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Pope Leo XIV mentioned sports in three tweets today (I know it’s called X but do you call it “he X’ed today”?) and all were on sports as a subject.
In his first one Leo mentions individualism and people thinking ‘it’s all about me’ as he mentioned “from ‘us’ to me’”. Yes, Leo likes Tennis, which is an individual sport but it can be a team sport as well (double tennis). Each person working together for the common goal of the win. Each player knows the strength and the weaknesses of their teammate and themselves. On a baseball team you have 9 players at different positions on the field as each position is different from the other and a different skill puts one in each position. Example: someone might be able to throw hard (infielders can really throw hard) but that doesn’t make them a good pitcher as you have to be able to change speeds, locations, make the ball move and set up the next pitch as pitching isn’t about just throwing hard (most big league hitters can hit balls that are fast and straight). A left handed player isn’t going to be placed at 3rd base where his throwing hand will be problematic to getting a throw across to 1st, so if he can catch then he will go to 1st.
When Jordan came to the NBA he was a scoring machine but he didn’t win anything. Bird & Magic had the dominating teams of the 80s and it wasn’t till Jordan had a team around him that the wins started coming in. Personally, I see the ‘team effort’ in secular alternative news media more than Catholic channels. In secular groups I follow they work together, prop each other up, promote each other and team up all the time. It’s not about ‘one man’ but the message. We will not go to hell alone nor to heaven alone.
Again, it’s different in individual sports. We played golf and bowling as kids and we all were good at them. Myself I was beating up 15-16 years old when I was 12 averaging 200 bowling and just embarrassing the older kids in my house rental shoes, a butterscotch spare ball, and skinny as a beanpole structure (well I thought I was embarrassing them as they were bigger and had girlfriends… I would have been embarrassed to lose to a younger weakling). Though even in bowling you have team events or leagues and each person has to hold their weight or others carry the one having a weaker day. If you want to win you are only as good as the weakest link on the team.
On a final note on individualism, let’s look at Babe Ruth, who, as a boy, lived at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore as a “delinquent”, separated from his family for persistent unruly and illegal behaviour. Martin Leo “Matthias” Boutilier was a Cape Breton boy who moved to Boston with his parents at a young age. He later became a priest and was an assistant director at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore and mentored Babe who would go on to call Boutilier the “greatest man I’ve ever known”.
Ruth stayed true to his Catholic faith as it’s reported he went to Mass regularly gave generously to Catholic charities (see book “the Big Fella‘) (there’s a tale that even if he came to the hotel late from being out he would wake up the Catholic Yankee players to hear Mass and would drop $50 in the collection plate where a teammate once said ‘is that for last night’s sins?’) The book “Life that Ruth Built” mentions Ruth frequently and publicly repented and consulted with priests, often from St. Mary’s, who helped him acknowledge his failures and work to change his ways. Remember this is in a time where anti-Catholicism was strong but he helped to make that situation better.
The photo is after his 2nd marriage to Claire and they got married after his 1st wife died.
When Babe died of cancer at age 53 (you can read the account in the LIFE link here) 100s of thousands passed his coffin (he had rosary beads in hand with the crucifix above), and then the Requiem Mass at St. Patricks Cathedral where 44 priests were at part of (see photos in the LIFE link for how big a crowd showed up). People still visit the grave site.
Final thought on being a team. Here is a clip from “42” on Jackie Robinson.
In his 2nd tweet Leo mentions how most everyone is ‘connected’ digitally & how the tech brings people from the far ends of the Earth together. He is 100% correct as, like the Sensus Fidelium channel (& other channels), I’ll see people from all over the globe watching and now with the AI dubbing that growth will be even larger. Yet, how many have seen people sit at a table, grab their cell phones, and start scrolling or texting away to people who are not there and the people they are with they just ignore each other. In sports you really cannot tweet and play. You are in the moment interacting with the others in play. Say you have a pick up street ball game. Nobody is thinking about texting, tweeting, taking selfies etc. You are disconnected from the 1’s and 0’s and focused on the X’s and O’s. Even in a slower pace of a baseball game you’re in the moment if you are playing. You’ll never see the centerfielder reach for a cell phone to send a tweet. It’s sad when most people live behind a screen instead of living in the moment. You’ll remember the moment, but most of the time you’ll forget you recorded that event.
