Gambling is wrong

Filed from Interstate 80, somewhere west of Kearney, Nebraska

One of the thorniest issues I’ve had to navigate in the modern age is how to biblically answer the massive explosion of gambling activity, fueled by internet gambling sites making billions of dollars a year.

And the biggest challenge I have, and that I’ve seen in likeminded pastors, is how to articulate our firmly-held belief that gambling is wrong. Because the Bible doesn’t say “thou shalt not gamble” in any verse with which I am familiar.

But, as with many issues, it does establish important principles that Christians must apply. And gambling is one of those topics to which Bible principles must be applied, and which is found unbiblical in light of Bible truth.

Gambling is the risking of money or other items of material value on the outcome of an uncertain event. This may involve sporting events, card games, various casino-style “chance” games, or indeed almost any other event with a measurable result.

Christians have long felt that gambling is wrong. It looks like a sin and quacks like a sin, what is it? Indeed, it is my opinion that the Holy Spirit indwelling the born-again believer specifically produces resistance to this sort of thing in Christians.

But this resistance, provable or not, is not in itself sufficient for one believer to tell another believer “this is sinful.” As people of the book, we believe we must have Biblical grounds. So, what are the biblical principles involved?

As with many issues, there are multiple principles at play.

A classic, and valid, objection to gambling is the 10th Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Covet.” Gambling involves the risking of material value with the intrinsic desire to receive more in return. Thus, in most cases, gambling behavior necessarily invokes covetuousness. This cannot be confused with merely working to earn resources for needs through honest gain; that is a biblically endorsed concept that cannot be identified here due to gambling’s inherently risky nature. Gambling inherently seeks a windfall that is disproportionate to need and reason, proportionate instead to risk. The desire for gain through gambling is inherently covetous.

Additionally, since gambling both between private individuals and in contexts sponsored by corporate entities is designed to produce more losers and more losings than winners and winnings, most people who gamble lose. This is poor stewardship. Wasting money is disparaged in both Old and New Testaments (Proverbs 18:9, for example) and stewardship in all resources both tangible and intangible is an imperative of believers (1 Corinthians 4:2).

So gambling to win money can safely be seen to violate both imperatives. These principles comfortably trespass activities like playing the lottery and most recreational gambling.

The issue I’ve struggled with on occasion is when people protest that they are being neither covetous nor particularly bad stewards; it’s “for entertainment purposes only,” they might argue. We spend resources on things for fun, what’s wrong with a little betting for fun? If one wins, it’s just a bonus, right?

Well, there are two objections. The first, which is in itself enough but is less important: gambling is not a safe recreational activity. It is highly addictive; engaging in it is itself risky, apart from the money at stake, because runaway gambling quickly becomes destructive. Proverbs 22:3 warns against predictably risky behaviors–“A prudent [man] foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished”–and gambling assuredly is one.

Worse, though, there is the moral culpability of winning. A defense of gambling that I have heard looks something like this: “I am good at it/I have knowledge/I can and do profit from this, so it is not risky, nor is it a problem, therefore it is ok.”

But Bible principle applies to those who win, not just to those who lose. When someone wins at gambling, they are necessarily doing so at the expense of someone else. And it’s not the bookie or the casino or the online betting site that they are taking from; it’s the majority of gamblers who lose. The gambling industry is profitable because when people win, even when they win big, there are far more people who will lose. The entire business model is built upon it.

So a winner is taking money from someone else. Christians are commanded to consider others as well as themselves (Philippians 4:2). And we know that cooperating with other parties in sin, particularly sin that harms others, is itself sinful (Proverbs 1:10-14). Gambling providers exploit losing gamblers for profit. It is wrong. A winning gambler is a party to this exploitation. One could argue they aren’t the provider, but they are a necessary cog in the provider’s industry. One could argue that the losing gamblers are losing willingly; so are people that purchase heroine from drug dealers, but that doesn’t exculpate the dealer from moral responsibility.

Even in the highly unlikely event that a winning gambler does not violate any other applicable Biblical prohibition, they are a morally responsible participant in sin against someone else.

Thus, in all cases, gambling is Biblically wrong.

