Depending on your spiritual bent, you may have been either thrilled or turned off by University of Connecticut women’s basketball star Paige Bueckers talking about her Christian faith in postgame interviews on her way to last year’s Final Four.
“I’m a living testimony. I give all glory to God,” she told ESPN. “He works in mysterious ways. Last year [after injury], I was praying to be back at this stage. He sent me trials and tribulations, but it was to build my character. It was to test my faith to see if I was a believer. But I just kept on believing. I did all I could, so God could do all I can’t.”
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There are many other instances too, such as some Ohio State football players after their national championship victory in January, and some Philadelphia Eagles after winning Super Bowl LIX last month.
Some probably feel, as Beneatha Younger put it in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” play, “I’m just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything? … I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There’s only man. And it’s he who makes miracles.”
The media and the public are now accustomed to hearing athletes thank God for the abilities He has given them. But that wasn’t always the case. In baseball in the 1950s and 1960s, it was extremely rare to hear such pronouncements from athletes. Then in the 1970s in San Francisco, one of the great culture clashes between Christian athletes, the media and the fan base erupted over a group of born-again ballplayers on the Giants who became known as the “God Squad.”
Gary Lavelle in August 1980.
Giants relief pitcher Gary Lavelle became a born-again Christian in the winter of 1976. When he returned to the club the next year, he gradually and quietly began to share his faith with his teammates when they showed an interest. Several, including Bob Knepper, Jack Clark, Rob Andrews and Randy Moffitt (brother of tennis great Billie Jean King) came to faith, and by the 1978 season there were eight or nine professing Christians on the team.
The Giants, who had suffered through several losing seasons, came to life that year and led the National League West for much of the season, only to fade in a September swoon and finish third. In postgame interviews, the players frequently thanked God for the ability He gave them, and the press raised no objection.
But when the Giants’ fortunes faded on the field in 1979, the media was quick to blame the born-again players, claiming their newfound faith had made them passive. The press derisively referred to them as the God Squad.
The cornerstone of that accusation was a quote attributed to Knepper, the pitcher who supposedly told manager Dave Bristol it was “God’s will” when he yielded a home run that lost a game. Knepper and his Christian teammates have always denied the quote, as did Bristol. But the false story continued to hound them for years.
The media was merciless at times. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Glenn Dickey wrote, “It may be that the Giants will have to trade one or two of the most obvious born-agains on the club, to break up the clique. At the very least, their lockers should be separated in the clubhouse.”
Another prominent Chronicle sports columnist, Lowell Cohn, told me recently that he disagrees with Dickey on that score. However, Cohn, known for his biting satire, penned one of his most provocative pieces, “Can Satan Save the Giants?” in which he recommended that one of the Giants sell his soul to the devil since God didn’t seem to be helping the team too much!
Not only did the media blame the God Squad for losing, it also alleged that the Christian athletes caused division in the clubhouse and got two managers fired. These false claims spread to the national media, where prestigious columnists Peter Gammons of The Boston Globe and Dick Young of the New York Daily News repeated them. One of the more ridiculous accusations was that the Giants had two team buses to take players to the field, one for the God Squad and another for the others.
Mike Ivie. (Photo courtesy of @S.F. Giants)
Mike Ivie, one of the God Squadders, returned to the club from a stint of mental exhaustion and sounded much like Bueckers, who had made a comeback from physical injury.
“He’ll put you through trials and tribulations and He’ll use every resource to help you find happiness in your heart,” Ivie said. “It would have been twice as hard for me to come back if I hadn’t believed in the Lord.”
Ivie and his teammates commonly made such pronouncements in a San Francisco atmosphere and era that was not conducive to talk about faith. Cohn felt the tension and in his memoirs made this fascinating statement: “Until that day, I believed I was covering a baseball team. I was wrong. I had wandered into the middle of a deep religious debate, one that defined the Giants at that time.”
The God Squadders were spiritual pioneers who bore the brunt of attacks by the media. They paved the way for Bueckers and other Christian athletes to speak boldly about their faith.
Matt Sieger, now retired, is a former sports reporter and columnist for The Vacaville (Calif.) Reporter. He is the author of “The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978.” This column first appeared in The Vallejo Times-Herald and The Vacaville Reporter.
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