Christopher Sanford’s case for Cricket is excellent. And reminds me of Stanley Hauerwas’s case baseball.
Here’s Sanford:
Cricket is surely the perfect corrective for a TikTok generation characterized by its need for instant gratification and its ever shorter attention span. At least as enacted in its longer form, it’s a sport that demands patience and perseverance. Imagine a single continuing contest where you leave the field on a Monday evening feeling mildly apprehensive about your team’s prospects, but then return to see a collective rallying of spirits by Wednesday afternoon, leading to an ultimate moment of fulfillment the following Friday lunchtime. That’s an international test match for you. Life itself can be measured out by the ebb and flow of such an event, and by the manner in which we, whether as players or spectators, react to it. Cricket can be a hard, and sometimes even quite a thrilling, affair. But it is also a game of profound thought, whose appeal doesn’t necessarily rely on a fixation with winning, and, as such, it is a thing of deep beauty in our presently debased world. […]
Cricket teaches us those virtues of patience, endurance, and magnanimity that give the sport a wider dominion in life than any mere obsession with individual statistics or results. Whether a public bred on our mainstream American sports can accommodate itself to such values should make for a fascinating spectacle in the years ahead.
And here’s Hauerwas in his book The Character of Virtue. He writes to his godson, “Baseball is America’s greatest gift to civilization. It is a slow game of failure. If you win half the time, that’s considered very good.”
That baseball is the great American sport indicates that there is hope even for America. Americans pride themselves on speed, but speed is often just another name for violence. And as I suggested in some of my earlier letters to you, America is a very violent country. That we are so has everything to do with our impatience. But we do have baseball as an alternative to war.
He then quotes David James Duncan in his novel The Brothers K:
I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q.Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it is so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q’s thesis that pro ballplayers—little as some of them want to hear it—are basically a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.
Hauerwas adds, near the closing of this letter to his godson,
Your father may well try to convince you that some game called cricket is actually more a game of peace than baseball, but you’ll discover that baseball is far more compelling. At the very least, I promise to take you to ball games in order for you to learn from baseball the habits of peace. Which is but a reminder that the patience of nonviolence is not an ideal, but rather lies at the heart of the practices and habits that sustain our everyday life. As I’ve suggested, our very bodies were given to us so that we might learn to be patient.
Whether it’s baseball or cricket, I’m certainly persuaded.
One more quote from Hauerwas, which precedes the above in the same letter:
My point here is that you will be brought up in the church, and you will be frustrated by the people who make up the church. You may even become as angry as I am with other Christians. But you must also be patient, which means you must be as ready to forgive as to be forgiven. The community necessary to be the church takes time—time determined by patience. You’ll be frustrated by the time it takes for people to be who God would have us be, but remember that God has given us all the time in the world so that we might be patient with one another…
…Patience, at least the kind of patience I’ve tried to suggest is the very heart of God, seems like a pretty heavy burden to put on a child. But if you think about it, it’s also a pretty heavy burden to put on someone as impatient as I am. Which is just a way of reminding us both that the virtues aren’t recommendations for individual achievement. The truth is that we can be patient only through being made patient through the patient love of others. That is the love I see surrounding you, making it possible for you to begin to acquire patience.