Down With the Ship

The book of Jonah is best known for its account of Jonah’s sojourn in the belly of the fish (1). However, the true meat of the of the story is Jonah’s difficult relationship with God’s calling on his life, and his particular struggle with the field to which God had called him.

Jonah was called to go to Nineveh. The great city, the social and economic if not political capital of Assyria, at the time the dominant geopolitical power of the region and leading power of the world, and a perpetrator of devastation and atrocity.

Jonah did not want to go. Biblical expositors tend to infer, I assert appropriately, that his reluctance was due to his personal feelings about Nineveh and the Assyrian empire. He did not like them. He knew that repentance toward God, and a subsequent issuance of divine mercy, were realistic outcomes of his obedience to God’s call, and he did not like that at all.

So he went the other way, of course. We know the story: passage on a ship, a storm, the desperate efforts to avoid sinking. And, eventually, Jonah’s acknowledgement that he was the reason the storm came, and his instruction to throw him overboard to spare the ship and the crew.

In the moment disaster came, Jonah finally, reluctantly, cast himself into God’s hands. And in his subsequent, miserable journey back to shore, he surrendered to obey God’s call, and to go to Nineveh, and preach God’s message.

It’s a striking story to me today, because Nineveh was a massive city filled with people, culture, life… and sin. And I find a number of jarring parallels between Jonah’s attitude toward that city and the sad neglect for large cities I find in my wing of Biblical Christianity.

And it remains to me startling how few are taking up the mantle to go work in the actual cities, rather than suburbs. A massive number of the challenges our nation faces are rooted in cities, and many of the most public national challenges can be found there. Crime? Fatherlessness? Addiction? How about political hot topics like fraud and anti-Americanism?

Yet, though the storms continue to howl through the country across political elections and administrations, Christians continue to decline the call to go. Minneapolis, at the center of the news again this year, and yet, no church planters have called me looking for support to go. Not to Minneapolis, not to St. Paul.

It’s not because there isn’t a need. It’s not because God has stopped calling. It’s because God is calling people and they are refusing.

There are people at Bible colleges that could go to a city like Atlanta or Los Angeles or Boston or Houston. People training for ministry in good churches that could go to New York or New Orleans. Families that could be pillars of new churches in St. Louis or Washington or Detroit. But many aren’t going.

And the fabric of the nation takes on water. We’ll vote every couple of years, hoping an election will bail some water, but that’s just a teaspoon against the tide. Content to have someone send the National Guard, rather than send a preacher of the Gospel. Real change must be spiritual, and that means people answering the call. And many choose the path of Jonah instead.

And so the storms swirl. Because people who should go to cities, to reach people, to give the Gospel, to answer the call, have refused.

They would rather go down with the ship.

(1) My position on this is that, at the time the Bible was written, the taxonomy did not exist to differentiate between aquatic animals of mammalian classification and those that we today consider relatives of the class of animal known as “fish.” Thus, it is perfectly in keeping with the biblical record to speculate that the aquatic animal inside which Jonah spent three days and three nights may have been what we now refer to as a “whale.”

A Matter of Scale

It is frustrating when one believes in a certain body of doctrines and values, and sees someone depart from that body of values, change a position. The beliefs are important. We don’t like it when people change. It’s a universal feeling.

It’s important not to lose perspective. I have, on some occasions, seen people make an incremental change, or a modest move. To use an example, perhaps someone changes principles for their entertainment or goes to a church that is casual in approach, perhaps fewer services or a different Bible version. And, yes, these are things that matter to me.

I have seen some people react to such changes in a way that suggests that the person changing is leaving the faith entirely. On rare occasions this is explicitly stated.

And, to that, I say: Get some perspective. I disagree with some of those changes. It’s not the same thing as denying everything I believe. Not close. In one case, a person who maintains basic foundational beliefs, who will teach their kids that Jesus Christ died for their sins, has changed some of their visible practices. In another case, someone has rejected Jesus Christ and now thinks what I believe is evil.

Foundational thinking can and should guide us to remember what is important and to be thankful for what is still there.

