Until my parents got so infirm, I was on a tennis team. I'm a terrible tennis player but tennis is fun. (My father once watched a match and commented, "You sure are better at riding horses.")
There's something that I've been mulling over about tennis, Christianity, sportsmanship and appropriate strategy. In tennis in my town some people will intentionally hit you with a ball. One coach in town teaches his teams to aim at the other players and we were all extra prepared whenever we had to face them. A tennis ball can hurt -- or do serious damage to an eye. The justification for "grand slams" at you is to intimidate you, get you to move to a less aggressive location on the tennis court or to punish you for line calls or other behavior they don't like.
It's widely done. My husband found out he was playing against a doubles team where the woman had the reputation for hitting other players -- on purpose. Sure enough, she aimed at him four or five times (he was playing at the net). On the sixth try she hit him hard in the privates, and then acted surprised and apologetic.
He walked around for a while trying to calm down as much as anything else. He wasn't going to let her win this mental game through bad sportsmanship and intimidation.
When they resumed play, the woman's partner sent an easy lob to my husband. He says he doesn't know what came over him, but that ball was just hanging in the air, and the next thing he knew, he hit it harder than he has ever hit a ball and aimed it right at the woman who'd hit him. She got a racquet on it, so she wasn't hit, but she lost the point. She was furious. She yelled, "I said I'm sorry."
He said, "You might have been sorry for the time you hit me, but I don't think you're sorry for the five times you tried to hit me and missed. If you're going to live by the sword, you'd better be prepared to die by the sword."
She didn't hit any more shots at my husband or his partner. My husband feels bad about all this as it wasn't very gentlemanly or very Christian of him. I said it wasn't very ladylike of her. Especially since she has a reputation for such things. Still, it's hard to think that intentionally hitting anyone is ever okay. We wouldn't tolerate this in our children.
I don't know her, but I know some Christian women players who have no guilt with hitting their opponents. One bragged to me about how she slammed one woman who kept making bad line calls. I was shocked by this. She plays as often as she can and she plays to win. She has called me to play with her, telling me she can teach me how to win. I have declined.
I was even more shocked when Lily was playing volleyball with this Christian woman's daughter, and the daughter slammed the ball into Lily. Apparently, she thought Lily was intentionally messing up their game. (Lily has my lack of skills in games involving balls.) Lily was physically and mentally hurt and shocked to be treated this way by a friend. The friend later explained that she had done it on purpose to teach Lily a lesson and apologized since she realized Lily wasn't playing like that on purpose....
When games quit being games, people need to quit playing.
Our church has two teams in a "Christian" softball league. Some of our players are exceptionally driven and competitive. After a couple of ugly attitude games our leadership decided there had to be some changes or our church would no longer participate because our witness for Christ was a bit tainted.
Well, the guys prayed and the guys changed - and helped each other "stay" changed ;-) - and the difference has been remarkable. In fact, several people have come into the Kingdom because of our church's demeanor at the games.
Posted by: groovyoldlady | November 07, 2007 at 08:16 AM