It was a little moment of gridiron history and it happened just last Sunday. The St Louis Rams, completing a remarkable escape from the slums of the National Football League (NFL), jumped the final hurdle and straight into the living rooms of America. Bam! Into the Super Bowl. One of the greatest turnarounds in the sport's history.
The aftermath scenes bore resemblance to those which greet the end of a big sports event anywhere. Media people scuttling about like ants, victorious players jigging and embracing, defeated players slumped and tearful.
What made the scene unique to the NFL was the men who went down on one knee on the Missouri turf and bowed their heads and offered up victory and defeat to the God they believed they have been reborn to.
Kurt Warner, the Rams quarterback who with one astonishing bound has freed himself from total obscurity and immersed himself in stardom, was cornered by a television crew. The question was bland enough, but the answer which whipped into the livingrooms of America was startling. At a decibel-heavy roar, Warner thanked his best mate: "My Lord, my saviour. Thank you Jesus, thank you, thank you, thank you."
The Super Bowl, the most concentrated, most vulgar, one-day celebration of mammon known to sports fans is in danger of being hijacked by hardline holyrollers. The locker-rooms of gridironland, once infested by steroids and bimbos, now reek of religion.
Where once the league was a hothouse environment for the development of lascivious bump, grind and shuffle dance routine celebrations to mark even the most minor athletic feat, now it is a platform for all-singing, all-dancing born-again Christians. It used to be that the game wasn't over till the fat lady sang. Now it's not over till the fat guys kneel and pray together.
Legend has it that the Gulf War is to blame. A famously epic game at the Meadowlands between the San Francisco 49ers and the New York Giants one Monday night in 1991 ended with a group of players from both sides who wanted to make a significant gesture of faith which acknowledged the possibility of a larger, more serious world beyond football. They opted to pray together at the end of the game.
The NFL, which had threatened to fine precisely that sort of display, backed down and a new era of conspicuous, luminous Christianity was ushered into the game. Testifying replaced testosterone.
Now the Gulf War is over and the higher authority is called upon to bless the snap decisions of linebackers and rushing backs and wide receivers each week. The correct form of respectful petition concerning the outcome of a Hail Mary pass is a matter of serious debate.
The NFL is a study in modern American extremes. This season an active player, Ray Carruth, has been charged with murder, a development which marks the low tide mark for a league which teems with felons to the extent that more than one in five has a rap sheet. Yet, every Sunday, the cons who went pro do the grunt and groan against the 40 per cent of the league who consider themselves to be born again Christians. That's big time, born again, Jesus-is-my-breastplate-and-shoulder-pads Christians.
The Super Bowl itself has in some ways taken on the trappings of an old style revival meeting. In Atlanta this week it is easier to find redemption than it is to find affordable hookers. In the sunami of money and advertising the God Squad are surfing with their message too.
Sport has become a billboard for religion. Christian groups have organised game-day parties wherein the half-time show will be replaced by video testimonies from athletes concerning their faith. Trading cards are available with players faces on one side and little stories about how they found God on the flip side.
Sports Outreach, a Christian organisation based in Los Angeles, hopes to run almost 6,000 Super Bowl parties across the US tomorrow. The Super Bowl is a bumper day in terms of those making "decisions for Christ".
When the Rams and the Tennessee Titans go into battle tomorrow they will both assume that God is on their side and making decisions for them. Not just rooting and tooting for them, but taking time out from famines, wars and listening to Garth Brooks in order to supervise the play-by-play minutiae of the NFL's big day. That's His way.
Barron Wortham, a Titans linebacker, claims that being dropped was Jesus's way of telling Wortham that he needed to be brought down a peg or two. "The Lord humbled me to make me better."
Team-mate Samari Rolle thanks his saviour for rescuing him from a paralysis scare following a serious injury. "It was a message from Jesus to me."
Veteran Bruce Matthews is a footballer because it is in "the good Lord's plan for me".
That's just the Titans. The St Louis Rams, if strength of numbers are anything to go by, have both God and the Vegas bookies on their side. A dozen of the team meet every Wednesday night to pray over their Bibles. Where this leaves Az Zahir Hakim, the only Muslim on the side, is anybody's guess.
"We respect each other's beliefs," says Hakim, who prays to Allah when his team-mates huddle for Jesus. "There is no pressure on me other than to play to my best."