Trust me, there’s a big difference between someone who has rejected the faith and embraced the world’s moral system entirely, and someone who goes to a church that has a drum set on the stage. We do poorly to treat someone engaging in the latter as if they are someone participating in the former.

A Visit to Dearborn

We’re taking a relatively laid-back family vacation in Michigan this week, mostly visiting with family. I get restless if there’s nothing exciting in a vacation to look forward toward, though, so we planned some stuff, not-so-coincidentally moving this vacation off of the former “cheap” category that accompanied “laid-back.”

One of the things we planned was a trip to Detroit to see the Tigers play at Comerica Park, and some time spent in Detroit proper outside of downtown. We wound up spending some time with the good/best friend I grew up with, best man at my wedding, etc. He invited us to his house in Detroit’s University Park neighborhood, one of the nicer areas of town, a perfectly normal neighborhood anywhere in the country where his kids were playing outside and the homes, while (like my neighborhood in Duluth) a bit on the aging side, perfectly nice and livable. We also poked around Detroit a bit, including areas that I had never visited, especially east of the Woodward/75 corridor that is a part of the region that someone from Ann Arbor really has no reason to visit.

We spent the next day with my mother, but that evening we made an intentional visit to Dearborn Baptist Church, a 3-year-old church plant headed by Josh Levesque. I’ve watched this ministry since I heard about it, and it’s exciting to see God working. They have, through God’s provision, obtained a property at an amazing location in Dearborn, and they’ve done great work with the space. Josh, who was helping another church when we visited, clearly has an enviably industrious disposition and he’s not afraid to try stuff.

One of the endeavors in which he has a part is the Great Lakes Baptist School of Church Planting, which I’ve heard about from a few ministry acquaintances from that area before. They’re trying something and I’m glad for it. I met one of the “church planting interns,” who is working with Pastor Levesque in Dearborn for a couple of years. I hit him up for information, some of which I am pointlessly repeating here as something of a notebook for personal reference.

The “School” has quarterly seminars held at different participating churches where the interns will receive instruction in specific areas of pastoring and church planting (eg, a series of lessons on “outreach” or “worship”) and will then implement what they’ve learned at their church. It’s a good idea, a way of getting interested church planters into a track that equips and mentors, while also putting inside local churches where they can serve and with whom, in many cases, they can presumably partner.

I’ve heard that there is at least one interested party in planting in Detroit, and I’m delighted to hear that. Frankly, Detroit needs at least four churches, and is currently sitting at *maybe* one. I’d love to see the GLBSCP (or whatever acronym makes sense for it) adopt a specific city-focused seminar or emphasis, though that’s their business and I’m not unhappy with their more general approach. It does, however, seem to provide a model for some of the needs that have been kicking around in my head.

Dearborn, for what its worth, is very close to the type of field I consider any big inner-city outreach. It contains the biggest Muslim community in the US, and Dearborn Baptist knows this and desires to reach them. This is not a church planted to be a typical suburban ministry, and I appreciate Levesque’s heart to reach Dearborn and Detroit.

We need more.

City planting notes – do we need an org?

Sometimes I just have to thump something out on paper to clear the head and order my thoughts.

So, I’ve referenced the work of Gary Forney before in his efforts to reach the Arctic. And he was successful. He went himself, toiled for decades in some of the most forbidding regions of all of creation, and left behind a legacy of churches and missionaries that continue in the region to this day.

But he also recruited, presenting the need in Bible colleges. And, while I’m vague on the history here, he was an integral part of the founding of Points North Baptist Mission, now All Points Baptist Mission. That board’s portfolio has included a significant missionary training conference every year in Ohio.

So, to facilitate his burden for the Arctic region, Forney mobilized: a travel schedule that included stops at Bible colleges at which he recruited laborers; a mission board with a focus on that region (and thus, despite a size that was, at the time, unimpressive, institutional knowledge of the issues and needs of that field); and an educational effort to develop, equip, and strengthen the laborers he is sending out.

Sometimes I feel like we need something like this for cities, for our stripe of churches.

There’s not nothing. And I’ve talked about the need, but others share the burden, and some are actually doing things about it. But I feel like we need more of a focus, and I definitely feel like there’s a need for some instruction on the particular needs of city ministry that doesn’t appear to exist right now.

