Sports and Christianity

Before I was a writer, and before I was a sportswriter, I was an athlete. I was a football player in a small, blue-collar Indiana town in the ’80s and ’90s, and was, to my shame, an unrepentant idolator of my sport. I lived it, breathed it, thought about it during school, and dreamed about it all day long. It was not only going to be my “way out” (what a cliché I was) of my small town, it was going to get my dad to say “good job,” get a girl to notice me, and prove that I once existed on planet Earth because I would have the newspaper stories to prove it.

I would lay my jersey out on the floor in front of my rocking chair (old soul), would turn on my little Panasonic boom box, and dream about all of the magnificent things I would do in said jersey and all of the accolades that would come my way because of it. The Lord, in His infinite wisdom and kindness, disabused me of this idol in college, via injury, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I began to actually think about sports and Christianity in ways that transcended “I go to church and Sharpie crosses onto my wrist tape, so it’s God’s job to make all of my dreams come true.”

Literate athleticism

When I was a kid, my dad was a pilot, and after trips he’d often bring me a book or two he’d acquired on his travels. In middle school he brought me George Plimpton’s Paper Lion (1966), which unbeknownst to me was a football book that was actually (a) literature, and (b) really thoughtful. Plimpton was the editor of The Paris Review, which I didn’t know existed back then. All I knew was that he went to training camp as a member of the 1963 Detroit Lions and wrote a book that I would read every fall for the rest of my life.

I got to meet Plimpton while covering a Detroit Lions game, shortly before he died. To my knowledge, he never bowed the knee in repentance, but he did write a piece of landmark literary nonfiction that in my middle school mind proved that football and thinking were not mutually exclusive and would give me a foretaste of the genre in which I would make my living.

Neglected classic

When I was laid up in a hospital bed in Indianapolis, with my lower leg held together by a plate and some screws, a dear old professor from my university who had come to visit me (next level), leaned over the side of the hospital bed and said, “Have you ever considered becoming a writer?”

I hadn’t. Ever. In my mind the injury was just a thing I would conquer on my road to a long and successful career in football. The Lord had other plans and, as it turns out, had a lot to teach me about my relationship with the game I loved, that wasn’t loving me back.

Enter a book called Competition (1975) by Gary Warner, also a gift from my dad. If you’re sensing that I had a great dad, you would be right. His copy of Competition was worn and dog-eared and underlined by him, and in it were reflections and meditations by someone who loved the Lord, on all of the internal conflicts I had experienced as an athlete. It convicted me of compartmentalizing my sports and my faith. It showed me that I was capable of great sin in my competition, and that there may be ways for me to actually honor the Lord with my sports. And that those ways had absolutely nothing to do with turning professional.

For what it’s worth, this is the absolute best thing ever written about Christianity and sport, and I’ve literally never met anyone who has read it (besides Pops).

Faithful masculinity

My leg healed, and I never played college football again. But a few years later, fresh off a stint as a “missionary” in Lithuania (read: college kids messing around for a year in Europe), I was working a cubicle job in Muncie, Ind., and reading a newspaper article about a semipro football team called the Delaware County Thunder. There was a phone number for the owner, who was also the coach, and who was also the starting quarterback (a classic semipro conceit). His name was Earl. Three days later I started at tight end and outside linebacker for the Thunder, after exactly one practice. I registered a sack and caught a two-point conversion from Earl, and learned that football, while a bad god, could still be a pretty good gift.

In the coming years, I wrote articles for ESPN, wrote a book about Mike Tyson, helped kill the emergent church, and wrote a feature film. But I never stopped competing. Never stopped looking for boxing gyms, sparring sessions, and semipro teams. I was dope-sick, except my dope was another field, another ring, and another helmet to buy on eBay. I learned there was nothing especially “manly” about any of this stuff. Like any other walk of life, some of the people I played with were virtuous, and some of them were complete dirtbags. But if I was to be virtuous, how would I submit my athletic life to Christ?

Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991, 2006), edited by Wayne Grudem and John Piper, taught me that what is actually manly is repentance, reconciliation, and faith. What’s manly is praying that my Lord would keep me from sin in competition, and repenting, when I needed to, on the way home from the stadium or the gym.

Now I’m 50 and a coach. I’ve been blessed to see my son score a touchdown on a play that I blocked for him, playing for a team I was coaching (I’ve become Earl). And I’m blessed to be able to spar with my younger son every Saturday. I had to ask for their forgiveness on several occasions, but I didn’t ruin sports for them, as I feared I would.

—Ted Kluck is a WORLD Opinions writer and an award-winning author of 30 books. He ­currently serves as an associate professor of journalism at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., and coaches long snappers at Lane College.