Champions

Champions

 

 

In the winter of 1986, newly-hired football coach Lou Holtz had a sign hung on the wall of Notre Dame stadium near the locker room doorway. Reading “Play Like a Champion Today,” the sign has become synonymous with the Fightin’ Irish, despite the fact that the original message may have been on a locker room wall at the University of Oklahoma forty years earlier. 

Like the WWII-era “Keep Calm and Carry On” signs discovered in Britain in 2000, the message “Play Like a Champion Today” has morphed into a number of other sentiments including (at the doorway of the Saint Ignatius faculty lounge) “Teach Like a Champion Today,” and in other places, “Pray Like a Champion Today,” and “Drink Like a Champion Today.” I have no doubt there is a dentist somewhere with “Floss like a Champion Today” above the door of her examination room.   

Gerry Faust, Holtz’s predecessor, appreciated the psychology behind the motto. In an article by writer Greg Touney, Faust is quoted as saying: “The word ‘champion’ means you’re the best—the very definition of it. You’re a bar above the rest. When you play that way, you’re going to be the best and if you give your best, that’s all you can ask of a person.”

Holtz saw something more: “Regardless of the win-loss record, regardless of the problems you have, when you walk out on that field you have an obligation to your teammates and the fans to play to the best of your ability—to play like a champion and to think like a champion.”

Playing like a champion, then, is about doing the little things and the hard things in practices and in games: making the sacrifices necessary to be the best player and form the best team possible. To play like a champion is to play the way champions do: with a goal in mind, focusing on it with laser-like sharpness, and being one’s best mentally as well as physically.

But I like to think that at places like Notre Dame and Saint Ignatius, playing like a champion means something more. We are Catholic after all.

In the ancient world, a champion was one who stood on behalf of another, who took the burden and responsibility of an army, a country, or another group on his shoulders, offered himself in sacrifice, and fought on their behalf. So it was with Achilles and Hercules in Greek mythology. So it was with the young shepherd boy David as he faced the wrath of the Philistine giant Goliath in single combat. So it was with Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem. Those men brought their strength, skill, determination, and faith to fight on behalf of others. And they undoubtedly brought their fears, self-doubts, and anxieties to their contests as well.

For better than a century, Notre Dame has hosted the “Bengal Bouts,” where young men box in a competition that raises money for the Holy Cross missions in Bangladesh. Making famous the mantra “strong bodies fight, so that weak bodies may be nourished,” those boxers profoundly demonstrate the spirit of champions.

Whether they win their matches or not.

Whatever one thinks of boxing, these are the type of champions our athletes—indeed all our boys—at Saint Ignatius should be. In chapel talks with the hockey team and pregame talks with the soccer ‘Cats, we have tried to instill this idea. Inviting them to think about a family member or friend who is struggling in some way (physically, emotionally, etc.) we encourage the boys to write the initials of that person or those people on the tape with which they cover their hockey sticks or which hold up their shinguards. The idea is that as these athletes go through the physical struggles of sprinting or lifting or pushing themselves in drills, they offer their difficulties in acts of self-giving love for those who struggle to persevere through challenging situations. But the self offering isn’t limited to the physical hardships the boys go through: it also includes the sense of boredom and tedium that so often accompanies doing drills or dealing with butterflies before a big game. Challenging our young men to offer their best certainly has the salutary effect of better preparing them for the next game or press on in the one they’re in, but more importantly, it gives them opportunities to think beyond themselves and act for others at a time in life when self-centeredness is often the rule.

Offering up his own struggles, St. Paul put it this way: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of His body, which is the Church.” (Col. 1:24). Paul is not in any way suggesting here that what Jesus did on the Cross wasn’t enough for the salvation of humanity. Far from it. Rather, he tells us that we can join our sufferings—in whatever form they take—with Jesus’s for the sake of the Church. It’s what theologians call “redemptive suffering” and it is one of the great spiritual practices the Catholic Church has given the world: taking our pains and our frustrations and our anxieties and offering them to the Lord for the betterment of others. Notes the Catechism:

By His passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to Him and unite us with His redemptive Passion (CCC # 1505). 

It is heartening when, after a game or a particularly challenging practice session, players will come up and say “I offered that up for my grandma who’s sick” or for “my mom who’s been struggling at work.”

So it is to “play like a champion”—Catholic style—to offer up one’s difficulties on behalf of another. But we can all do the same as we each “change diapers like a champion,” “do taxes like a champion,” and even—God help us!—“floss like a champion.”

One of the distinctive characteristics of an authentic Catholic Christian faith is this understanding of the efficacy of redemptive suffering and intercessory prayer. Simply put, we take care of each other, a care that is offered not only in physical ways, but spiritual ones as well.

So even as we are cheering on the Fightin’ Irish to a national title this year (as I’m sure we all are ;-)) perhaps we can offer the ups and downs of our daily lives for someone we know who is struggling.

Because that’s what champions do.

A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.