And we need to recruit laborers; both the “vocational preaching” types, but also the people for the pews. Specifically, here: I believe we need to put some focus on recruiting future lay adults to commit their lives and their families to a church situation where the need they can fill is greater than the benefit they receive. Recruit future engineers and nurses and carpenters to choose a place in a city where things are a bit rougher and you don’t have the clean-cut teen program but you can serve and contribute. You don’t need to be a pastor to do this.

That sounds like some sort of org. A board or a specific ministry of a church that is essentially full-time. A ministry dedicated to the recruitment, development, and implementation of urban church planting.

Sounds nice. In theory. Where this would come from? Only God knows.

Beware of issue mythology

I’ve been listening to a podcast(1) series on the French Revolution. It’s a fascinating piece of history that I’ve read about in the past and of course learned in other vague ways, but into which I’ve never really drilled deeply before.

What fascinates me is that the podcast, which in my view is effective in trying to be both objective from an historical standpoint and fair to the historical figures and events given their subjective conditions, has spent some time puncturing a number of popular mythologies surrounding some of the big stories of the Revolution. In particular they spent time on Marie Antoinette and the Bastille, showing in both cases that the popular mythology of those two entities were not nearly as inflammatory as subsequent popular history has led us to believe.

And, since I am an American who can function perfectly well without ever looking deeper into the Revolution, I’ve never really had cause to look at the events much closer than that. So hearing these mythologies, which make up a significant portion of popular knowledge of the events, punctured so thoroughly, is very powerful. Too powerful, in fact–without deeper knowledge of the social and economic and political issues of the day, it is very easy for a person without base knowledge to misunderstand the significance of Antoinette and the Bastille, and think that there was no reason at all for the events that transpired in 1789 except the lies told about those things.

Which is, of course, nonsense. And the podcast is clear about that, as well; they go on to describe many of the real problems of the day. It’s well done. There were enormous problems, and when I actually zoom out into a larger macro-view, I note that the monarchy that was overthrown was the monarchy of Louis XIV, a tyrant who persecuted Christians, and a Regime that was wholly unrepresentative and ultimately unjust to an even greater extent than the one my country successfully exited just a few years earlier.

But it struck me how powerful the puncturing of popular mythology can be when one’s understanding of events or issues is limited to the surface caricatures.

I have previously discussed the dangers of engaging in straw man arguments against error. There is also a danger is focusing our attention on buttressing our own surface, caricatured arguments for our own positions without going to the effort of describing and persuading the merit for the underlying principles. We can, in a sense, get attached to our own straw men, argue them, and then find to our shock that people behave as if the emperor has no clothes when those weaker arguments are punctured.

I’ll explain: when someone has only a surface knowledge of a system in which they believe, and a detail of a relatively unimportant part of that surface knowledge is punctured, they are much more likely to question the entire edifice. Take, say, the founding of the United States. In reality the United States was founded in large part by brilliant but complex and flawed men promulgating new ideas that had never before been executed on the level of a large nation. They declared new ideals even when they themselves were imperfect in holding to them; Thomas Jefferson famously railed against slavery in portions of the Declaration of Independence that were subsequently deleted by other factions of the Continental Congress, yet he himself owned slaves for his entire life.

If one’s understanding of the Founding Fathers is limited to a caricatured view of them as paragons of 21st Century freedom and virtue fighting for freedoms for all people, or alternately as devout Biblical Christians founding a Christian nation, when one discovers that they are neither of those things one might question the entire project. And, indeed, many have, in some cases violently.

And that would be wrong. Because someone well versed in the history and the issues will have no problem granting those flaws and imperfections, while still admiring and supporting the whole. It is precisely that surface knowledge encompassing a deeper ignorance that can cause overreactions that can be destabilizing.

I recall with some amusement a social media post by a person who actively rejected and opposed Christianity. An archaeological exploration discovered signs of idol worship from the era and geographic space of what was at the time the northern kingdom of Israel established by Jeroboam and his successors of various dynasties. The link to the article was accompanied by a smug note to the effect of, Ha! See? Turns out the Jews weren’t really always monotheistic after all! The idea here being that evidence of idol worship somehow punctured allegedly false Judeo-Christian teachings of what the Bible said.