Leo’s 3rd tweet on this speaks of losing. Now the first sentence brings up the dog eat dog world of business and society where it’s the survival of the fittest. If you crumble you don’t deserve to eat. I remember, during my medical device days, a company went out of business and my boss texted me “we have to jump on their accounts tomorrow”. I felt horrible about them just going belly up (though their product wasn’t very good) and said we shouldn’t dance on their graves as how many of them are now wondering how to feed their family and such? On the flip side maybe that company learned from having a bad product and went to improve on it. It’s a reason why companies like to hire people who played ball. Why? Not just because of the competitive spirit (I loved the challenge of getting new accounts or overcoming objections and such. I enjoyed the game) but the overcoming adversity part of it. In sports you will always find adversity. You will have a bad practice, politics on the team, a bad shooting day, a bad pitching day, a day you go 0 for the day or strikeout 4 times. Maybe everyone got a hit but you. Whatever the case it you will have it. It’s how you overcome adversity. Do you cower in the corner and cry and make up excuses or do you figure out what went wrong, work on it, improve, and try again?
If you have even been involved in a cut you have been told or heard that Jordan got cut from his high school varsity basketball team as a sophomore. At the time, he was 5’7″ and deemed too short and lacking in advanced skills. The thing is, contrary to popular mythology, is yeah he didn’t make the VARSITY squad but did play on the JV squad and lead the team in points. If he made Varsity maybe he doesn’t get the playing time to become better. Jim Abbot was a left handed pitcher in the 1990s. He was born without a right hand yet he pitched 10 seasons in the Major Leagues with a 87-108 (Win-Loss) record & threw a no-hitter on 4 September, 1993 (then the 9th ever in New York Yankee history). Nobody remembers the 108 loses but they’ll always remember the no-hitter.
Think of Kerri Strug winning gold in 1996 with torn ankle ligaments. Kurt Angle, same Olympics, won gold with a broken neck. Bethany Hamilton lost one of her arms in a shark attack while surfing, still wan a National Title. Josh Hamilton was the top prospect in all of baseball then let his life go out of control with drug use. He cleaned himself up and got back into the Majors (we were at his comeback game with the Reds) later won the Home Run Derby.
Loyola Marymount, in 1990, Hank Gathers literally died on the court. 37 members of Marshall University’s football team was killed in a plane crash on 14 November 1970. The list of tragedies is endless. How you overcome them defines you.
Nobody likes to lose, unless you are the Washington Generals (they play the Harlem Globetrotters (they’ve only won 3-6 games in their history and have lost more then 16,000 games against the Globetrotters.. their last win was in 1971 beating Harlem 100-99), or the Chicago “Black Sox” who threw the 1919 World Series vs the Cincinnati Reds thanks to the mob and gambling (still not all of them were in on it. See the great movie “8 Men Out”).
The only other person who wanted to lose is William Thatcher in “A Knight’s Tale” where Heath Ledger’s character is told “if you love me you will lose” and proceeds to get beat up for the girl.
But losing is a tremendous educator. Losing will sharpen your discipline, focus, and increase your drive. You always have heard “he is so competitive he hates losing checkers” well duh who does enjoy losing? Now being a sore loser is another story. That’s just being a baby. You’ll see what athletes do from ‘good losing’ when they watch the other team celebrate the championship. Soaking in ‘what might have been’. Shoot I still remember my 2003 Panthers doing that after they lost the Super Bowl to the Patriots. When you make a mistake, you want to ‘run it back’. You will do anything for another chance and work on never making that mistake again, just like we should be doing in confessionals. We want another chance not to screw up. In today’s sports many have had it handed to them much more easily than players of old. As Tom Hanks’ character in “League of their Own” said to Dottie, because she wanted to quit because “it got too hard” Coach Jimmy said “it’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. The hard makes it great.”
All of this came from his sermon on Trinity Sunday and he finished with remembering Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, the patron saint of athletes, who will be canonized on September 7 this year. He pointed out that Frassati’s life shows us that “no one is born a champion, no one is born a saint.” It is a daily training and takes us one step closer to our final championship.
Closing, Pope Leo XIV challenged the athletes present with a mission: “to reflect in all your activities the love of the Triune God, for your own good and for that of your brothers and sisters.” Urging them to entrust themselves to Mary, who will help guide them towards the “greatest victory of all: the prize of eternal life.”
