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Sports: Mystical baseball

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Imagine my surprise, paging through the photos in my fresh new copy of John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, to find two familiar faces staring at me: Helena Blavatsky, theosophist, and Henry Steel Olcott, lapsed Presbyterian and “white Buddhist.” The caption notes that the two founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, and in 1878 “handed the reins to Abner Doubleday” – the man who, according to Thorn’s revisionist account, did not invent baseball.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 21, 2011 at 12:01 pm

Sports: Sports and Courage

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I have a limited aim in this little essay. A tiny aim. I am neither attacking Christian participation in sports as such, nor responding to all the arguments that Christians use to defend sports. I address only one argument, and I offer a simple historical response that is admittedly broad and general. I don’t prove or disprove anything. I only step to the flagpole to raise high my banner, a banner emblazoned with a prominent question mark.

The argument that I’m responding to is this: Sports are good for young people, especially young men, because sports teaches courage. Combat sports like football are better for this purpose than more finesse sports like baseball and basketball. When you take your stance across the line of scrimmage from a beefy tackle who wants to chew you up and swallow you before grinding the quarterback into mincemeat, you need to buck up and be a man. Young men who have learned to face tackles and linebackers grow up to be courageous in other ways. Such, or somesuch, is the argument.

My response is, as I say, a simple, perhaps a simple-minded, one: When have Christians been more courageous – in the first through fourth centuries, or in the nineteenth through the twenty-first? And, when have Christians been more deeply involved in sports – in the first through fourth centuries, or in the nineteenth through the twenty-first?

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 5:55 pm

Sports: Go Cougs!

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The folks over at First Things were kind enough to put my paroxysm of march madness on their group blog: http://www.firstthings.com/blog.

Go Cougs!

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 24, 2008 at 2:31 pm

Sports: Tennis scoring

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Why 15-Love? “Love” is a corruption of the French “l’oeuf,” “the egg,” as in “the big goose egg.”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 4:30 pm

Sports: NC Rivalry

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Over at the Books & Culture online magazine, Jason Byassee of the Christian Century – and a Duke PhD – lists some of the best lines from Will Blythe’s To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry (HarperCollins, 2006):

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, October 15, 2007 at 5:23 pm

Sports: Paternalism

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Some reviewers of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side have complained about the “paternalism” of the Tuohy family who brought Michael Oher into their orbit.

Well, tu quoque. Is it just possible that some lost kids, even lost black kids, might actually need a pater?

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 10:25 am

Sports: The Blind Side

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Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Hardback, 299 pp. $24.95.

Over the past two decades, professional football has evolved so that the outcome of games often turns on the performance of one of the least-noticed and least-glamorous men on the field, the left offensive tackle.

During the 1980s, Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers transformed the NFL passing game from a high-risk venture into a precision machine. Quarterback Joe Montana’s stock went through the roof, and as other coaches borrowed from Walsh, quarterbacks throughout the league became more important, and more expensive, than ever before.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at 4:56 pm

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