Slate magazine hailed 2014 as “The Year of Outrage.” It appears that Americans are determined to continue the trend into 2015. Since the morning of January 19, the national media has been hijacked by a controversy nicknamed “Deflate-gate” on social media. By the amount of coverage the controversy has received, you would think deflate-gate was …
Continue...It has become fashionable among some to denounce football as barbaric and gladiatorial. Author Malcolm Gladwell has repeatedly called for colleges to drop their college football teams and has asserted that it is barbarism akin to dog fighting. Professor of law at Northeastern University, Roger I. Abrams, asks regarding football, “Should we accept this gladiatorial …
Continue...“Without fathers, there is no baseball, only football and basketball.” – Diana Schaub, National Affairs Baseball is uniquely a sport that fathers pass on to their children. When Willie Mays speaks of his dad teaching him how to walk when he was 6-months old by enticing him with a rolling baseball, he is telling the story …
Continue...Multiple domestic violence cases in the NFL in the past few weeks have caused outrage in the media, throughout the league, and among the fan base. Many fans and media outlets appear to be just as outraged by the way the Commissioner initially handled the earliest reports of the recent domestic violence cases. Consequently, the …
Continue...Brad M. Griffin from the Fuller Youth Institute posted an article, “The Only Six Words Parents Need to Say to Their Kids About Sports—Or Any Performance.” I am sympathetic with some aspects of the article. He is rightly concerned that too many parents simply obsess on their child’s performance in sports. He writes, “All kinds of parental anxiety and dysfunction …
Continue...“Little League is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets,” Yogi Berra is reported to have quipped. Few things are as quintessentially American as the Little League World Series. In 1939, Little League baseball had its inaugural season, and in 1947, the Little League Board of Directors began a national …
Continue...“I believe that God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.” That memorable line is from the 1981 British historical drama film Chariots of Fire. It is the response Eric Liddell gives when he’s confronted by his sister for neglecting his responsibilities before …
Continue...Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in southern Georgia. His grandfather had been born into slavery and his parents worked on a plantation in the postbellum South for $12 a month until his father abandoned them when Jackie was 16 months old. After Jackie’s father left, the plantation owner ordered the family to …
Continue...Baseball means dealing with failure. “There is more Met than Yankee in all of us,” as Roger Angell has poignantly wrote in The Summer Game. Every person who has ever played the game of baseball has been a consistent failure. It has been more than 70 years since the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams, finished the …
Continue...Andrea Mullins is the publisher for New Hope Books, a division of WMU. She's a long time friend and is a tireless advocate for missions. This year she is leading a team to Sochi, Russia, for outreach and evangelism among the Olympic athletes and tourists. She was kind enough to chat with me about this, …
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