In mid-August the basketball team of Georgetown University, the “Hoyas,” set out on a ten day “good will tour” of China. They played various Chinese teams in an effort to foster good feelings between the USA and China. The basketball games were a kind of “visual aid” to accompany vice-president Joe Biden’s concurrent visit with Chinese political leaders.
On August 18 the “Hoyas” played against the “Bayi Rockets” of Shanghai at the Beijing Olympic Basketball Arena. Unfortunately all the “good will” went “goody by.” In the fourth quarter, after a hard-fought, highly physical, in-your-face game, the score was tied. One flying elbow on a rebound set off a brawl that cleared both teams’ benches and had players kicking, punching, and wrestling with each other in the middle of the basketball court. The fans added their two cents by throwing chairs and full water bottles onto the court. Finally the Georgetown coach gathered his players and declared “We’re outta here.” The US team sprinted for the exit tunnel under a hail of tossed trash.
Talk about a public relations nightmare. Not to mention a diplomatic incident.
This bench-clearing brouhaha didn’t exactly advertise the qualities of good sportsmanship and team spirit. But whichever team threw the first punch or was more “offensive” than “defensive” it was the visiting team, the Georgetown Hoyas, who ultimately had to beat a hasty retreat. The Hoya’s Coach Thompson wisely acknowledged that whatever else was going on during that melee, his team was lacking one crucial bit of support the home court advantage.
Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim are co-authors of a new book, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won (Crown: 2011). In their research these authors found a clear “home court advantage” operating in all different kinds of team sports. In college basketball for some teams the home court advantage was as high as 69%. Moskowitz and Wertheim set out to discover what the source of that “advantage” was.
There were lots of candidates. Was it the boisterous, bellowing hometown crowds that unsettled the out-of-town opponents? According the these authors’ research, no, there was not statistical evidence that the crowds significantly influenced player’s behaviors.
Was it the stress of traveling to strange locations? Again, no. While dumpy buses and greasy-spoon meals might once have influenced scores, the first-class travel of today’s first-class athletes statistically doesn’t ruffle their feathers or affect their performances.
Was it familiarity with the home town venue — the baseball stadium, basketball arena, football dome, soccer field? Sounds reasonable, but Moskowitz and Wertheim found that ultimately, “knowing what you need to do well on your own back yard doesn’t help you do it any better. Home advantage seems to be entirely outside anyone’s power to control.”
So what did these two researchers finally focus on as the source of “home court advantage?”
The officials. The referees.
Their argument: “The officials can make the crowd happy and then surreptitiously bask in the warm glow. Away players can’t alleviate the pressure of being in a hostile environment. Referees can.”
What do you think? Haven’t you always suspected that the home court advantage was really reducible to the referees?
Well, not so quick.
One of the reviewers of this book totally disagrees with the authors and presents an alternative thesis. His name is David Runciman, and he teaches political science at Cambridge University. His most recent book is The Politics of Good Intentions (2008).
Runciman completely disagrees with the theory of referee bias. “It is not just because the referees are letting them, it is because something is making them play better,” Runciman argues. And what is it that makes them play better? “They believe.”
The theory Runicman offers is simple, but profound: “home advantage is a team phenomenon …Somehow playing at home breeds a sense of solidarity, or what used to be called team spirit, which means that players have more confidence in each other and work better as a unit.” Runciman conclude his critique by admitting, “I can’t prove my theory, but I can defend it. It chimes with what you can see happening in any team sport — the away players don’t quite believe in themselves in the way the home players do.”
Team spirit. A spirit that binds together a bunch of individuals and lifts them up to a new place of confidence and plane of performance. A spirit that gives them a distinct advantage over all the “away” players. Runciman’s suggestion is so much more satisfying than “the guy in the striped shirt did it” explanation offered by Moskowitz and Wertheim. Why? Because it acknowledges the genuine power of unified belief.
