball.

The intensity of the latter reaction can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the cases against Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky and Syracuse’s Bernie Fine are more easily processed by the casual observer. The alleged crimes were committed by one man; the resultant cover-ups, orchestrated by only a few.

The brouhaha within the Catholic Church, on the other hand, was slower to develop and more difficult to personify; not every priest was guilty and the group that was guilty was a large and ephemeral one.

However, it is worthwhile to compare the reactions for one important reason: the Catholic Church is an organization devoted, inherently, to moral superiority. All policies of sin-forgiveness aside, churches are supposed to be good.

College sports programs are, at best, morally ambivalent and, in reality, probably morally bankrupt. (For football, see: Miami, The University of; Southern California, The University of; et. al. For basketball, see: Louisville, The University of; Oklahoma, The University of; et. al.)

Strange, then, that the public’s reaction to child-sex scandals within college sports programs would be more intense than the public’s reaction to a child-sex scandal within a religious organization.

Or perhaps there’s another explanation. Perhaps sports have become the new American God.

In the age in which we live, we are rarely allowed to talk about the “big” issues. Told that such topics are off-limits, we are taught to keep politics and religion out of our conversations. Instead, we are conditioned to discussions of neighborhood gossip, Mad Men, and the latest development in the most recent Parikimsey Lohashian flame-up.

Or, we talk sports.

On Sundays, groups of men devote as much time to the NFL as they would to a workday. Entire offices are effectively shut down for the sake of March Madness. (Thanks to “sick” days and those seventy-two extra trips to the break room, the NCAA tournament costs companies $1.8 billion.) Women compete with one another to prove how much they, too, like nothing more than to attend a Red Sox game on a picturesque June night.

Check CNN.com, or Yahoo.com, or even the front page of the New York Times: if something happens in the sporting world, it will be found there, creeping toward the top of the most-read/most-emailed lists.

Steroid use in baseball rates full-blown congressional hearings. A lockout in football warrants a federal mediator. Want to talk to the President? Good luck, unless you win an NCAA championship.

Why the obsession?

Because sports are easy. Black and white, good and bad, winners and losers. Sports offer an escape from the messiness of the human condition. A distraction, really, and one that can be wrapped up in the package of a verdict that took only two hours to arrive: today, the Blue Devils are Good. Tomorrow, the Friars are Bad.

Need morality in parable form? Those are available, too. The wide receiver who carries a gun sometimes: he’s a Bad Guy. The first baseman who volunteers at the children’s hospital: he’s a Good Guy.

No need to dig deeper, to recall that the men we watch on the field, on the parquet, on the sidelines, are complex, multifaceted human beings, just like the rest of us.

Real, live discussions of faith, morality, and mortality? No, thank you. Those are too difficult. We’ll put our faith in the sanctity of sport.

But then, something happens. The brittle world we’ve created – the one that preaches fairness, sportsmanship, and the holiness of The Game – is upset.

A basketball player is accused of rape. A golfer admits to being unfaithful.

A venerable football program is associated with crimes worse than anything we can process.

How could they?!, we scream. I’ve watched JoePa/JimBo for years – he’s a good man! He’d never allow something like this on his watch!

We’re appalled. We can’t believe this has happened, even when logic points to its inevitability. For, if we assume that coaches are human, and that some humans are sexual deviants, then some coaches will be sexual deviants.

In other words:

What, exactly, did you expect?

If an organization devoted to morality (the Catholic Church) can be found to have been covering up thousands of child molesters for decades, doesn’t it stand to reason that an organization not devoted to morality (the Penn State football program, the Syracuse basketball program) might have covered up one child molester for years?

For many people, the answer is no. Because the football stadium is their cathedral; Joe Paterno is their God.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could take note of the fact that we have turned part-time distractions into full-time obsessions. That, perhaps, it might not be healthy to live by proxy through large men who are not us. That, maybe, there are bigger questions than whether the Buffalo Bills can right their metaphorical ship or whether it’s fair to move your entire team to the American League West or whether further revenue-sharing is a viable model for the NBA.

We could do these things, but we probably won’t.

Because, like gladiator-loving Romans before us, we’ve kicked out our old Gods and replaced them with new ones: football and baseball, basketball and golf, cars and horses, the Olympics and the World Cup.

This is where we place our trust. This is what we believe in.

This is sports, the new American God.

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