Recently, Pope Leo XIV spoke about sports as a unifying factor, teaching athletes teamwork and respect for other traditions.
But is that true? With the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in play, there has probably never been a bigger moment for nations to come together through sports. And yet if sports bring people together, teams and fans alike, they also divide.
For one thing, sports like tennis, which the pope adores, are basically individualistic. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a team aspect with the players’ entourages or competitions like the Davis Cup or the Billie Jean King Cup. But the best tennis players, golfers and boxers are people who are self-possessed.
Then, too, team competitions foster an us-against-them rivalry, even within the same city. The pope, a Chicago White Sox fan, is well aware that Chicago Cubs fans feel very differently about their crosstown rivals and their city and vice versa. So, too, the New York Yankees versus the New York Mets. And don’t get me started on Yankees-Boston Red Sox.
I’ve attended several violent Yanks-Bosox games, and that brings me to another point: Sports are a vicarious form of warfare, and every once in a while the scales are tipped.
But the pope does have a point. The potential return of the New York Knicks from the championship wilderness after 53 years — can they win two more games in the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs, beginning tonight? — has brought a nostalgia and a brotherhood to New York City and to those who don’t necessarily take kindly to the city. And it has reconnected us in other ways — with memory.
I find myself thinking back to that 1973 championship team of Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe and Walt “Clyde” Frazier. What a wonderful team — truly legendary, the kind of team and collection of individuals that made you feel that you, too, could achieve some form of greatness.
And what a great decade to be a New Yorker. The Yanks, the Triple Crown-winning Secretariat (1973), Seattle Slew (1977) and Affirmed (1978), the tennis, the music, the defecting ballet dancers, American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet. It was a terrible time politically and financially but it was a fabulous decade culturally. All of this has come flooding back to me. So, thank you, New York Knicks, and godspeed.
Of course, there is one way people have come together for sure. When President Donald J. Trump was booed at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan before Game Three between the Knicks and the Spurs, I was struck, moved even, by the number of posters from all over the nation and the world who said, “Thank you, New York.” Thanks, I guess, for expressing what they have long felt.
So it’s not just sports that can bring us together. It’s our visceral reaction to the Norma Desmond-like Trump — although I don’t think this is what the pope had in mind.