To which the obvious response is: Idol worship? In Old Testament-era Israel? No kidding.

This is important in discipleship. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve seen that used to agree with my position on issues that change and use incredibly weak arguments to explain that change. It’s silly, except that it often(2) reveals that they were never taught the foundational principles in the first place. One can produce a lot of enthusiasm through loud recitation of surface platitudes, but if there is no work done to buttress those platitudes with reason and fact beneath the surface, the entire edifice crumbles easily the moment the subject hears counter-arguments.

It is important to teach and to believe below the surface. And when we lack knowledge that goes beneath the surface, to have the humility to recognize that there may be important details or themes of which we are unaware, that are important to understand. Social media today elevates to absurd levels the confident statements of “experts” on issues that think they know everything because they read a Wikipedia article or one book. We must take care to understand and teach the real issues, both for our own strength of belief, and for proper strengthening of others.

(1) I can’t endorse all of it, but the podcast is “The Rest is History,” and I find it enjoyable and balanced. They are excited by history, fair about its warts, but also discuss it without demanding 21st century concepts be applied to individuals and circumstances without the benefit of 21st century knowledge.

(2)Not always. Sometimes the issue isn’t that they weren’t taught well about the issue, but that they are intellectually lazy or dishonest.

On Intellectual Humility and Foundationalism

Adapted from a discussion in which I particpated. It regarded a friend of mine who found it baffling that sincere people identified as Calvinists would go through the mental contortions necessary to arrive at a conclusion that essentially makes God the author and creator of evil. My analysis:

Going to be contrarian here because the monstrous conclusion of Calvinism is the result of following path of intellectual pride and human reasoning from Biblical truth that is very possible for Biblical Baptists to also follow in error.

I am not baffled.

I can see how easily this human reasoning progresses. It can progress from presuppositions that are vaguely or explicitly biblical.

The problem is that these presuppositions are applied to issues and situations incorrectly, and the outcome is not re-measured to the foundation of Bible Truth. It’s like building a structure, and measuring each portion of it by the portion previously built, without re-measuring to the foundation on the ground, and finding your structure crooked and unsteady.

So: “God knows the future and God is sovereign” becomes “God knew that people would fall into sin” becomes “God therefore predestined those people to fall into sin.” And just like that you’ve started with Biblically defensible statements and followed them into unbiblical error.

We can do the same thing to. Not on this issue, but on others. We must apply biblical truth to different issues and situations, but when we apply that biblical truth, we are using human reasoning. It can be very easy for us to make the mistake of following our own reasoning into a place that fails the test of being re-measured by the Word of God. Our mid-acts dispensationalist friends have this problem. So do people who equate departing from our standards on, say, dress and music, to “leaving the faith.”

The ease with which human reason can vehemently and honestly lead us into error should lead us to humility, grace, and a desire to re-measure our principles and suppositions to the Word of God, lest we fall into the same trap.

A partial list of venues at which I have watched sports in-person

This is just as unimportant as the previous post, but recently it occurred to me with some surprise that I had completely forgotten a significant game I had attended in an unusual location, and since I’m feeling type-punchy I felt like writing this all down somewhere, and where better than a blog nobody reads?

At the moment it is my plan to skip high school and club level sports, but maybe I’ll change my mind. I am tentatively organizing by sport, as much to help me process this mentally as to organize it for reading.

Note that I try to identify the general home team or event of the venue; in some cases, such as Frozen Four games at NHL arenas, that’s not the team that I saw.

