Does the sports beat get God?

By Steven I. Weiss

On Super Bowl Sunday, millions of football fanatics will be treated to the biggest religion story to hit sports in some time: the faith of Reggie White in his last days.

While much of ESPN’s programming this weekend will focus on the game to come, the network will also air a story during its pre-game show on the recently-deceased White, a defensive lineman so famously devout that he was nicknamed “The Minister of Defense.”?

That White’s faith is a legitimate story on both sporting and religious grounds is undeniable. He’s widely considered one of the greatest defensive players in football’s history, and as an outspokenly religious man, he never shied away from invoking his faith. But religion stories such as White’s rarely get covered on other beats; does sports journalism do a better job of approaching religious topics?

Gregg Easterbrook, a political writer, weekly football columnist, and occasional religion commentator, thinks it does. “The sports media does seem less disturbed by God talk than political reporters seem when politicians talk about religion,” Easterbrook wrote in an e-mail to The Revealer.

Considering how much of the coverage of White noted his record of religious action, it seems Easterbrook is right. Every mention of his death last December paid attention to the religious angle, an angle that has a lot to tell.

White — who in addition to being considered one of the greatest defensive players of all time was also an ordained Baptist minister — became a famous face for religious issues: in 1995, his was among the series of black churches that were burned to the ground; in 1998, he led a 300-member pilgrimage to Israel featured in front-page dispatches for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and in papers from The Washington Post to The Jerusalem Post; and shortly after this pilgrimage, White again made national news by delivering a controversial speech condemning homosexuality and other aspects of contemporary culture to the Wisconsin State Legislature.

But one of the most intriguing stories about White’s faith will be presented Sunday.
On the day after Christmas this past year, when White died, ESPN’s Andrea Kremer was the most-quoted expert, revealing in on-air discussions that she’d been speaking with the football legend in the period before his death, when White underwent a massive re-evaluation of his faith.

Amidst a busy playoff schedule, Kremer spent a large part of last week filming a story that will “have details about his death and it also gets into what he had been doing, this sort of religious journey that he had been on.”

Unlike Easterbrook, Kremer thinks that the sports press ignores religion angles. “I think that religion in sports is viewed in the electronic media as a channel-changer and in the print media as a page-turner,” she said in an interview with The Revealer, adding, “I don’t think they want to deal with it at all.”

Even White, she claims, got short shrift from the sports press on the religion front: “I think he was treated like he was talking about stuff that he shouldn’t have been, like he was overstepping his bounds… I think the sports press was comfortable when he talked about sports, and when he talked about religion, they just weren’t comfortable with that.”

But she says her story is different. “We’re throwing it right out there in the biggest show of our season–and the reason I think it will work is because of a change that Reggie White underwent in his religious beliefs,” she said, emphasizing “the fact that here’s a man who made his name, reputation and everything so strongly with respect to religion, and then he battled that… That that changed for him is a huge deal.”

Just what kind of religion stories will make it into the sports pages is hard to determine, but that religion stories in general make it there pretty easily — or at least more easily than for other beats– seems a fair assumption to make based on casual viewership/readership.

Easterbrook thinks that religion is better covered in sports media because there its value is more appreciated. “I think one reason the sports media isn’t put off by religion is that sportswriters and sports editors know there are many top athletes who would be in jail, or at least be in trouble, if religion had not set them on the right path… So the sports media is willing to posit that faith can be good for you, whereas political journalism takes a very condescending attitude toward religion, seeing it as almost always bad,” he wrote.

However, just because journalists sympathize with the religious sentiments of the players they cover doesn’t mean they have to report those sentiments. Kremer is sympathetic to the religious devotions of football players, explaining that “football is a vicious, violent, brutal-beyond-belief game–if a player wants to invoke God or some kind of religion to give him strength, to get him through, more power to him.” However, she said, “I just don’t know why we have to hear about it.”

And sometimes we don’t hear about it from the sports press. When the Philadelphia Eagles won the NFC Championship game last week, safety Brian Dawkins howled into a microphone during the live broadcast, exclaiming “Halleluya!” A profound expression of relief after three years of frustrating losses in the game, I didn’t notice it in any broadcasts reporting on the game, and a Nexis search indicates the remark was quoted only three times, none of which were in Philadelphia outlets. The absence of such a quote from subsequent reports is surprising. Had Dawkins screamed a word like “Finally!” it’s hard to imagine reporters similarly ignoring it. (The treatment of Dawkins’ statement recalls that of Curt Schillings’ praise of Jesus last October, which was virtually shut-out of news coverage.)

A similar example is wide receiver Terrell Owens’ recent conversation with reporters. Owens, who was so seriously injured last December that his doctor recommended he not play in the Super Bowl, told the journalists that, “Spiritually, God is healing me, and I’m way ahead of where a lot of people expect me to be.” But few news outlets quoted this statement, favoring instead his more religiously-neutral next sentence, in which he declared “spiritually, I’ve been healed.”

Perhaps this down-playing of players’ religiosity is owed to doubts over their sincerity, as Kremer suggests: “Thanking God has become just another sports cliché, like ‘giving 110%.’” Meanwhile, she said, “when you get somebody that really believes and has some depth to their belief,” their religious beliefs don’t get the same air time. Why? According to Kremer, because, “The bottom line is that religion makes people in sports media uncomfortable, because how do I know you’re really a religious person?”

Perhaps that is why Terrell Owens’ religious mindset garners almost no mention. As it turns out, his statement about having been “spiritually healed,” was not amongst his most significant statements of faith this season. While Owens has received wall-to-wall coverage in the sports beat this season, hardly a reference was made to his faith though he had a very devout Christian upbringing and regularly quotes the Bible.

Despite these examples of excising religion from players’ statements, it still seems that religious references are often part of the coverage, not the least of which are those references made by sports journalists themselves, who regularly infuse sports coverage with references to the mythological and the divine. It’s not by accident that football fans have gotten a large dose of orchestral music, or that sports tributes consistently evoke classical or Biblical heroes, and their virtues of sacrifice, strength and courage.

Further, they join fans to invoke “faith” and “belief” for underdogs like the Red Sox, or any other David pitted against overwhelming odds. One of the most famous lines in sports commentary, Al Michaels’ wonder at the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s winning the gold medal, echoes this sentiment of devout gratitude and awe: “Do you believe in miracles?”

What fans think of journalists and players religionizing sports is difficult to determine. Studies of sports audiences avoid questions of faith and none of the three houses of sports fandom expertise contacted by The Revealer—the NFL, Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, and the consulting firm OnSports Strategies—could provide a knowledgeable commentator on sports fans and religion.

Without such information, it’s impossible to know whether religion really is a “channel-changer” or a “page-turner” for fans. And yet the “believe” posters in the stands, the t-shirts for sale, the last-minute prayers suggest that fans are bringing their faith to the ballgame, too. It’s entirely possible that, even if sports reporters pay more attention to religion than other beats, the fans might want more. Nobody who could know, it seems, has bothered to ask.

Perhaps this is because, as the clichés go, sports is a new religion. If it is, sports journalism is partly responsible, having co-opted the language that helped make it so.

Steven I. Weiss maintains the blogs Canonist and Kosher Bachelor, and is the editor and publisher of the just-launched CampusJ.