"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play…it is war minus the shooting."
Handbook of athletic perfection
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Wes Neal, Cross Training 1981. ISBN 0-915134-77
Reading and reviewing a book 29 years after it was published is a fascinating enterprise. First of all I need to congratulate Wes Neal warmly for being so far ahead of his time in thinking along this lines so early in the history of sports ministry. I first encountered concepts like playing for an audience of one, representing Christ and worshipping God in sport in the late 1990s but Neal was writing about them in 1981.
That said, it is inevitable that I judge the book from my perspective in 2010. In that light, I found it wanting.
The book’s basic concept is the athlete (sportsperson) achieving a total release of everything to God and being controlled by the Holy Spirit at all times. See for example page 60-61: “One goal can release a Christian athlete’s potential in every practice session and competition. One goal can make you desire to run wind sprints with an all-out effort when your body screams for relief. It is not a self-satisfying goal, although there is much pleasure involved. The perfect goal focuses your attention on God rather than yourself. God’s athletic goal for you is to conform you to the same likeness as Jesus Christ through your athletic performance.”
This is great as a concept but I struggled with how he interpreted it at times. For example when he says that winning an Olympic medal can be part of your planning
but cannot be an intermediate goal (Page 65) this seems a very pedantic or semantic distinction.
When he gives the example of a shot putter whose last put falls fractionally short of winning and says of it “if your only goal was to conform to the likeness of Jesus, you would see this as an opportunity for God to work His purpose” (Page 68) and that being disappointed shows your goal is not to be conformed to Jesus, it seems unnecessary over-spiritualization and not recognizing the human emotion of disappointment. Similarly I disagree with his suggestion (Page 115) that if a player is disappointed not to be in the starting line-up, it shows that he is not controlled by the Holy Spirit.
When he writes, “People tend to compare your present performance with those of the past or expectations of the future…Your only comparison is with Jesus Christ “ (Page 84), I have no clue what he means.
Chapter 11 – Overcoming negative forces, which gives examples of negative forces attacking athletes and suggests that focusing on God’s love would overcome it, seems very simplistic.
Chapter 14 “Developing the praise performance” seems to be a combination of Scripture, Christian Music and visualization. Page 163 even suggests different kind of Christian music for different sports!
On Page 175 he states “Your mind can only focus 100% its capacity on one thing at a time” and goes on to illustrate this with an example of a golfer about to hit a seven iron. He continues: “You see the seven iron shot as an opportunity to praise God with your athletic skills. While having this thought, you dub the seven iron shot. You continue practicing isolation following a failure, just as you do following a success. The first thing you do is learn from whatever mistake you committed. If your inside elbow was away from your body, you’ll want to correct that.” (Page 176) I couldn’t help seeing this as super-spiritual nonsense and wondering if the golfer had been concentrating on his swing (or elbow) and not on God, he would have hit the ball better and been no less spiritual!
When he compares Jesus’ approach to the crucifixion with an athlete preparing for a game (Page 88ff) or argues for the need for a player’s attitude toward this coach to be that of Jesus towards His Father—total submissiveness – I found it unhelpful and unconvincing.
Not a book I would recommend highly to a modern reader.