Football

• Michigan Stadium, Ann Arbor (Michigan Wolverines)
• Pontiac Silverdome, Pontiac (Detroit Lions)
• Ford Field, Detroit (Detroit Lions)
• Rynearson Stadium, Ypsilanti (Eastern Michigan Hurons/Eagles)
• Skydome, Toronto (Toronto Argonauts)
• Ohio Stadium, Columbus (Ohio State Buckeyes)
• Spartan Stadium, East Lansing (Michigan State Spartans)
• Glass Bowl, Toledo (Toledo Rockets)
• Neyland Stadium, Knoxville (Tennesee Volunteers)
• Memorial Stadium, Lincoln (Nebraska Cornhuskers)
• “Death Valley,” Tiger Stadium, Baton Rouge (LSU Tigers)
• Kyle Field, College Station (Texas A&M Aggies)
• Camp Randall Stadium, Madison (Wisconsin Badgers)
• TCF Bank Stadium, Minneapolis (Minnesota Golden Gophers)
• Houlihan Stadium, Tampa (Tampa Bay Buccaneers / Outback Bowl)
• Invesco Field at Mile High, Denver (Denver Broncos)
• Los Angeles Coliseum, Los Angeles (USC Trojans)
• Rose Bowl, Pasadena (Rose Bowl)
• Malosky Stadium, Duluth (UMD Bulldogs)

Baseball

• Tiger Stadium, Detroit (Detroit Tigers)
• Comerica Park, Detroit (Detroit Tigers)
• Skydome, Toronto (Toronto Blue Jays)
• Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles (Los Angeles Dodgers)
• Angel Stadium, Anaheim (Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels)
• Target Field, Minneapolis (Minnesota Twins)
• Ned Skelton Stadium, Toledo (Toledo Mud Hens)
• Jethawks Stadium, Lancaster (Lancaster Jethawks)
• Dow Diamond, Midland (Great Lakes Loons)
• Blue Wahoos Stadium, Pensacola (Pensacola Blue Wahoos)
• Wade Stadium, Duluth (Duluth Huskies)

Basketball

• Crisler Arena, Ann Arbor (Michigan Wolverines)
• The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills (Detroit Pistons)
• Breslin Center, East Lansing (Michigan State Spartans)
• Pontiac Silverdome, Pontiac (Detroit Pistons)

Hockey

• Yost Ice Arena, Ann Arbor (Michigan Wolverines)
• Joe Louis Arena, Detroit (Detroit Red Wings)
• Little Caesar’s Arena, Detroit (Detroit Red Wings)
• Xcel Energy Center, St. Paul (Minnesota Wild)
• HSBC Arena, Buffalo (Buffalo Sabres)
• Mellon Arena, Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Penguins)
• Munn Ice Arena, East Lansing (Michigan State Spartans)
• Value City Arena, Columbus (Ohio State Buckeyes)
• BGSU Ice Arena, Bowling Green (Bowling Green Fighting Falcons)
• Ewigleben Arena, Big Rapids (Ferris State Bulldogs)
• Taffy Abel Arena, Sault Ste Marie (Lake Superior State Lakers)
• Lawson Ice Arena, Kalamazoo (Western Michigan Broncos)
• Berry Events Center, Marquette (Northern Michigan Wildcats)
• Joyce Center, South Bend (Notre Dame Fighting Irish)
• Omaha Civic Auditorium, Omaha (Nebraska-Omaha Mavericks)
• Kohl Center, Madison (Wisconsin Badgers)
• Mariucci Arena, Minneapolis (Minnesota Golden Gophers)
• DECC Arena, Duluth (UMD Bulldogs)
• Amsoil Arena, Duluth (UMD Bulldogs)
• Nutter Center, Dayton (Neutral site)
• Van Andel Arena, Grand Rapids (NCAA regional site)
• Resch Center, Green Bay (NCAA regional site)
• Compuware Arena, Plymouth (Plymouth Whalers)
• Windsor Arena, Windsor (Windsor Spitfires)
• Hershey Center, Mississauga (Mississauga Ice Dogs)
• St. Michael’s Arena, Toronto (Toronto-St. Michaels Majors)

Soccer

• RFK Stadium, Washington DC (DC United)
• Columbus Crew Stadium, Columbus (Columbus Crew)
• Olympic Stadium, Barcelona (FC Barcelona)

