Why Athletes Thank God
Dismiss their heavenly gratitude if you must, but players’ motives may be less transparent and more purposeful than you realize.
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You’ve seen it before: immediately after the game ends, the guy who made the big play is pulled aside, and a microphone and TV camera are quickly shoved in his face. He is almost always asked a generic question about how he’s feeling or what was going through his mind when he made the shot or how he was able to keep his feet inbounds. There are the typical smiles and platitudes about teammates and coaches and opposing players, but more often than not nowadays, he starts his answer by praising God for what happened.
Collective-eye rolling ensues.
There he goes again, we think, as if God has nothing better to do than to saunter down from the heavens and determine the outcome of sporting events. Is nothing else going on in the world? And what of the opposition? Don’t they believe in God, too? None of it makes much sense to those who aren’t particularly dedicated to faith, but believe it or not, there’s actually a lot going on when a Christian praises God on national television — most of which gets lost in translation.
As most of us were taught growing up, religion and politics are the two things you simply do not discuss in polite company. Part of it stems from the fact that views about God tend to be passionate and inflammatory, but the reality is that no one wants to be lectured to or preached at — and certainly not by professional athletes who, as the recent NFL unpleasantness proves, seem to be violating commandments on an hourly basis.
As my colleague, Greg Hanlon noted, we’ve seen this sort of hypocrisy before.
As a result, overt displays of religion tend to make even professional journalists, who are trained to deal with just about anything happening on live TV, uncomfortable. Take, for example, when Doris Burke interviewed Kevin Durant after an NBA game last year. K.D. had been on a tear, averaging more than 30 points a game.
“What goes into a streak like this?” Burke asks. “God. That’s all I can say. Jesus Christ,” replies Durant. After a brief pause, the veteran reporter laughs nervously, and asks, “You had nothing to do with it?”
In his defense, Durant isn’t really saying his supernatural shooting hand was touched by the hand of God — it’s actually quite a bit more simple than that. He doesn’t think that God is overtly responsible for his success on the basketball court; he expressing that his God has omnipotent presence in everything Durant does in his life. Therefore, it would be crazy not to praise Him when good things happen. Without Him, Durant believes, none of his success would be possible.
Christianity defined, basically.
To be sure, Durant himself is the one who spent all those hours in the gym to become into one of the best shooters in the world. At the same time, though, it would be folly to deny that there must be hundreds of guys walking the planet with skills comparable to Durant’s who aren’t in the NBA — simply because they aren’t 6-foot-11 with the arms of a tarantula and the coordination and athleticism of guys who are a foot shorter than he is. K.D., like all professional athletes who’ve won the genetic lottery, has been “blessed” with singular gifts, and he chooses to acknowledge that fact when he can. His modesty is impressive; as Kanye would say, it’s hard to be humble when you are stunting on a JumboTron.
Unfortunately for Durant, and others who try to spread that message, our society doesn’t seem nearly as captivated by athletes who embrace modesty and deflect attention. We’ve been conditioned to “worship” players who build their brand and “glorify” their accomplishments, all in some transparent attempt to sell us overpriced garbage that we do not need. Michael Jordan and Nike created this culture, and there is no turning back.
For members of the media, of course, the worst thing an athlete can be is boring. Love or hate Richard Sherman and his trash-talking brashness, opinions were formed, tweets were re-tweeted, engagement had been set ablaze. It’s no surprise that his meteoric, endlessly chatty rise has coincided with a bevy of Campbell’s Soup and beef jerky spots.
For today’s modern athlete — and anyone else in the public eye, really — fame and fortune are as intoxicating as any drug could ever be. Players spend virtually their entire lives listening to people tell them how great they are, and they are constantly asked to explain why they are so good at what they do. Actively practicing humility allows the smarter among them to keep their egos in check, and for many, there’s no better way to do that than by acknowledging that there exists something out there that is much greater than any of us.
There are few genuine ways to answer most of the questions athletes are asked in post-game interviews, and there are few players who actually offer anything insightful when asked to describe things that happened a few moments prior. So while it may be off-putting for a secular audience to hear a religiously inclined athlete praise God during the postgame, they should recognize that it’s about humility and staying true to the beliefs that helped the player achieve that elite on-field performance in the first place.
