In September of 2012, ten years ago I called the Paul Finebaum show. I asked to speak to Tide QB AJ McCarron but Paul said no, we have Greg McElroy as guest today. I said okay, fine, Greg as one Rhodes Scholar to another....Paul Said This oughta be good.
But I turned out to bring a little more to the table than Charles From Reeltown and had Paul and McElroy taking notes in short order. I referenced the Howell Raines Piece in the New Republic "Farewell to the Bear" from 1984. Finebaum as a radio now SEC Cable TV Talk show host and one of the top seven most powerful men in the SEC volunteered, that article one of the strongest big picture articles he'd ever read about SEC, even College Football.
Dartmouth Proff Randall Balmer spotlights that era of George Wallace, Bear Bryant mid 60s influence in Bama and Civil Rights history in his new book Passion Plays of UNC Press.
But before he gets into the esoterics, Balmer goes big picture best described in his introduction of the book. He focuses on four sports, football, baseball, basketball and Hockey for Canadian nationalism. He places football as after effect of militarism and the Civil War, Baseball as a development of the industrial age, Basketball as mostly an urban creation and release, And Hockey for the rough and tumble Canadian expansion into the western wilderness.
He is explicit in saying he is not pursuing the well trafficked stories of bivocational christian witness of Evangelist Billy Sunday of the Chicago White Stockings or John 3:16 product of Jerry Vines FBC Jacksonville Florida, Tim Tebow. However I do hope he comes back to Tebow, his Mother in Particular Pam Tebow, Eagle Forum woman of the year for 2018 , devout anti abortionist who recently was named as prime force for the recent crusade re Critical Race Theory.
But that is for another essay.
Balmer's purpose "is to demonstrate that we cannot completely understand why sports invokes such peculiar passion unless we delve into the history and symbolism of team sports and their relationship to organized religion and to the broader historical context."
At one point he quotes A Bartlett Giamatti to great effect : "Sports and Politics are the surrogate for a people ever in quest of Covenant." While that is of Old Testament proportions Balmer concedes in the midst of all the similarities of ritual, procession, sacred Spaces, sports never offers Salvation, but is headstrong in replacing community in American life.
Balmer is rich with insight in every chapter, and Paul Putz has written a sterling review for Christianity today, an easy google. But I want to narrow down on a couple of his points.
Balmer says in the late 80s during his stint at Columbia in NYC he became addicted to Sports talk radio of Mike Francesca. Balmer displays all the stats of how sports talk took off.
For me it was Paul Finebaum about fifteen years starting out of Birmingham, Alabama before moving to Charlotte a few years ago where he is now a fixture with ESPN and SEC sports Chat. He was the subject of a New Yorker profile not long ago.
Balmer points out how sports talk at that realm is like confessional with its on liturgical rites, a supplicant often calls in as first time caller, long time listener. Callers often offer their take on some finer point of a game but yield to the expertise, the priest, the high holy one of the Host.
Ironically in the Southeast, that is often a truck driver, an independents Baptist, or another fundamentalist evangelical of some stripe in obeisance of a secular Jew as Finebaum is.
Balmer narrows his evolution of basketball to the significant advancement of the sport in its developing days through the YMCA in the inner cities. He uses that to focus on the community in the playgrounds of big cities, the energy there as a way out and therapy for all the trauma a life "wandering through the labyrinth" necessitates. Basketball is sanctuary.
But it was the small town of Boiling Springs NC where Balmer's quote from Kareem Abdul Jabbar connected me to the eradication of gravity. My friend Ron Rash the novelist had a beautiful tribute to Michael Jordan's hero David Thompson who erased gravity with his vertical leaps. As a HS junior Rash was on the four by one hundred relay team with Thompson and handed him the baton.
Here is the beautiful quote Balmer has from Jabbar to introduce his chapter on basketball.
When it is played the way it is supposed to be played, Basketball happens in the air. Flying, Floating, elevated above the floor; Levitating, the way it has always been in the imagination of oppressed people of the earth when they see themselves in Dreams.
Likely the most provocative chapter is Balmer's final one Shut Up and Dribble. The title comes from Fox News Laura Ingraham during the Kaepernick Kneeling episodes and the many players of the NBA who came to his defense. Balmer's take there is: Beyond sports black athletes are often villified when they are seen to be stepping out of bounds. "Having fled a parallel universe of defined expectations. and tidy boundaries, white fans are loath to be reminded of what they seek to ignore, and so they punish athletes of color who dare to erase an idealized separation between sports and politics."
This book is must reading for all who have a stake in organized sports, male or female; and especially for those like Balmer and many of us who are taken by the "wonderful, enchanted universe" sports provides.
As a coda, a footnote a modest proposal. Would be grand if Balmer is invited to panel this summer at CBF convo with self identified balcony Baptist Ed Southern, and Ryan McGhee son of former Wingate president Jerry Mcghee. Southern is recent author of Fight Songs about his devotion to Wake Forest Basketball and Clemson football till he marries a Roll Tide woman from Trussville, Alabama. ESPN personality McGhee writes Bloodlines and Sidelines about his father's days as big time college football referee.
