NCAA: Duke fluke? Battier cliche? Whoa, yo!

One week from today, the Christian world will celebrate liturgies and make processions in holy places that recall the journey of Jesus, the heavy wooden cross on his back, up the hill to Calvary and a crucifixion that undeniably shaped and altered the course of human history. This much is all true, whether you're Christian, religious, spiritual, or none of the above. However, since an overwhelming majority of Americans do claim to believe in God, this might as well apply to people of any religious faith.

Quite simply, religious faith is grounded in a belief that a loving God created this world and is bigger than the evil, brokenness and limitations of this life. God--in all the names belonging to God (Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, etc.)--will bring us to new life. Easter, Passover, Ramadan are all part of this general dynamic.

Call it cliche if you want, but when people die or when we experience grief, all of our faith experiences, no matter what faith or (for Christians) denomination, essentially tell us that there's a presence of goodness and a quantity of love that is greater than the death and pain we are encountering.

Yet, I don't think I'd be going out on a limb if I said that funerals and experiences of death are met more with genuine sadness than with genuine joy. Our society and culture here in America is not good at coping with death and immense grief--Bill Moyers pointed out as much in a PBS series last year on death and dying.

When moments of truth come, the things that religious faith tells us--the things we hear on every Sunday or Sabbath or Mosque gathering of our lives--suddenly seem to fade away against the enormity of pain, instead of coming to the forefront to assure and comfort us.

One could say that we live in a world of cliches that don't give meaning. Or, someone could also say that the cliches of faith--things we're told are true and which we hear again and again with a mind-numbing consistency--never transcend that cliche status to give us that extra source of strength in the midst of agony.

To put it succinctly, it seems that in America, religious truths often seem like hollow cliches in the face of death, and not like genuinely empowering truths.

Cliches are cliches because they're true; yet, the force of reality, in all its coldness, seems to take the power of truth away from the time-tested lessons we hear so often in places of worship. We're supposed to believe it, but yet when a testing event takes place, the well within ourselves seems empty and dry.

You might be thinking, "What the hell (pun not intended) kind of college basketball season wrap-up piece is this?"

I guess I need to explain that one, eh, especially since a bunch of Devils--oh, the irony!--won the championship.

The end of the 2001 college basketball season, as it relates to elements of faith and the meaning (or lack thereof) possessed by cliche-level statements, is focused around Shane Battier and Duke.

The question has essentially loomed over the college game all season long: does Duke and that perfect student-athlete, Mr. Battier, get all the calls from the refs? Considering how often a three-point shooting team such as Duke has been able to earn many more free throws than its opponents over the course of the season, such a question is understandable.

After looking at the Duke-Maryland National Semifinal, the worst-officiated Final Four game ever, the force behind that inquiry grew substantially, so much so that, on Monday night, all of the Maryland, Michigan State and otherwise-neutral fans boisterously voiced their disapproval not necessarily when Duke scored, but when a bad or questionable call went Duke's way. Billy Packer quickly, consistently and correctly told the national television audience--and his initially skeptical partner, Jim Nantz--that the Metrodome crowd was rooting against Duke specifically in connection with the Blue Devils' perceived ownership of the officials.

Off the hardwood court, but still in the court of our nation's culture and public opinion, Dick Vitale had to endure season-long criticism of being an excessively pro-Duke shill. Vitale, who leads the nation in cliches per game... errr... broadcast (but who, it should be noted, believes in those cliches with a passion, instead of dropping them at the door when the red light goes off), said--quite correctly--that there's nothing about Duke that can't or shouldn't be praised.

How can you question Mike Krzyzewski? How can you question Duke's academic reputation? How can you not say that Duke is an example, by and large, of "The Way Things Ought To Be In Collegiate Athletics and In Sports In General?"

Sure, Duke has had some problem children in recent years--William Avery comes to mind--but hey, North Carolina's Dean Smith had Makhtar Ndjiaye, and John Chaney had two players bolt from his team this past year. No one is immune. As a whole, Duke does it right under Coach K, the coach of this generation.

And while we're on the subject of Duke, one can't avoid making mention of Shane Battier, the well-spoken young man who could do Bill Bradley one better and actually become president someday after a star-studded college career from a prestigious Eastern university. (It's a pathetic plug, but maybe Bradley can find the right rhetorical pitch in 2004... who knows?)

Battier is the poster child for Duke and everything the NCAA claims scholastic athletics is supposed to be about. Battier is the walking, talking definition of a student-athlete. Chances are you've read many of the fawning stories about him and his brilliance and personal wholeness. One fact, among others in the Battier dossier, stands out in relation to this overall discussion of faith and college basketball: Battier is a religion major.

Battier's overall profile, much like Duke's profile over the past 15 years, is so thoroughly colored by success that it's understandable why many, many Americans want to see both Battier and Duke taken down. The fact that Arizona represented such a tender, emotional, feel-good story didn't hurt the anti-Duke push.

But in the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if there are people who resent Battier precisely because he's a religion major, even though he does anything but impose his views on other people.

Surely, few to no people genuinely root against Battier for that reason, but simply voicing the question does present a much more real, though symbolic, reality: when we see something done right in America, such as Shane Battier or the Duke program, do we really and fully appreciate it? Or does this representation of success make us root for the underdog, as endearing as that underdog may be, and then angrily cite the officials as the false source of that hard-earned success?

There's a theme to this, isn't there?

When we approach death, we're supposed to call on our faith, but it remains an empty cliche for too many.

When we see religion major Shane Battier and Duke win a title, we're supposed to say, as a nation, "Wow! That's what intercollegiate athletics, and sports in general, are supposed to show us about the human experience and personal growth!" Yet, we--or at least all the non-Duke fans among the 45,000-plus at the Metrodome Monday night--can only express resentment, possibly hatred, and blame the folks in the zebra stripes.

In other words, we as Americans, in relation to our faith traditions and the way college athletics moves us, both seem to view much of what we experience as hollow, meaningless cliches, instead of calling forth what should and must be called forth in given moments.

Cliches are cliches because they're true. We need to ditch the cliches in our lives, but hold onto the truths within them. Dick Vitale, Digger Phelps, Billy Packer, and many others in the broadcasting "coachitariat" who get severely criticized for kissing up to coaches all the time, truly believe the things they say. They themselves, and the people like me who believe them, are--I think--better for it.

The question for our nation as Easter approaches and another moving college basketball season fades into memory is this: do we believe the things we're taught--about God and everything else in life?

I've been writing almost every day for e-sports.com during the NCAA Tournament. Now that it's over, I'll give myself a well-earned break.

Happy Easter and Passover to all of you, and may you give thanks--as sports fans--for the example provided by Shane Battier.