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GIVE ME THAT PRIME TIME RELIGION | PAGE 1, 2
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When Sanders whines that the media is out to get him, however, or when he insists it was the public who wouldn't let the Prime Time character die, he betrays the depth of his self-involvement. His version of the most notorious incident in his career, for example, is pure hallucination. In 1993, baseball announcer Tim McCarver had been questioning Deion's commitment to the sport. When Deion's Braves beat the Pittsburgh Pirates for the National League championship and McCarver stopped by the locker room, Deion used the occasion for revenge -- according to everyone but Deion. "Just to show what a forgiving, easy-going, fun-loving guy I was," he writes, "I turned and doused this guy with a bucket of water the same way I'd been doing with everybody else!" He's not being sarcastic.

It is this lack of accountability, this obtuse narcissism, that makes Deion's conversion, when it comes, so quintessentially athletic. When Deion gets saved in his hotel room, he calls up his born-again lawyer with the news. "I did it!" he yells. No mention of Jesus, who was apparently just a fan with a really good seat.

Deion's motivation for saving himself, with an assist by Jesus, also fits snugly into jock tradition. He'd lost a step. He got injured and his wife refused to wait on him hand and foot, using some excuse about having to attend a college class. He got depressed and tried to commit suicide, because as he rounded 30, things had started to go wrong.

The most pronounced, and Pollyanna-ish, attempt by an athlete to rationalize the betrayal of the body probably came from the San Francisco Giants' Dave Dravecky. God tested him, Dravecky used to explain, by giving him cancer in his arm, but faith allowed him to return to pitching. Dravecky had a harder time putting his next ordeal into lesson format. Baseball fans probably recall watching his career end in grisly, slow-motion videotape, as his ulna snapped in two on the mound.

Athletes have asked and received more from their bodies than the rest of us, so their confusion when their bodies fail is understandable. But the religious drift begins while the body is still reliable. Jocks join organizations like Athletes in Action and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes while they're in their teens. The Christian cabal within the New York Yankees, the born-again majorities on teams like the Texas Rangers and the pervasiveness of team prayer do not arise from late-career angst.

Perhaps athletes of all ages like God because they like the status quo. They have every reason to. If the world revolves according to God's plan, then that plan obviously includes them in starring roles. They've been winners, physically and socially, from their earliest days. Life has rewarded them for following the rules and forgiven them when they haven't. A system with a coach and a playbook has offered them transcendence in the physical realm, so why shouldn't that model work in the spiritual realm? Jocks don't have to waste time muddling things out for themselves when God is coach, the Bible is the playbook, and the body is a beautiful temple.

This endorsement of the way things are also explains athletes' politics and hobbies. During the summer of '97, a West Coast paper ran profiles of individual players on the local baseball team, with entries for their party preferences and favorite leisure activities. The paper needn't have bothered asking. Player after (white) player answered "Republican" and "hunting and fishing." In blood sport and laissez-faire economics, victory is to the strong, survival to the fittest, which makes perfect sense to the very strong and fit. Life's winners then bring their conservative code down on the rest of us. Anyone who needs help must be defective, lazy or female. In his book, Sanders cites a Bible passage to support the subjugation of women, one more species of weakling who shouldn't get uppity. Deion devotes the second half of his book to the masculine wisdom of his bishop, a black Promisekeepnik named T.D. Jakes.

The innate jockish disdain for feminine weakness also squares with the Bible's warnings, in Leviticus and elsewhere, about dropping the soap in the locker room. Even without the preachers in the bleachers, jockdom's the most antigay sphere in public life. The few openly homosexual sports figures of the past 20 years, like umpire Dave Pallone and Washington Redskins receiver Dave Kopay, only came out after their careers had ended. Tommy Lasorda traded Glenn Burke because he didn't want a queer on the Dodgers, even though his own gay son would later die of AIDS.

When athletic macho converges with the religious right, you get the buffoonish figure of Reggie White, performing the grown-up equivalent of shoving some debate-team wimp into a locker. The recently retired NFL All-Pro and ordained minister torpedoed his broadcast career with a few sulfurous speeches about the evils of faggotry, one of them to the Wisconsin Legislature. Intolerance had been wed to strength, in the name of a messiah so, um, meek, he'd have been cut from the team for turning the other cheek.

Knowing which jocks are born-again matters, because sometimes White types do more than merely visit the legislature. Rep. Steve Largent, Republican, Christian and Hall of Fame wide receiver, almost became majority leader in the House. It also matters, however, to the most philistine sports fan, for the most banal of reasons. Born-again players have a rep for being slack. The unsaved suspect that the saved are too sated to have any fire in the belly. They're no longer any fun, of course, as Minnesota Twin Kent Hrbek groused when drinking bud Gary Gaetti found God. But Gaetti also lost some pop in his bat post-salvation. His batting average and RBI totals fell, and he did some time in the minor leagues.

Now, "Power, Money and Sex" may make fans wonder about Deion. Sure, it's sweet that the former Prime Time now shouts, "God loves you!" to hecklers, but true believers in the cult of the Dallas Cowboys, his current employer, may be disturbed to learn that Deion, who has a "new sense of peace about what happens [on] the field," who "put[s] aside rivalry" to pray with opposing players after the game because there's "a bigger game going on in our lives," thinks '97 was a good year because so many Cowboys came to Christ. America's team, Super Bowl champs in '96, were 6-10 in '97, and they were ignominiously ushered out of the first round of the playoffs this year by the lowly Arizona Cardinals. Deion, battling a big toe injury, played valiantly. But with his team boasting all those athletes who have come to Christ, and losing, what the Dallas faithful may want to know is, was that cause or was it effect?
SALON | Jan. 26, 1999

Mark Schone is a senior contributing writer at Spin magazine.