The Game of Inches
By Will Bryant
The ritual of Sunday church and the ritual of Sunday football have some remarkable similarities.
“We’re in hell right now, gentleman, believe me.” Tony D’Amato, head coach for the Miami Sharks—portrayed in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday by a seedy, scenery-chewing, 90s-vintage Al Pacino—has three minutes to heal a season’s worth of brokenness, to raise his team from death to life. And so D’Amato embarks upon that greatest of American literary forms, the Locker Room Speech. D’Amato will use every second of his three minutes: to call his team to repentance, to reforge their bonds as teammates, to remind them that football is a “game of inches” where every snap, step, pass, and catch brings you closer to victory or defeat.
The hope of salvation D’Amato has to offer his team is no cheap grace. Any Given Sunday gives a raw treatment of the violence, injury, and substance abuse that run rampant in the NFL. The in-game sequences are nerve-wracking. Coaches yell and players growl and pads collide and no one can catch their breath. The off-field scenes are just as gritty: men get in each others’ faces, medics court malpractice, a defensive lineman defecates thunderously. There is little apparent nobility in the football of Any Given Sunday. And so it falls to the head coach to find transcendence in the chaos, to narrate his team’s journey “back into the light.” D’Amato offers up his own brokenness, and he shares his faith with his team, and when he tells them, “We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time,” they believe him.
Inspiring stuff. And if you find the drama of football—even fictional football—more compelling than other Sunday fare, you’re not alone. While church membership has fallen by a quarter since 1975, NFL viewership has skyrocketed. The Super Bowl, for example, has more than doubled its TV viewership since 1975, reaching an audience of 113 million this past February. Regular season games, too, command a staggering amount of American attention. Of the 100 most popular telecasts in 2022, 82 of them were NFL games. It seems most Americans prefer to spend their day of rest not in worship and contemplation of God but in a celebration of gladiatorial competition and consumeristic flash.
On the other hand, the ritual of Sunday church and the ritual of Sunday football have some remarkable similarities. Both are deeply social, attended together by families and close friends. Both have dress codes to mark the occasion. Both have a bodily liturgy: there are times to sit, times to stand, times to chant or sing. Both have complex languages that are unfamiliar to the uninitiated. Both rely on an affiliation with a particular town or city. The list goes on. The same loves that motivate football fandom also inspire religious faith. It just might be possible that if we investigate these connections more deeply, Tony D’Amato is telling you to go to church.
The athlete and the Christian must both exercise “self-control in all things.” They must be single- minded in pursuit of their goal.
The power of D’Amato’s vision of football comes from its reduction of the game to the smallest constituent of victory: the inch. And football really is a “game of inches.” Vast resources—fifty-one professional athletes, hundreds of support staff, and millions of dollars—are recruited in service of that mind-numbingly simple goal: move the ball forward, even by an inch. “The inches we need are everywhere around us,” D’Amato says. “They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second.” Every waking moment of a professional football player’s life—every practice, every workout, every bite of food—is devoted to the inch. The margin between failure and success is razor-thin: “…one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it.” The game of inches requires nothing less than purity of heart: absolute singleness of will. It requires a discipline, a focus, a total dedication that is utterly sacrificial: “we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch.”
The apostle Paul would have made a great coach. He narrates the Christian life with the same clarity that D’Amato brings to the game of football. For Paul, every motion of our hearts and bodies is to submit to “the law of the Spirit,” as he writes in his letter to the Romans. To the church in Corinth, he writes, “Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.” This is only one of many direct comparisons he draws between the life of the Christian and the life of the athlete. Paul sees the world as a seasoned competitor sees his sport: the same possibility of victory and defeat scattered through a million tiny chances, each worth fighting for. The athlete and the Christian must both exercise “self-control in all things.” They must be single-minded in pursuit of their goal; if athletes will submit to the exhaustive demands of training and discipline “to win a perishable wreath,” how much more should Christians be willing to sacrifice “to win an imperishable one.” D’Amato says that in order to win, “we tear ourselves… to pieces,” and Paul couldn’t agree more: “I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it.” It might seem counterintuitive, but if more Sunday sermons tapped into this narrative of triumph through sacrifice, church attendance might win back some inches from the ruthless blitz of the NFL.
Finding inspiration in a clear, goal-oriented narrative doesn’t mean ignoring the ways we fall short of both the goal and our devotion to it. Both Christianity and football have to wrestle with sin. The reason Tony D’Amato needs to give his “Game of Inches” speech is because he has failed them as a coach so far. His team is in shambles: their young quarterback is inexperienced and narcissistic, the locker room is rife with whining and infighting, the management have dithered and debated themselves into a seemingly unwinnable position. Tony is in shambles himself, and that’s where he starts, by owning up to his status as “the worst of all sinners”: “I made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me, and lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror.” By humbling himself, Tony helps the players face their own “sins,” their own ways of falling short.
