When things don’t go our way… In elementary school, I participated in Royal Ambassador basketball. “Royal Ambassadors,” or “RAs,” was a Baptist missions organization for boys. Every week we had a Bible Study and learned about people who were telling the Good News around the world. Every winter we had RA basketball where we competed with other RAs from other churches around the city. We had some great coaches who were quite good at basketball and they invested their time in teaching us the game. We practiced on Sundays after church, which was kinda weird for the time (early 70’s) in Knoxville, TN, because there were still “blue laws” and Sundays were set aside for church, rest and Sunday drives to the country-side. However, no one could practice any other time during the week, so we brought our tennis shoes, knee socks, shorts, and t-shirts to change into from our “Sunday Best” and had practice after church. McDonald’s was open on Sundays. So, after leaving church, we would run to McDonald’s, get a Big Mac and a Coke, devour it quickly, change clothes, go to the gym and hopefully not hurl it back up when running laps. Before our church had its own gym, we went to the local school to practice. We learned to dribble, pass, shoot and learned the rules of basketball. One year, our coaches were so good we defeated all the local teams and were invited to the state RA basketball tournament in Nashville. We were all giddy. We got there and as I recall, won our first game on Friday night. Then we were all wired up about being in a hotel for a sleepover, juiced up on Coke and Cheetos, we somehow coerced our coaches into letting us watch “Crack Through the World'' movie on television. It was a disturbing late 1960’s apocalyptic movie about how the earth was destroyed by an ill-fated plan to harness the Earth’s geothermal energy by shooting a nuclear bomb deep into the earth. This of course, as you would guess, began the earth ending crack through the world. The movie showed many people dying in horrific ways (landslides, train wrecks, molten hot lava - to which one of the boys quipt “fried to a crackly crunch. Cheetos, cheese that goes crunch!” We all laughed, but kind of guiltily.
Of course, I didn’t sleep at all because I was so disturbed by the images seared into my brain, not to mention the copious amounts of fizzy caffeine and sugar that I consumed. Needless to say we were all tired the next morning. We played our next couple of games and won, which should have made us RA State Champions, but the host church decided that their team needed one more chance to defend their title against us with their best player who had not been able to play the earlier game. So they required a short play off game. I knew that this was not right and in my sleep deprived, elementary school immaturity, I threw a tantrum and began to cry, stating that I would not play another game...not that my playing had any impact on the team, I wasn’t that good, but I wasn’t bad at dribbling, passing or defense. I gave myself a free pass to act badly, because I perceived someone had disrespected us. The coaches tried to remind me that we had come to play basketball and agreed to the rules of the tournament. They also reminded us that we needed to represent God and our church well. So, in my “self-righteousness,” I still sulked and sat on the bench, while the rest of my team battled the title holders. The host church’s plan worked, they won the short winner-take-all game and we went home with a 2nd place trophy and my little tantrum, justified or not, did nothing but make me look like a crybaby and abandon my team.
