Telemachus vs. the Sports Bro

Tearing down edifices to idols

I Just returned from a conference in Las Vegas. I am always fascinated by the lights, music and entertainment of my nation's gambling "mecca." I am not referring to the star-studded shows or the Sphere. I am talking about the lights, music and entertainment of people watching on Fremont Street. For someone who suffers from a bit of agoraphobia, the streets and packed casinos of Las Vegas are simply sensory overload for me. I recently put my toe into that electrically charged water to briefly experience the splendor, but honestly could not wait to return to my hotel room, turn off the lights, block out the noise and read a book.

Las Vegas is the modern edifice to our idols. From a distance, the casinos and attractions look real. They take on the look and proportion of classic architecture. Upon close inspection though, the buildings are not made of long-enduring stone and mortar, but of temporary spackle and plastic. The building facades in Las Vegas are as fake as the breasts in a Taylor Swift video. And, just as the latter defies gravity, so does the warm desert strip defy reality. Stepping off the airplane and onto the unheated jetway at six degrees in Minneapolis was my wake-up call and my return to reality.

Las Vegas is the "Babel" of our idols. If we worship it, it is personified, electrified and bet on in that desert town. Each year, another glittery level is added to the faux-tower earthly men erect to reach the heavens. I am saddened that the activities I played as a youth and continued to enjoy as an adult have been turned into the idol’s Western societies now worship. The sports I played taught me teamwork, leadership and honor towards worthy adversaries. These are vital ideals for youth to learn and the mechanized idol worshipping of sports is killing those virtues.

Upon my recent visit to Las Vegas, I experienced sports book. It is a huge section of the casino dedicated to betting on all thing’s sports. The area featured stadium-style seating and floor to ceiling televisions on three sides of the hall streaming every live sporting event imaginable. NHL Hockey, NBA basketball and NCAA equivalents all played on the wall of video monitors and a row of money changers was at the ready to receive the sports-betting tithes. If the sport one bet on was not televised on one of the many screens on the wall, an electronic “ticker tape” chyron of all possible games scrolled about the sports betting room. Betting patrons studied the results like a Wall Street broker, ever ready to hedge against the spread.

In the 4th century AD, an ancient empire still worshipped their old idols while embracing a new religion called Christianity. A monk by the name of Telemachus traveled to Rome and attended the blood sport of the Gladiatorial games. Appalled by what he witnessed, Telemachus walked onto the sands of the arena floor and attempted to halt the spectacle. Legend has it that for Telemachus' interference, he was either stabbed by a Gladiator or stoned to death by the crowd. The Christian emperor, Honorius, was so impressed by Telemachus' martyrdom, that he banned all future Gladiatorial games. That singular event in 404 AD would be the equivalent of a modern president issuing an executive order that the NFL must cease all of its operations immediately.

I imagine the "sports bro’s," bookies and gladiatorial team owners of ancient Rome were none-to-pleased with the emperor's decree. The Colosseum was big business and big business closings have tsunamic effects on economies. As I am sure Emperor Honorius soon found out, smashing the Gladiatorial idol did not make the sports bro’s cease their pagen love of blood sports and convert to the new "turn the other cheek" religion on the block. Quite the opposite. Honorius, son of Theodosius I, lived long enough to see the Western Roman Empire start to crumble. Starting in 410 AD and lasting approximately 60 years thereafter, the Goths and Visigoths chipped away at the Western Roman walls. Within 70 years of Telemachus' fatal stand against the idol known as the gladiatorial games, the Eternal City fell by the hand of the Germanic chieftain known as Odoacer.

Right now, in the United States, we are at the height of our idol worship of sports. Cities and universities erect billion-dollar "Colosseums" for their teams to do “battle.” TV and corporate ad money flows to the few owners and players dominating these exclusive clubs. The sports bro’s (for a detailed description of the several species of sports bro’s, click here) and bookies play off each other all while on-air commentators talk not of the virtues of worthy competition, but of the titillation of sport. Narratives are manufactured of on-the -field rivalries and off field romances. Superficial commentaries like, will Kelsey and Swift unite and make little "Swifties," and fantasy football trade deadlines, dominate the sports chatter. Endless stats are compiled on teams and individual players all to enhance the betting markets. I have even heard football announcers discuss the stats of referees officiating the games. I kid you not, professional football referee now have performance stats as well (see here.) The only purpose for keeping referee stats is to aid the betting market that creates the weekly spread. Rest assured, just as the excess of tax collection funnels into our lawmakers' pockets, so too does "the house" siphon off revenue from the sports book industry.

Is there a modern Telemachus in our midst that will step onto the field and call for an end to our idol worship of sport? I do not know. But I suspect if one does emerge, he will face the same fate. Although we no longer stone our agitators in the public square, we do an excellent job of excommunicating them. We deplatform and de-person them via social media. In the extreme cases of those who seek to smash idols, we demonetize them through the banking systems, rendering them unable to work and travel as free citizens.

I feel like God is giving us one more chance, in a seemingly endless gift of chances, to correct our course and tear down our idols. But my gut, and history tells me, that we will fail to heed the warning signs of our time. We will continue to play the role of Lot, thinking we can negotiate our way out of our decadent morass. We will sacrifice our sons and daughters to the angry villagers protecting the sports status quo, thinking that sacrifice will buy us favor with the very Giver of eternal life.

It will not go well for the Idol worshiping West. Times have changed and the enemy at the gates no longer waits for our weakness to subdue us before crashing through and sacking the city. For in modern times, we don't fall to marauding barbarians seeking plunder, fame and fortune, we just become evil. For me, the thought of what an evil society can do in the age of AI technology is far scarier than a foreign army simply crashing the gates and snatching our golden idols. This latter fate at least gives us a chance at redemption and restoration to a Godly ideal. Slipping ever more into evil in a techno-world ultimately leads to empires that build Death Stars. Embracing evil to protect our idols leads to soulless individuals holding the power to destroy worlds in a blink of an eye, all in the name of good intensions. No, I would rather endure the ashes of defeat as that is the only way we rise again to praise the Glory of our Creator, and to relearn the eternal lesson that Beauty, Grace and Truth reign now and forever.