God and man at Lambeau Field

by David Benjamin

“It’s all God’s timing, man … It was God trying to tell me to help my foot out a little bit.” —Jayden Reed, injured Green Bay Packer

MADISON, Wis.—Katy, one of my coffee-shop friends, looked a little strange. She was wearing mostly men’s clothes as usual and pushing the walker she’s been using since twenty years as a barista took its toll on her spine. But her overall aspect seemed to me sort of … synthetic.

I sniffed out the imposture as soon as “Katy” had uncharacteristically pronounced every consonant in “Good morning.”
“God?” I said. “Is that You?”

Now and then, God assumes mortal form and visits my breakfast joint for—He says, a more intimate sense of the human condition. But, after a few of these sessions, I’ve realized that all He really wants is to get his gripes off His chest.

He slumped into a chair and sent me for a mug of joe. When I got back, He said, “Thank God … well, I mean Me … for games. Baseball, hoops, girls volleyball, high-school soccer. If it wasn’t for all these sweet, dumb jocks … ”

“God,” I said, “don’t burn around the bush. What’s eating you?”

“Well, you know Me, kid. The older I get, the less I feel like meddling with what my creations are doing. But when their screw-ups and travesties start to pile up like bimbos on the Oval Office couch, I get this nagging urge to horn in.”

“Divine intervention, Lord? I said. “It’s never a good idea.”

“You’re telling Me?” he expostulated. “I create a Son, send him down, get him crucified for man’s sins, and what happens next? Two thousand years of war, carnage, slavery, genocide, atrocity, horror and bad taste. Hitler, Stalin, Nixon, the Kardashians. The hydrogen bomb, for Christ’s sake!”

“I guess,” I said cautiously, “you could try sending down another Son.”

“What? And get him snatched up in a hotel and cut up into pieces with a bone saw by the goddamn Thought Police? I don’t think so.”

I apologized for the suggestion.

“So,” said God, “I’ve decided to play it safe and focus My love and benevolence on pointless human pastimes, namely football.”

“Of all the possible choices,” I wondered,“why football?”

“Football is my last surviving demographic, kid,” God retorted. “Listen to these jocks. They’re not blue-collar leatherheads or Bible Belt hillbillies. They go to good high schools, prep schools, big universities, the NFL. You can’t be an athlete, at least in America, unless you are—to all appearances—educated.”

I conceded that schools are the feeders of the sports-industrial complex.

“There ya go,” said God, patting my cheek. “But after the game? Wave a microphone at the shmuck who scored the winning touchdown and he says something like ‘God guided the pigskin into my waiting hands. God blinded the cornerback to the ball’s flight. My touchdown, our victory and our championship are God’s sign that He loves me, loves our team, loves our fans and loves the cheerleader I knocked up beneath the bleachers after the Homecoming dance.’”

“Really?” I said dubiously. “Football heroes aren’t usually that articulate.”

“Okay, I’m translating. Most of these gridiron stars never had to crack a book. Who knows whether a single Alabama or Ohio State football player has ever set foot inside a classroom? But don’t you see, kid? That’s the beautiful thing.”

“Beautiful?” I asked. “You’re going to have to explain.”

“Athletes are the last refuge of human innocence,” God explained. “They’ve coasted through a lifetime of school without learning much beyond the pious platitudes spouted by coaches in locker rooms. I mean, is there a thinking human being who could hear a grown man say,’When the going gets tough, the tough get going’ without rolling their eyes and giggling?”

I agreed that most jocks are barely acquainted with rhetorical originality, much less history, science, philosophy, religion, politics and social issues. Indeed, if the rare athlete dares to speak up on a real-world issue that ventures beyond zone-blocking, blitz packages and strained hamstrings, he risks his career.

God called this the Kaepernick Syndome. He shook His head forlornly. “Y’know,” He said, “I thought bestowing free will on humanity was a blessing. Silly me. Give a jock a moral choice and a chance to to express himself and what happens? He inherits the wind. He’s flamed by the White House, suspended by the league and drummed out of the only job he knows how to do.”

“And when they see what happened to him, the other players figure out that they’ve dodged a bullet,” I added. “And they clam up.”

“No, they haven’t figured it out,” said God. “Not only are these brutes almost entirely devoid of a functioning intellect, they’re pretty much incapable of taking a hint—maybe because of repeated blows to their helmets.They can’t tell the difference between a teammate fired for his ethical convictions and the fourth-string tackle who’s released on cutdown day. To them, it’s all just My will. They actually believe that I give a camel’s ass about personnel decisions in the NFL.”

With this, God confessed that He’s begun following football so obsessively that he now and then interferes with a pass completion or tears the occasional cruciate ligament. “I’ve pretty much turned into that couch potato in his man cave making microbets with FanDuel on down-and-distance in the red zone.”

I implored God. “You can’t tune out humanity just like that. You have a world full of believers.”

God did a spit-take with his coffee, spraying my face as he laughed out loud.

“Believers? In Me?”

“And your Son,” I suggested, wiping coffee out of my hair.

“You mean Christians?” asked God. “You mean the ones informing on neighbors and standing idly by as masked secret police abduct them into unmarked vans and ship them to concentration camps? You mean Christians who’ve chosen as their Savior a horny orangutan with a comical comb-over? You mean Christians who are eager to shrug off their false messiah’s bromance with a goat-footed satyr who raped a little girl after every meal? You mean Christians for whom it’s more important to be white than to be the child of a Father who proclaimed that all his children are One? You mean Christians who have sold their souls to Caesar, pledged their troth to the moneychangers and turned their backs on the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart and the peacemakers, who have disdained succor to the least of us—because there’s nothing in it for them? Those Christians?”

In all our morning conversations, I’ve never been adept at refuting God’s logic. “So,” I said, “God’s Kingdom has shrunk down to what? Lambeau Field?”

“Cozy, isn’t it? Just me and 70,000 cheeseheads, with nothing on our minds but Go Pack Go!” said God. His face—well, Katy’s face—was alight with team spirit. “I’ve been thinking about inspiring the Pope with a whole new category of saints—heroes who instilled simple manly values into the countless boys whom they took under their wings, who taught the jet sweep and kept them pure from the taint of dissension, doubt and heresy, who guided them to the soul-cleansing, mind-numbing conviction that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

“Wait,” I said, with a mixture shock and guilty pleasure, “you mean, like, Saint Vincent of the Frozen Tundra?”

“You’re catching on, kid. The possibilities are infinite!” said God, excitedly. “Saint Curly de Lambeau. Saint Berwanger of the Heisman. The Holy Bear of Tuscaloosa. Saint Erin, Our Lady of the Sideline. Saint Joseph of Montana … ”

God kept rattling on, from Knute Rockne to Len Berman, while I went for a fresh cup of coffee.