Sports and Religion
In order to first understand ritual in sports, it is necessary to define what a ritual is. Rituals give bonding, while also granting freedom to a group of people in a shared context. In terms of sports, symbols play an important role in supporting ritual. For example, players go about their daily rituals in order to elevate the overarching symbol of their franchise. For example, every game for Michael Jordan, a “sports deity”, was an opportunity to partake in the rituals of basketball to both represent the symbol of the Bulls, and his own symbolic representation of the Jordan brand (Laderman 59).
Sports themselves offer an alternative movement to religions that offers the opportunity for people to both religiously follow athletes and teams. For fans, sport creates “enjoyable diversions from daily routines, a model of order and coherence, and heroes to look up to and follow” (Laderman 47). Within the context of Bull Durham, the character Susan Sarandon portrays describes her plight of trying to find a religion to follow, and eventually chooses baseball because “it is the only church that feeds the soul day in and day out”. For her, and many other fans, sports fulfill similar spiritual needs as traditional religion does by taking people out of the profane and bringing them into the sacred. In other cases, it can serve to bring order and healing. For example, after the September 11th attacks the Mets played a very emotional game in which Mike Piazza hit a game clinching home run in New York. According to a widowed wife who attended the game: “when Mike hit that home run, the release of everyone around us was just incredible. We never thought there would be a light at the end of the tunnel” (Botte). This is also an example of how sports can work as a force of theodicy, as they bind “fans athletes and teams together around idols that are worshipped in ways that, for some, create shared experiences and memories as impressive and meaningful as any other sacred encounters in this life” (Laderman 62). This ritualization of sports brings together the entirety of humanity by taking the universally familiar aspect of play and giving it religious connotations that transcend everyday life.
Luis Serota, Eric Seiden, Eric Lintala
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