I am not the most rabid sports fan in the world, but I like watching an occasional game. I like cheering for the hometown team, and I like cheering for the underdog. Of course, if you live in Kansas City like I do, cheering for the hometown teams usually means cheering for the underdog. Still, there is something inspirational about seeing "David defeat Goliath" when it does happen. I think it speaks to something deep inside us, maybe even at a spiritual level.
There have been several movies recently about amazing sports underdogs. There was The Rookie in 2002 about baseball pitcher Jim Morris. He injured his arm in the minor leagues and went on to become a high school coach. Coaching a team in his late thirties, he made a deal with his team that he would try out for the major leagues if the high school team made it to the playoffs. They did, he did, and he made the major leagues in 1999.
Seabiscuit was released in 2002 about a 1930s-era castoff horse and the people who owned, trained, and rode him. Seabiscuit went on to beat War Admiral in a head-to-head race in 1938 and became a national symbol for the downtrodden in overcoming the odds. Similarly, Cinderella Man was released this year. It is the story of Jim Braddock, a Depression-era boxer who rose from out of nowhere to defeat world champion, Max Baer. Both movies gave you a real sense of the times.
My favorite movie of this genre must be Miracle, released in 2004. Miracle is about the 1980 US Hockey team defeating the Soviet Union in the Olympics and then winning the gold medal. From the beginning, the movie had its hooks in me. The opening credits give a retrospective of national and world events in the 1970s up to the summer of 1979, when the team was formed. During the movie, the Soviets invade Afghanistan, and hostages are taken at the US Embassy in Iran. The movie includes portions of Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech, where he observed that for the first time in US history, most Americans believed the next five years would be worse than the previous five years.
These events hooked me because they are a summary of my formative years. I turned ten in 1969, and the chronicled events are among my earliest memories of life beyond my world. I also connected with the movie because the average age of the players on the team was twenty-one. I turned twenty-one just a month or two after the Olympics.
The main reason I connected with these events was I remember watching the game against the Soviets with a group of friends from college. The Soviets were like a machine. They had won more than fifty consecutive games. They easily defeated the NHL all-stars and beat the American Olympic team in an exhibition game just before the Olympics by some lopsided score like 10-3. No one really gave Team USA much hope, but they stunned the fans by beating Czechoslovakia (the second-best team in the world) to advance to the semifinals against the Soviets. Could they pull it off?
The movie covers seven months from the team's formation to the 1980 Winter Olympics. It centers on coach Herb Brooks, who selected the team to beat the Soviets. It tells the story of undisciplined young men who truly become a team. The game against the Soviets occupies the movie's last twenty or so minutes. The Soviets scored first, but Team USA tied it up. The Soviets scored again, and Team USA tied it again at the buzzer of the first period. The Soviets went ahead yet again in the second period. The USA tied it again in the third period. Then, with ten minutes left in the game, Mike Eruzione scored for Team USA, putting the USA on top 4-3. The roof just about came down.
The movie captures well the nerve-racking battle of the Soviets throwing everything they had against Team USA for ten solid minutes as the Soviets became more flustered and desperate. During the last couple of minutes of the game, the crowd was on their feet screaming. (By that time, no one I was watching with, in 1980, was sitting either.) With seconds left, the teams were scrambling for the puck. Then came the words of sportscaster Al Michaels, his voice ever more frantic, "Five seconds left in the game! Do you believe in miracles?… [buzzer] YES!!!" To this day, sports list fanatics rank that game as the greatest upset ever. Two days later, Team USA beat Finland and won the Gold Medal.
The movie ends with a voiceover of Herb Brooks as scenes play from the end of the medal round and from the medal ceremony, where all twenty players jump up on the top platform to celebrate the accomplishment. The voiceover has Brooks saying,
I’ve been asked in the years since Lake Placid, what was the best moment for me. Well, it was here [medal ceremony]. The sight of twenty young men of such differing backgrounds now standing as one. Young men willing to sacrifice so much of themselves, all for an unknown.
A few years later the US began using professional athletes in the games. “Dream Teams.” I always found that term ironic because now that we have dream teams, we seldom get the chance to dream. But on one weekend, as America and the world watched, a group of remarkable young men gave the nation what it needed most; A chance for one night, not only to dream, but a chance, once again, …to believe.
The story is truly amazing and inspiring. Yet each time I watch it, I find it connects with me at some spiritual level. Brooks talks of differing people becoming one through sacrifice. These people have a common dream. That dream comes down to one apocalyptic moment where the miracle becomes a reality. The mighty are toppled, and the lowly are lifted up. It is, in many ways, a metaphor for the Church. Where the metaphor breaks down is that the team's faith is not radical enough!
Al Michaels asked, "Do you believe in miracles?" with five seconds left in the game when it was a foregone conclusion. After the buzzer, there was pandemonium. What if, instead, on a summer day in 1979, seven months before the Olympics, Coach Brooks announced to his newly assembled team that the Soviets were already defeated and all they had to do was play? What if he and the team had broken out in a wild victory celebration? You and I would think they were crazy. Yet this is exactly what the Church is called to do!
With the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has declared that evil is defeated. We are told to celebrate this victory in front of the world as a sign of the dream that is going to be fulfilled:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Revelation 21:1-4, NRSV)
As we find ourselves in the advent of 2005, I don't know how long it is before the dream comes true. Are we celebrating? I know that angels came to Shepherds two thousand years ago in the night and celebrated the victory of God. I do know we have been called to celebrate that victory as well, before a world that wants to dream but doesn't know how. There may be five seconds, five years, five centuries, or five millennia left on the clock, but the same question keeps ringing down through the ages. "Do you believe in miracles?"
Leave a Reply