Sportsmanship and the season of our discontents

In early October, a dinner conversation with an old friend turned to why we both find the National Football League virtually unwatchable these days: the constant penalties (often elongated into absurdly lengthy reviews); incessant injuries to key players; TV ads for in-game betting; and above all, the adolescent, suggestive post-touchdown “celebrations” that remind one why, when Elvis Presley first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, he was only shown from the waist up.

As a University of Alabama undergraduate, my friend (now a distinguished infectious-disease doctor, researcher, and professor) played football for the legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant, Crimson Tide coach from 1958-1982, and recalled Coach Bryant’s instructions to his players: “If you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”

Which put me in mind of a story told by Alex Hawkins, a running back for the BALTIMORE Colts in the 1960s, about his quarterback, the great John Unitas:

The Bears were in front 20-17, and the Colts had the ball inside the 40-yard line, with just seconds remaining in the game. On third down, Unitas called a deep pattern to Lenny Moore … The Bears were blitzing, and Bill George managed to get hold of one of John’s legs. George held him long enough for Doug Atkins to get free and finish him off…

John was slow getting up; we knew he was hurt. The trainers and doctors were running onto the field as Doug stood towering over John’s limp body. Doug just stared down at him for a second, and then he spoke: “Well, kid, that’s about it for you today.”

John propped himself up on one hand and replied, “Not just yet, it ain’t.” When I saw John’s face, I almost threw up. His nose was slashed and mangled, and his face was covered with blood, as if he had been hit with an ax.

…. After packing his nose full of cotton, [Unitas] trotted back onto the field. When he reached the huddle, his nose had already swollen to twice its normal size, and both eyes were almost swollen shut. On fourth down, with no time-outs and only 19 seconds left on the clock, John called the identical deep pattern to Moore. Lenny beat his defender as Unitas uncorked a perfect 39-yard scoring strike to win, 24-20.

It was the most dramatic finish and the damnedest spectacle I had ever seen. Things like that just don’t happen; they’re caused. The man who caused this one, John Unitas, just walked off the field as if it were an everyday occurrence. No high fives, no dancing or celebrating, no fingers pointed upward designating “We’re Number 1.” Here was the greatest quarterback who ever played the game, walking casually off the field, having just finished a day of work. This was what he was paid to do. How often do you see that kind of dignity anywhere?

The Hawkins sidebar in Sports Illustrated’s September 23, 2002, cover story on Unitas was entitled, “How Tough Was He?”

But that rather missed the crucial point that Alex Hawkins was making. Yes, John Unitas was tough—the son of a hardscrabble Lithuanian American family in Depression-era Pittsburgh and veteran of semi-pro sandlot football had to be. More to the point, he was a man with an innate sense of dignity who treated his work as a craft and took legitimate pride in doing that work well.

I very much doubt that lifelong Catholic John Unitas (parts of whose funeral homily I had the honor of drafting for the late Cardinal William Keeler) ever read Pope Leo XIII’s foundational social encyclical, Rerum Novarum. He didn’t have to, though. He knew all about the dignity of workers and work.

And he knew that the dignity of his work was diminished when it was treated as some sort of performance art: a vulgar saturnalia devoted to the false god “Me, Myself, and I.” Moreover, he knew that the dignity of his work, and indeed his own dignity, would be debased by his taking an in-your-face attitude toward those he had just bested. An honest appreciation of his own skills bred in him a sportsmanlike appreciation for the hard work of others.

The deterioration of our games is part and parcel of the deterioration of our culture. And as politics is downstream from culture, end-zone ridiculousness and similar self-aggrandizing debaucheries in other forms of entertainment have inevitably leaked into politics like a poison. Remember that linkage the next time you hit the mute on either an NFL game or on any number of prominent public officials.

(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)