In this week’s epistle text Paul’s doesn’t use the phrase “team spirit.” But his words describe the “team spirit” that makes a Christian community. This “team spirit” isn’t fueled by a supportive crowd. It isn’t made possible by indulgent officials. It isn’t aided by any special knowledge of the terrain.
The Christian “team spirit” is based on an unrelated bunch of believers embracing an ideal of “agape” — of “genuine love.” Believing in the life-changing power of that love — the love that brought Jesus into our midst and to the cross and out of the tomb — gives Christians a “home court advantage” anywhere we go.
Our “team spirit” is Holy Spirit inspired. Paul declares that a Christian community is “aglow” in the spirit, zealously eager to serve the Lord. Such a “team spirit,” inspired by passion, doesn’t even require a home court to have the “advantage.”
Good thing. Because genuine Christian team spirit has rarely had the “home court” advantage.
Not in the centuries between Jesus and Constantine, when Christians were fuel for the fires.
Not when Scripture was kept sacred by keeping it secret from the people of faith, before the Reformation.
Not when politicians proclaimed all their actions as “Christian” to cover their tracks.
Today the culture doesn’t even try to pretend its policies and policies have any Christian roots. We do not have that kind of “home court” advantage anymore. All Christian games are now “away games,” with the crowds cheering for anybody but the Christians. You might even call it an ABC world where ABC stands for Anybody But Christianity.
But whatever court we are playing on, we can claim the “team spirit” advantage that the Holy Spirit brings and that a commitment to genuine “agape” love gives us.
John Wesley said that the most important description of God in the whole Bible is this three word statement: “God is love.” When a community lives out of that reality in all that it does, then there is an unbeatable “team spirit” that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
An elderly Father Ambrose put it like this in a conversation with Jon M. Sweeney: “This is the only real Christian truth: it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But it is love all the way down.” (Cloister Talks: Learning from My Friends the Monks [Brazos Press, 2010]).
Jesus came all the way down to tell us that “it’s love all the way down.” Can we be a community that really believes what doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but is true: “it is love all the way down!”
That’s the real home court advantage.
Sermon Notes:
Here are a few more details of David Runciman's argument. See the review by David Runciman, “Swing for the Fences,” London Review of Books, 30 June 2011, 27-29.
Runciman makes the case that “Players aren’t put off by the barracking of the home fans, but the umpires are.”
Runciman says that the authors own stats show that “the crowd doesn’t have an impact on individuals.” But “what if home advantage is a team phenomenon? ... Somehow playing at home breeds a sense of solidarity, or what used to be called team spirit, which means that players have more confidence in each other and work better as a unit. I’m not saying that’s definitely what happens. But Moskowitz and Wertheim haven’t proved that it doesn’t. The key figure that they don’t really discuss is the disparity between home advantage in baseball and football. Baseball has a relatively low home advantage ratio -the lowest for all major sports -at around 54 percent for the major leagues. This is a huge difference from the 63-67 per cent that holds for the big European soccer leagues. What explains it? Moskowitz and Wertheim spend a lot of time describing how the bias of baseball umpires can account for almost all the home advantage in that sport if it sways around 3 per cent of games (and they give good reasons for thinking that it does), then that’s practically the whole of it. But what about the extra 10 percent in football? . . . Let’s say the mistakes of football referees favour the home side by a ration of 60-40 (corresponding with the basic home advantage ration). It also seems reasonable to believe that the mistakes of referees decide perhaps 20 per cent of all football matches.”
“So here’s an alternative explanation: home advantage is lower for baseball because it’s less of a team sport. It’s primarily a series of individual encounters between batters and pitchers. It’s more like tennis than like football. Playing at home makes the biggest difference to passing sports, where the players have to rely on each other...Baseball is also a more disjointed sport (again like tennis): it consists of lots of discrete plays. Team sports where the action flows are the ones in which playing at home really counts. Why? I’m not sure. But Moskowitz and Wertheim have not ruled it out. I can’t prove my theory, but I can defend it. It chimes with what you can see happening in any team sport — the away players don’t quite believe in themselves in the way the home players do.”