You gotta believe, so to speak
Sports as a form of religion? Well, maybe, but not quite the way you might have thought:
For me, being a Los Angeles Clippers fan for over twenty years has taught me firsthand about the spiritual dimensions of faith and suffering, and has helped me better understand my own Hindu tradition. According to the Bhagavad Gita, a pan-Hindu theological text, we should act righteously in each moment and relinquish attachment to future rewards. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna counsels Arjuna on the battlefield and instructs him to act in the present moment without being attached to the fruits of his labor. In this context, Hinduism shares an Indian philosophical worldview with Buddhism that focuses on the process as opposed to the goal, the present as opposed to the past, and the journey as opposed to the destination.
The Clippers have long been derided as the paradigmatic bottom-feeding NBA team. Indeed, in a famous cover story, Sports Illustrated called them the worst franchise in sports history. But their perennially disappointing seasons are a powerful lesson in Hindu philosophy for Clippers fans. We have no championship banners, no MVPs, no retired jerseys — we don’t even have our own arena. As Clippers fans, we’ve never been attached to the fruits of our fandom because we don’t have any fruits to be attached to!
Maybe it’s karma. Lakers coach Phil Jackson certainly thinks so:
He astutely stated that the Clippers aren’t cursed but rather they suffer from the negative karma accrued by their ownership and management. In Sanskrit, the word karma means “action,” and as a philosophical term, karma refers to causality. Karma is cause and effect — a metaphysical caveat to Newton’s third law of motion. Given that the Clippers have historically been managed from a business perspective instead of from a basketball perspective, the effect has been a financially profitable franchise with only a handful of winning seasons.
Meanwhile, the Cleveland Cavaliers follow the King James version of things.
(Via TrueHoop.)
