Men and Sports

by Pat Kahnke - St. Paul Fellowship I

Pat is a player and pastor for St. Paul Fellowship Church.
This article is reprinted with his permission and can be found on Pat's blog, Frogtown Pastor.

My subject is men and sports, but first, three short points (to avoid the trap of overgeneralization):

1) Mankato East High School (where I grew up) in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had a series of phenomenal girls’ basketball teams. The girls played smarter than the boys’ teams, were probably more competitive, passed better, dribbled better, shot better – basically did everything better. But if the two teams would have played each other, the boys would have won…barely. At that age they already had begun to develop into men, and basketball is a sport where a man’s physical advantage is simply overwhelming.

2) I play on a co-ed softball team with men and women from St. Paul Fellowship. It’s a joy to get to be team-mates with women in a league that frankly recognizes the physical differences, and tweaks the rules in a manner that makes for fun competition. I wish this would happen more often in sports.

3) I also play on a men’s team with St. Paul Fellowship, and we have two wonderful sisters who play with us. When I talk in a moment about the innate competitiveness that men have, I don’t mean to say that some women don’t have this same competitiveness. I’ve never been a woman, so I’m only guessing (and going by observation) when I say that men seem more driven in sports (in general), but the two women on our team seem as driven as the men. So you can’t over-generalize.

On to the topic:

I heard Mark Driscoll speak at Mars Hill Church in Seattle on Sunday, and part of his message focused on masculinity. Something inside me clicked into focus when he talked about the need for men to have outlets for their competitiveness – to be strong in some manner – to strive for excellence. I realized why I love softball.

I love that once a week in the summer I get to go all-out, win or lose. The primary purpose of our softball teams at St. Paul Fellowship is to have fellowship with one another and with people from other churches, but what I’ve come to realize is that a desire to excel together is a big part of what makes that fellowship work.

We often say, rightly, that it’s not whether we win or lose that matters. What I think we also need to say, though, is that (in a limited manner that keeps everything else in our lives in their proper perspective) it’s appropriate and good to strive together to do the best that we can.

We’re not all-stars – we don’t have try-outs. The point is to get everyone together and then, given who we have, do our best together.

Part of being a man, I think, is this inherent competitive drive. The fellowship simply wouldn’t be as rich if we didn’t share the common goal of trying to win. When we lose (which happens often, as our 1-19 record two years ago proves) we ought not hang our heads or say it was wasted time, but we ought not also abandon our goal of winning.

Sports is a wonderful, safe way to be competitive. Because softball is a game, the structures allow for the players to go for broke within the boundaries and then to leave it all on the field. Once the game is over, the competition ends.

Hopefully our men’s league has a uniquely Christian feel to it (although we haven’t all lived up to this all the time). At its best, our league shows the best qualities of allowing for brotherhood (as we pray together before the games, interact in a Christlike manner during the games, and shake hands and build friendships after the games) and competitiveness (within the bounds of the rules).

I used to feel bad for being competitive in sports. I’ve always stunk at sports, but when I’ve occasionally found myself on the winning side, I’ve felt bad for the one who loses. No more. Now I understand that they also got to compete and did so of their own free will (it helps that I’ve been on the losing side more often than not, and learned that it’s still fun to have gone all-out).

I now realize that not everyone competes in the same way: God invented Chess and Uno and Yahtzee for a reason.

But the bigger point in all of this is that a man’s drive to excellence can occasionally be focused towards games (and this is a wonderful blessing from God), but it should always be focused towards the care and protection of women, children, and society.