"God answers my prayers everywhere except on the golf-course."
Playing and praying, sport and spirit. The forms and functions of prayer in sports
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Joseph L Price, International Journal of Religion and Sport, Volume 1, 2009, Pages 55-80
The paper reviews prayer in relation to American sport: “He quotes Higgs on the phenomenon of public prayer at sports events: “The camera is the major symbol of our time, which means that we have turned everything around, made prayer a public event in the arena instead of a private affair in our closets, made pride, once the unpardonable sin, a virtue which we have equated with victory”
After briefly considering the forms and functions of prayer, the paper examines the confluence of praying and sports in the United States, providing examples of various occasions and purposes of prayers for athletes and their contests.
There are a number of examples of prayer during competition. There is also a reference to the banning for prayer in the endzone later rescinded/clarified to an instruction to “referees on the exception for prayer as a permissible act of celebration. As long as their act of praying seems spontaneous rather than posed…’players may pray or cross themselves without drawing attention to themselves.’”
The argument that team prayers promote unity is examined with examples of coaches encouraging prayer or limiting time allowed for team prayers. There is a section on public prayers before games and the court ruling against it.
Under the heading “Post Game team prayers”, he discusses prayers of thanks for victory. Prayers in defeat and examples for prayers from both teams praying together.
In Off-Site prayers there is reference to the Mighty Macs of Immaculata College - a small Catholic women's school outside Philadelphia – which made history by winning the first three women's national college basketball championships ever played 1972-1974. “Rather than pray for basketball as if to consecrate a secular Activity, these players assumed basketball was already sacred, if played by Catholics who understood their whole lives as an ongoing offering to God.” Julie Byrne, O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Under a heading, “Praying as playing and playing as praying” he argues: “The tendency to connect athletic success and divine favor suggests that the convergence of sports and religion involves a kind of denigration of one or both-the profanation of the sacred or the diminution of sporting competition”.
There are examples of sporting invocation prayers in the style of: “ Your son is our quarterback” and “Divine Goalie”.
Finally there is a discussion of the similarities between play and pray: “In both voluntary acts of playing and praying, however, the goal is a refreshment and rejuvenation of one’s spirit”. I was not convinced by this argument