Motor Racing

• Michigan Internation Speedway, Brooklyn, Indycar
• Belle Isle, Detroit, Indycar
• Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Lexington, American Le Mans / IMSA
• Mosport Park, Bowmanville ON, American Le Mans / IMSA
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indianapolis, Formula One
• Brainerd International Raceway, Brainerd, NHRA
• ERX Motorpark, Elk River, MN, Champ Off Road
• Crandon International Raceway, Crandon, WI, Champ Off Road
• Antigo Lions Speedway, Antigo WI, Champ Off Road
• Dirt City Motorplex, Lena WI, Champ Off Road
• Ojibwe Forest Rally, Minnesota, American Rally Association
• Lake Superior Performance Rally, Michigan UP, American Rally Association
• Spirit Mountain, Duluth, SnoCross
• Proctor Speedway, Proctor, Late Models

Other

• Tour of California, Acton CA (Cycling)
• Fort William Gardens, Thunder Bay ON Scotties Tournament of Hearts (Curling)
• DECC Arena, Duluth, US Championships (Curling)

A partial list of sports for which I am capable of producing informed opinions

Photo by Giovanni Garnica on Pexels.com

It has occasionally been observed that I know a lot of things that are completely useless. Most of us hold some level of useless knowledge in something; it happens that, in my 44 years, I have gained a lot of useless knowledge about sports.

I come by it honestly. I was a fan from an early age, and it was my obsession in my years before I surrendered my life to serving the Lord. In my adult years it remains a pleasant diversion that is available to consume when I have recreational time and available to discuss when I want to indulge in something that is not quite so heavy; it is also something I can lay aside when time is not available.

I learn about things in spurts. I take an interest in a topic and I search and read. I’ll drink from a firehose for a while. The interest will decline a bit, sometimes fade completely, but the knowledge remains, and like riding a bike, it is easy to jump back on when the appropriate moment strikes. This inclination is more than something for hobbies, too; it has, in the past, been a useful job skill, allowing me to cover medical office vacations with months or years between shifts, and also to plug into the election reporting I now moonlight in without major difficulty after many months of inactivity.

As sports go, this means that I have learned a lot about many sports and I am competent to discuss them. It doesn’t mean I watch all of them all the time. In recent years I have become more conscious of something I have actually done for a long time–I pick and choose things to spend time on, and keep a pilot light on stuff I am less invested in at the time. Some years I follow and watch Baseball closely; other years (particularly recently, when the Tigers are bad) I will watch much less. I haven’t watched the NHL consistently in many years, keeping just enough of a pilot light going to track some key trends and teams and players, aided by Cliff’s Notes-style intake on social media. I was a huge auto racing fan for years in the 90s, basically left the sport behind for over a decade, and picked back up where I left off a few years ago.

So it is with many. Here’s an attempt at a list, not really in much of an order, except that football is at the top. Note that I’m not including participation sports that I have not watched significantly as a spectactor, such as Ultimate. Anyway, here we go:

Sports which I know too much about:

• Football – Michigan, the Lions, followed closely for 40 years with almost no break.
• Baseball – Tigers fan, currently at a “not watching much” point, but I hope to catch a game or two this year.
• Basketball – Michigan, the Pistons (haven’t watched a full Pistons game in years). UMD basketball, which I’ve followed with varying closeness. Less intense since Michigan basketball declined.
• Hockey – Michigan, the Wings. Michigan hockey fandom is one of my more disproportionate followings relative to how much I follow the rest of the sport and its miniscule national profile.
• Soccer – I was soccer-mad from 1999-2002 and have continued to follow it on and off since. Sometimes I’ll tune in for a big international tournament, but I watched quite a bit of club soccer and MLS in the last two years. I’ve been to a few matches, most wonderfully one in Europe last year.
• Motor racing – Indycar, F1, Desert, Ultra4, Short course off road, Rally, Rally Raid, IMSA, Le Mans/WEC, Moto/Supercross, Snowmobile, even a little NASCAR. Indycar was my #1a to #1 football for years as a kid. I got disillusioned by the split and kind of drifted away from everything when I went to California. A racing themed VBS kindled an interest in off road which I maintain to today, and I’ve followed all of these with fair levels of intensity. I have attended most of these disciplines at one point or another. NASCAR, for what it’s worth, is the least interesting of them all.
• Cycling – Got into it during the Lance years. That was originally just a Tour de France interest, but expanded considerably when I was in California and coverage of other races improved. Watching closer in recent seasons with the emergence of some spectacular riders and rivalries.
• Alpine skiing – Have you gotten up at 4am to watch a downhill race in Europe in January? I have. Easier to get into when you live in a cold, snowy climate like I do, and also helps that my family enjoys skiing.
• Rugby – I’ve watched some League, and I got into the sport heavier with the World Cup last fall. I watched a fair amount of six nations as well. I’m hardly an expert, but I can enjoy the matches coherently now.
• Sailing – One I’ve actually done quite a bit myself. This is a sport where you really need to be eager to find it to watch it regularly, and it’s been a couple of years for me.
• Curling – my mom got me connected to this watching curling tournaments on CBC when I was a kid. When John Shuster won gold I met people out doorknocking the next morning who were just as tired as I was because we were all up in the wee hours watching.

