Prayers and the Pros--an Expanding Link : Evangelism: More and more athletes are practicing something else these days--public displays of religious faith in the arenas and the locker rooms.

You can bet it isn’t on the head coach’s play list, and it won’t be diagramed by the TV analysts. Even so, the post-game prayer huddle has become a popular new formation in the National Football League.

In what has become a common practice, players from opposing teams--the same hulking characters who may have just spent 60 minutes relentlessly bashing each other in one of civilization’s most violent pastimes--quietly gather at midfield in Christian fraternity.

This post-game “witness to faith” is the one of the latest signs of growing links between religion and big-time sports. Players are becoming increasingly bold in proclaiming what once was mostly a private matter--a manifestation, team chaplains say, of a search for something deeper than the fleeting glamour of sports celebrity.

Evidence of religion in sports is plentiful.

From Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls superstar for whom everything has gone right, to Scott Norwood, the Buffalo Bills kicker who was last year’s Super Bowl goat, viewers can hardly have missed a growing willingness, even eagerness, to mention God in post-game conversation.

Among examples:

* Jordan and his teammates, after winning the franchise’s first National Basketball Assn. championship in 1991, gave NBC cameras little choice but to record a brief prayer session. The celebrating players, on returning to the locker room, joined in a circle and recited the Lord’s Prayer. As players hugged the NBA trophy, there was a lot of talk about thanking God.

* The Lord’s Prayer is recited after every game by this year’s Super Bowl-bound Washington Redskins, according to the team’s chaplain. The big show Sunday in Minneapolis will be no exception, and the national television audience could get a glimpse of praying players.

“I can guarantee you, if we win the Super Bowl, when they come into the locker room, the cameras will be on and the first thing that will happen is there will be a prayer,” said the team’s volunteer chaplain, the Rev. Lee Corder.

* The Lord’s Prayer was also offered by Coach Pat Riley and his New York Knicks before an NBA game at Madison Square Garden early in this year’s season in support of former Lakers star Magic Johnson, who had just announced that he has the AIDS virus.

* Last spring, at the start of the Major League Baseball season, sports pages carried stories of recent conversions to “born-again” Christianity by Howard Johnson of the Mets and Darrell Strawberry, an ex-Met who had left to join the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The public professions of faith, mostly in the “born-again” Christian tradition, are not surprising, say chaplains who see the behind-the-scenes religious activities of players and coaches. What appears on camera, they say, mirrors a deeper yearning among players who know, and who want the public to know, that the glitz and glamor can be as fleeting as quicksilver. The public prayers, they say, are part of the search for something deeper and more permanent.

Many of the expressions of faith on the playing fields today are grounded in such groups as Campus Crusade for Christ, Athletes in Action, Young Life, the Baseball Chapel and Athletes for Christ. The groups producing sports chaplains are national, independent Protestant groups that are evangelical in nature. The only other regular chaplains on the professional sports scene, according to several team chaplains, are Roman Catholic. Priests often say Mass for players on Sunday. But there is little mainline Protestant or Jewish influence.

The off-camera work of team chaplains is aimed at far more serious purposes than winning games. In the high-powered world of professional athletics, where a player’s worth is determined solely by athletic skill and where a career is an injury or a coach’s decision away from ending, the search for spiritual substance can be compelling.

Father William Dowd, who became Catholic chaplain for the New York Giants last year, was somewhat in awe at first of the performers he was supposed to minister to, he said. The Catholic Masses for the Giants regularly drew, over the years, figures like quarterback Phil Simms and former tight end Marc Bavaro.

“I said to one of the public relations people, ‘How do you preach to these guys?’ He answered, ‘Look, these are young men trying to keep their lives together and make their careers work. They need your help.’ ”

Most of the players are people “at a very interesting point in life,” said Corder, the Redskins chaplain. “They live on the edge in a way most of us will never experience. One injury can end a career, and all the big money will end, too. . . . Most of them have been performing for years for coaches who could care less about the past or what one might do in the future. It’s, ‘What can you do for me right now?’

“Consequently, people are driven to seek what is beyond their career. People ask, ‘Am I just a modern gladiator? What am I worth beyond football?’ And they begin a search of a spiritual foundation that goes beyond football.”

Bratton recalled a comment by Chico Resch, former goalie for the New Jersey Devils professional hockey team. Resch once told the chaplain that many athletes learn, by the time they are 30, a lesson that it often takes business people a lifetime to learn. By that age most athletes have reached most of the goals they are going to achieve and have earned lots of money. “They quickly realize there must be more to life than what this world has to offer. At some point in their careers they develop an interest in spiritual matters.”

The need for attachment to something more lasting than the last win or loss was very real to kicker Norwood. After the Jan. 12 playoff game that sent the Bills to the Super Bowl for the second year in a row, Norwood said his faith, his family and his team had been the “constants” that had helped him through a very difficult year.