Following a sports team is an avocation filled with irrational exuberance and irrational gloom. It offers us no logical explanation about why we care so much, and leads us to bouts of euphoria and bonhomie after special victories. But, it also leads to bouts of doom, gloom and self-hatred for caring so much after bitter defeats. As one who learned to love playing sports as a child and had the opportunity to play through college, being on a team taught me discipline, hard work, friendship and how to live in community with people from various racial backgrounds, socioeconomic zip codes and parts of the country. Strangely, one thing I did not learn from playing was how stressful and challenging it is to be a fan and spectator.
I say all this to preface the fact that I am an avid Davidson College basketball fan. It was 10 years ago on a Good Friday that Stephen Curry led the Wildcats on a run for the ages. I went directly into a Good Friday Tenebrae service after having watched this small Presbyterian liberal arts college advance in the NCAA tournament for the first time in 40 years, and it was challenging to sing “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” in a reverent way while gleefully thinking that I had just witnessed the impossible become possible in a college basketball game. I hope I will be forgiven for that (among many other things). The euphoria continued on Easter Sunday when the Wildcats slew mighty Georgetown, then Wisconsin, and finally ended as they missed a last-second shot against Kansas to go to the Final Four a week later.
In an era of FBI investigations and big-time college coaches knowingly or unknowingly facilitating payments to players and in an era where corruption in college sports threatens to undo the many things that are good and important and life-building about college sports, Davidson’s basketball team is led by a coach in his 29th year who has seen to it that his athletes are successful on the basketball court, in the classroom and in life. (Under Coach Bob McKillop’s tutelage, he has seen to it that all his players have graduated, except for one, Stephen Curry, who is currently an NBA supernova, but will one day complete his degree as well.) In addition, he emphasizes non-linear concepts like joy and delight and pouring oneself into something without being consumed by it or taking it with ultimate seriousness. Bob McKillop could win anywhere and be successful anywhere, but he has fallen in love with the challenge of trying to do it at a place like Davidson. Since 1998, he has taken nine Davidson teams to the NCAA tournament. For many serious college basketball programs, that may seem average or middling, but to do it in the environment of a top-ranked liberal arts college is remarkable. But it is also an indication that it can be done. One can have the expectation that athletes are just as capable as excelling in the classroom as anyone else and can still win.
That said, it is very unlikely that Davidson will be in the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament. For starters, they open against basketball blue-blood Kentucky in the first round. The hill is steep and the road is long and the odds are against them. But I don’t care. I have seen the impossible become possible before. I realize I perhaps can only see things through my Davidson-Wildcat-filtered spectacles. We all have our teams or hobbies or things we think matter. The kingdom of God is not necessarily whatever whim or emotion or potential idol we are feeling at any given time. But I think Coach McKillop is on to something. How do you do a job or undertake a task with ultimate seriousness — how do you want to do so well and achieve excellence and win, and yet do so with a sense of joy and delight and gratitude that seems counterintuitive or ancillary to such efforts? We never see the interview with the losing athlete after a game who wants to thank the Lord for contributing to the loss, but we all know that we learn more about ourselves and God from defeats as much if not more so than victories.
The first Christians were called people of the Way, and there is a certain sense that Christian discipleship is not just about what we do or what we seek to accomplish, but the way we go about it. How we treat each other on the way to achieving our ends. How we behave when our side loses and the other side wins. How we get back up and enter the fray once more. How we live with joy and delight and wonder even when we are trying to accomplish important, serious and ultimate things. No, God is not on “my side,” whether I mean the basketball court or a church debate or a social issue or a political campaign. But whatever side I am on, I pray that God will give me the ability to not take myself too seriously, to live, even when facing serious challenges, with a sense of joy and delight and gracefulness in the pursuit of excellence.
And if God has any spare time this March, that maybe just maybe God’s sovereign gaze will look favorably just for a moment on the Davidson Wildcats. God has much more important work to do I know, but for God, “all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).
CHRIS CURRIE is pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Shreveport, Louisiana.
