Pasadena’s Super Sabbath: Gridiron Rites and Wrongs

The Methodists, the Unitarians and the African Methodist Episcopalians over on Orange Grove Boulevard this Sunday morning will be keeping one eye on the preacher up front and the other on the traffic outside. Otherwise, they could find themselves blocked in their parking lots for the rest of the day.

Meanwhile, clergy serving the Presbyterians, Catholics and plain Episcopalians farther east will be watching the length of communion lines and the hands on the clock. In pockets underneath their cassocks, some of them are sure to be holding game tickets more precious than virtue.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in Pasadena, and since it’s the Lord’s Day, too, the customary Sabbatic calm of the worshipping community will be thrown off by the immigrant heathen hubbub--the heavens abuzz with airplanes, helicopters and blimps; the brunch places, ordinarily so restorative after a tedious sermon, given over to the free-spending fans of the Broncos and Giants; and the city’s western streets rendered practically useless to those who live along them until after the 3 o’clock kickoff.

Taking all that into account, more than a few reverential residents are sure to mutter that, material benefits to the city notwithstanding (at least $1 million, according to the Pasadena Convention & Visitors Bureau), spiritual values will have been trampled like chaff. Super Bowl Sunday, in short, tries a body’s Christian charity.

In the opinion of some people--I have in mind St. Paul the Apostle, Pope John Paul II, and, modestly, myself--that attitude not only misunderstands but maligns the situation. Because sport is itself a kind of religious experience. Pasadena, perhaps, should see that the Super Bowl--advertised as the quintessential athletic experience of human history--is a blessing in disguise.

St. Paul was fond of likening ministry and discipleship to prizefights and track meets. No paineth, no gaineth, etc. And the current Pope has said more than a few times that he regards athletic endeavor as one of humanity’s highest spiritual attainments--mentioning loyalty, fair play, generosity, friendship, solidarity, respect and cooperation. “Are not athletic values the deepest aspirations and requirements of the Gospel message?” is typical of the way he sees the issue.

Paul, John Paul and I are not alone in associating sport and spirituality--in particular football and spirituality. A kind of ecumenical body of thought has lately been developing on the subject.

Russell Chandler reported in The Times, for example, that Father Andrew Greeley has determined that all public sports spectacles contain a powerful religious component: the forces of good pitted against the forces of evil.

And Illinois Evangelical Sociologist James Mathisen recently told delegates to a religious conference that the Super Bowl itself is a “ritual expressing and communicating a secular religion of the American Dream.”

Then along comes David Mamet, an urbane writer with no theological pretensions that I know of, echoing Mathisen’s perceptions in his latest book, “Writing in Restaurants”: “Only two legitimate holidays remain,” Memet writes, when Americans are united--the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl. Holiday, you’ll remember, is the variant spelling of holy day.

While Mathisen’s analysis of our secular religion may be a little rarefied for some tastes--the founding of the nation, he suggests, is corporately portrayed in the action of the football game itself; our national fantasies are acted out by the marching bands at half-time--individual players and fans in increasing numbers seem to be making the football-as-religion connection.

There is the John 3:16 Scripture reading, an evangelical cheer for Our Side so succinctly expressed on bed sheets that people in the stands have taken to waving at television viewers whenever field goal and extra-point kicks sail through the uprights.

There is the pious ceremonial. A kick-returner makes the sign of the cross just before some streaking tackler attempts to dismember him; a wide receiver drops to a worshipful knee after scoring six points. Jeff Van Raaphorst, quarterback for Arizona State University, wears a scrap of Old Testament Scripture on adhesive tape around his throwing arm. “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength,” the verse says; thus emboldened, he led his team to this year’s Rose Bowl victory.

The religious factor is even working its way into media coverage. Michael Goodwin, a New York Times reporter, catching the spirit praised NBC’s recent coverage of the Fiesta Bowl, writing that the network deserved “100 hosannas.” Strictly understood, that means NBC is due to collect from somebody 100 utterances of the Hebraic entreaty “Save us, we beseech thee.”

The phrase is not inapt. In American football, as in any self-respecting religion, the need for salvation is not to be undervalued. As John Paul II has also said, when “competitions are swept away by violence, injustice, fraud, and eagerness for gain . . . then sport becomes a tool of power and money.”

That shoe fits just fine. During the past season, football players from coast to coast have been reprimanded, fined and suspended for fighting and dirty play. The Chicago Bears’ Jim McMahon, one of four professional quarterbacks seriously maltreated in 1986, missed most of the season because of an injury aggravated by such an assault. Vulnerable as all quarterbacks are to injury, McMahon was said to be target No. 1 on a six-man hit list the defensive player was carrying.

Some fans deserve suspension as well. Rams Coach John Robinson and Dallas Coach Tom Landry received death threats not long ago. And post-game domestic violence, particularly wife-battering, is thought to be stimulated by nastiness observed on the home screen, NBC News reported last Sunday.

Is nothing sacred? Dominic Frontiere, husband of the Los Angeles Rams’ owner, is in prison this very morning for scalping 1980 Super Bowl tickets and evading income-tax payments on the proceeds--dipping into the collection plate, so to speak. And in a widely reported story last fall we learned that angry parents had gang-attacked and broken the jaw of an official of a children’s football game. They said he had failed to call a clipping penalty. Il Papa, meet Pop Warner.

Well, other religions have had their inquisitions, witch burnings and unholy alliances on the pastor’s sofa, so it’s no time to be self-righteous. Offsetting some of its sins, American football can at least contribute to morality plays.

Denver police corralled 67 Bronco fans (and fugitives from justice) in a sting operation that encouraged suspects to attend a giveaway drawing sponsored by the fictitious Rocky Mountain Sports Assn.

The jail bait was promises of two free Super Bowl tickets and the possibility of a plane ticket to Pasadena.