The poster boy for this new promiscuity of prayer, of course, is Kurt Warner, who on Wednesday was named the league's most valuable player of the year. The Rams quarterback was stacking shelves on a supermarket just a few years ago, a great future apparently firmly behind him. A series of strokes of good luck and a dogged faith in himself brought him from that zenith of obscurity to the Super Bowl in double quick time.
He says it was meant to be.
Having been raised as a Catholic, Warner was brought into a Bible studies group when he was playing in the minor league wilderness with the Iowa Barnstormers. The Bible group electrified his faith which in turn sparked his play.
Warner is too nice and too generous a guy to ask the obvious question about whether God's writ runs to minor league showdowns and possibly all the way down to big high school games. Still, he believes it was all part of the divine plan for Super Bowl XXXIV. "My life is lived for Jesus Christ," he says, eager to share his faith when asked. "This success has taught me that the Lord has a plan for me. Everything that happens to me is just a platform for me to share my faith and what I believe in. There's no bigger platform than to be the starting quarterback in the Super Bowl and to be able to share what I'm all about off the field."
Warner's bottom-to-the-top story, allied with his obvious and perhaps excessively publicised/exploited love for his adoptive and brain-damaged son Zachary, is a good excuse for some old-fashioned religion. The worship has practical and professional applications, too, however. Warner reckons that his shared faith with the team's other franchise star, Isaac Bruce, has been instrumental in the Rams's success. Or, more precisely, he reckons the two of them have been instruments in a plan for the Rams's success.
"When I came onto the team it made it easier for me. Isaac has been here a long time and it's important for him to be able to trust the quarterback. That we could pray together and share our faith together brought us along quickly."
Like Warner, the wide receiver Bruce has a store of real-life experience which buttresses his faith and his confidence that somebody is taking a special interest in him.
Driving from a basketball game one dark night, Bruce drove his Mercedes Benz clear off the road and tumbled the car several times while not wearing a seat belt. He says that when he lost control of the vehicle and felt himself passing off the road he just raised his hands from the wheel and said the word "Jesus" as his mother had taught him to do as a child. He offered his fate up to a higher power. He and his girlfriend walked away from the mangled wreckage unscathed.
When it comes to Jesus and Co, Bruce not only talks the talk but walks the walk. He reckons an injury was healed instantly when he phoned his sister from a stadium and prayed over the mobile with her. He believes God ordains the plays, and when he receives his playbooks he prays over them.
Amidst all the wanton testifying, Warner and Bruce are the heavy metal exponents of wear-it-onyour-sleeve Christianity. They petition God to grant them the jackpot every week and, win or lose, feel no need to inquire, "Is that your final answer?"
The Christians are easy to ridicule, but their wide-eyed sincerity is difficult to undermine. In terms of popularity they do themselves no favours. Most fans, most journalists, and evidently most sponsors despise the crass exhibitionism of the post-game prayer sessions, identifying an unwarranted intrusion of private faith into a public and secular arena.
Others argue that to create a Touchdown Jesus is to trivialise the seriousness of all faith - or even of lack of faith. Many people object to the insertion of Him into every snap interview about that last play.
Yet, as a heathen wandering around the media sessions this week asking the holybowlers to discuss their peacock displays of devotion, it was hard not to be struck by the similarity of tone amidst the answers. Beyond the glib professions of belief and devotion, most players said their religion was something to hold on to.
The conversations suggested a group of young men who were struggling to find something beyond the easy money and single-dimension lifestyle which American superstardom offers. They arrived to Super Bowl XXXIV at the end of a season's journey which, like any other they have experienced through their lifetime of being the best in their sport, saw them cossetted, pampered, spoiled, adored and excessively rewarded. In Super Bowl week we get to visit a world without perspective. These guys live there.
"Why not Jesus?" said Isaac Bruce.
And in a time as vulgar and tacky as Super Bowl week, when everything from doritos to dot.coms are being flogged to death via sport, it was hard to put one's finger on exactly which well of sporting purity Isaac Bruce's version of the hard sell was polluting.
One thought occurred, though. If Az Zahir Hakim scores the winning touchdown tomorrow, we certainly have a question to get back to Isaac with. Go Allah!
