Cheaters gonna cheat. It’s what we do. Over the past few years gambling has grown to be virtually synonymous with the game. The Oakland Raiders now call Las Vegas home. The NFL has its own official gambling app. Time was that any connection to gambling was strictly forbidden in professional sports. The great Willie Mays, years after he retired, found himself in hot water with Major League Baseball when he took a job as a greeter at a casino. He’d done nothing wrong. It just “looked bad” in those more innocent times. The Houston Astros took the joy of winning the World Series and dropped it in the trash. Not long ago the NBA had to come clean and admit that one of its officials was manipulating games for gamblers. Fake vaccine cards, performance enhancing drugs, deflated footballs and stolen signals. It’s everywhere.
The problem here isn’t, in the end, gambling. The problem isn’t that sports have somehow become entirely too competitive. The problem isn’t endemic only to professional sports. Once more, instead, we find professional sports to be a microcosm of the broader world. It was philosophers, not football players, who first suggested that right and wrong are culturally conditioned. It was artists, not football players, who first “challenged our paradigms” by mocking honor. It was professors, not football players, who first taught us that all texts are shrouded power grabs, and so have no power to compel.
We have created a culture where we cannot be condemned for our sexual shenanigans, and then are shocked that we are surrounded by competitive shenanigans. As my friend and for Major League baseball player Mark Dewey once wrote in Every Thought Captive, we know that Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds were unfaithful to their marital vows. Why should we expect them to be faithful to their competitive vows? Which, in the end, is the more sacred vow?
Relativism in the end isn’t merely stupid. It isn’t merely permissive. It is instead the death of everything good, true and beautiful. Because we are sinners we construct a world where sin is not possible. Because we are human, we hate the world we have created. Or, to quote a most quotable man, “And all the time—such is the tragic-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible…In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful” (The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis.)
They will scream at us that we are narrow, bigoted, and judgmental. And all the while they will long, as long as we are not like them, for the goodness, truth and beauty that inhabits the walls of the city of God. They will praise our works before God.