Sports which I can/have watched and understand as a replacement level fan:
(if that sounds unremarkable and unimpressive to you, you’re right)

• Tennis – this is borderline, I spent a lot of time on this in the Nadal-Federer peak era.
• Australian Rules Football
• College wrestling
• Boxing
• Table Tennis
• Golf
• Olympic sports I’ve done extra work to understand: track and field, swimming, freestyle wrestling, figure skating, snowboarding.
• Olympic sports I have watched and understand at the level the announcers have taught: Gymnastics, handball, rowing, weight lifting, volleyball, archery, water polo, diving, bobsled/luge, cross country skiing, biathlon, freestyle skiing, ski jumping, speed skating.

Notable absences:

• Cricket – No plans to learn it, but never say never.
• Lacrosse – I basically understand it and I think it’s nice, but I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a full game from beginning to end.

Current sports follows as of July 1, 2024:
What I’m actually paying attention to right now

• Not football now, but I’ll be back in a month and a half.
• Tour de France
• Racing: F1, Indycar, IMSA/WEC. Off-road following has declined this year, mostly time/money, but that may change later.
• Soccer – Euro 2024, but less seriously than last two tournaments, only watched a couple of games.

Fall/Winter/Spring follows this past year:
What did I follow closely this year?

• Football, obvs
• Rugby
• Some Michigan Hockey, though few games on tv
• Racing – F1/Indycar, Baja 1000, King of the Hammers, one snowmobile race, Sebring and Le Mans
• Declining but non-trivial amount of soccer. Much less than the year before, but got to go to a game in Europe.

Sports at pilot-light level this last year:
What did I follow the headlines/big news for, but not really watch?

• Basketball – my teams are bad
• NHL – see basketball
• Baseball – see NHL
• Various others at lower pilot levels

Notes:

• I might be forgetting something I know enough to place on the “know too mucha about” lists. I am, after all, getting old.
• I have attended events involving competition-level players in all of the first list except alpine skiing and rugby, including 8 different racing disciplines.
• Attempting to quantify how many sporting events I have attended would be a futile exercise. But it’s a large number.

Postscript:

There is is. Embarrassing, isn’t it?

A lament on writing

I’m wordy. But I’m not a great writer.

Professional writers regularly nail deadlines. They produce copy. If they’re not feeling it, they produce it anyway.

I think more by nurture than nature, I have developed pretty negative habits in writing that make disciplined, objective-based writing difficult for me.

I can produce thousands of words in one sitting with almost no effort. But if I get, say, a specific topic, or specific role to fill, it can be incredibly, brutally laborious. And my life schedule modestly obstructs my ability to practice and discipline myself to get better at that kind of writing.

For me, it’s either “there” or it isn’t. A topic catches my fancy? I can bury you with words that make sense, rapidly, sometimes mercilessly. But hold me to a structure and I have a hard time writing with the end in mind, with the pressure I put on myself that it be “good.”

A significant source of this is the hobby-level interaction I partake in on the internet. It’s pretty light-weight stuff, and I’m naturally very good at it. Theological question? Opinion the likely outcome of a Tour de France stage or a football game? I’m there. But it’s also easy to step back and not worry about stuff I don’t feel like talking about.

It keeps the writing muscles moving, but it isn’t well-suited for disciplined, objective-based writing. But it *does* help me understand and admire those who do that on a regular basis.

I’m not *that* old yet. There’s still time.