Critically, D’Amato helps his players see that their selfishness is keeping each of them locked in their own private hell, isolated from their teammates: “Either we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.” In the same way, disunity represents a serious failure in the life of the church. The apostle Paul echoes D’Amato’s ultimatum when writing to the divided church in Corinth. He rebukes them strongly for their disunity: “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I did not baptize any of you…” For Paul, disunity among Christians is a grave sin. He goes so far as to express gratitude that he did not baptize the Corinthians, so that he is not associated with their fractured church.
Their willingness to sacrifice their lives for their goal—this death paradoxically brings life.
On the positive side, Paul emphasizes the unity of the Christian life. He exhorts the Ephesians to “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” He goes on to describe the oneness with which the church is called to follow Christ. “There is one body and one Spirit,” he writes, “just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” The Christian narrative of sacrificial triumph makes no qualifications or discriminations. All are called to the same, unified life. When this common life breaks down, the entire church falls into sin. It is only through the corporate action of the “body of Christ” that individual Christians are freed from self-centeredness. The church recognizes that Christians “will die as individuals,” so, like D’Amato, it encourages a “team spirit.” Many churches, for example, practice the corporate confession of sin every Sunday, a testament to the redemptive nature of unity. The life of the Christian—like the life of the football player—can only be rightly lived in unity with others.
Not only must the football player and the Christian live a life of unity with others, they must also give up that life for the sake of victory. Tony tells his players, “In any fight, it’s the guy who’s willing to die, who’s going to win that inch. And I know if I’m going to have any life anymore, it’s because I’m still willing to fight and die for that inch because that’s what living is.” The death the players would die as individuals, the death of ignominious defeat, would be a waste. But their willingness to sacrifice their lives for their goal, for one another, perhaps for the sport itself—this death paradoxically brings life.
The same is true about life in Christ. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus warns his disciples that “the Son of Man… must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” He invites his disciples into the same death and resurrection, saying, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.” The Christian, like the football player, faces a threat of death. If they attempt to “save their life” by “living according to the flesh,” they will die spiritually. But, paradoxically, if “by the Spirit they put to death… the body,” they will live. For the Christian, real life—eternal life—requires the death of the flesh.
The American obsession with athletic excellence is not so far removed from an obsession with spiritual virtue.
This (re)understanding of death brings us full circle, back to the promise of a life under a rigorous, all-encompassing discipline—a law—that paradoxically gives us our freedom. On the football field, by subjecting themselves to the hard preparation of training, the players gain matchless freedom of movement: the strength and speed and coordination that makes gaining inches look easy. The intense rigor of athletic training creates an appearance of effortlessness. When millions of Americans erupt in celebration after an acrobatic end zone catch, they are worshiping virtuosic skill, and by association, the underlying discipline that produced it. The American public consciousness is obsessed with this kind of virtue—think of the mania that followed Odell Beckham Jr.’s jaw-dropping one-handed catch in 2014, or the idol-worship of Tom Brady as “GOAT”—and so it is also obsessed with the law underneath. Sneaker commercials and Gatorade ads celebrate the blood, sweat, and tears required by athletic discipline, and the freedom it produces.
In just the same way, the Christian church assembles to worship Christ’s freedom in his resurrection, and the underlying discipline that produced that freedom. What’s more, the Christian can participate in Christ’s freedom and his discipline. Paul writes that, “…through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.” The law of the Spirit—this rigorous way of life—ultimately sets the Christian free through Christ. Through the study of the Bible and the history of the church, Christians celebrate examples of particularly virtuosic or “Christ-like” behavior, and seek to emulate those behaviors in their own lives. They venerate the product of the discipline—freedom in Christ—and seek that same discipline for themselves.
A church service on Sunday morning, then, offers much the same excitement as that of a football game. Though less athletically engaging, a church service offers the same vicarious participation in a life-defining drama of disciplined excellence. By comparing football and church, I intend this essay as a reminder for what the church can offer today’s America. Professional football, undoubtedly, gives Americans much in the way of entertainment, cultural identity, social formation, and the development of virtue. By contrast, many Americans today see the church as backwards and decrepit, unable to offer anything of value. I think they have forgotten what the church is capable of. The church has to offer the kind of life-consuming narrative that Americans will go to great lengths to find, whether in sports or in something else.
What’s more, the church is also capable of being a cultural staple in the same way that professional football is now. The American obsession with athletic excellence is not so far removed from an obsession with spiritual virtue. Though the American church has lost the cultural limelight, it continues its dependable, weekly operation, always pressing against the cultural bulwark with a competing narrative of life, death, discipline and freedom. On “any given Sunday,” the life-defining game of inches is on, and in church, we already know who wins.
Photos by Unsplash by photographers and from Oak Ridge Football 1947.
Will Bryant is a junior at Dartmouth College, where he studies Quantitative Social Sciences, Religion, and Philosophy. Outside the classroom, he works as a research assistant in economics and enjoys adventuring in the New Hampshire.