Christian education - Sports

Is the good foul good? Playing basketball a different way

The object of basketball is pretty simple. You and your four teammates want to put the ball through your opponent's hoop. This is how you score. The other team also wants to score, but on the opposite hoop, so they will try to take the ball away from you. You must not let them! The winner is the team that manages to put the ball through their hoop the most times, in the time allowed. It's that simple.

Simple, but it sounds like things could get kind of violent, right? This is where the rules come in. Basketball is a non-contact sport. There is even a rule that says so. The rules control the violence by punishing players who biff their opponents too obviously. The most common punishments are called free throws, which are free chances to score. Usually allotted in two's, they are given to the player who has been biffed to compensate him for the biffing he received.

Biffing is, of course, also known as fouling. With players being punished for fouling, you would think they would do what they could to avoid committing fouls. After all, both the letter and the spirit of the rules are against fouling. But sometimes, late in a game, when one team is behind by only a bit but there doesn't seem to be enough time to catch up, they will foul their opponents on purpose. By fouling they do give their opponents free chances to score, but the clock stops. The strategy is simple. The team that is behind will foul the worst shooter on the other team and stop the clock. After the fouled player takes his shots (which they hope he will miss) they will get the ball back. The clock will start again and they will race down the court and hope they get their shot in. Then they will quickly try and foul again to stop the clock. This way only a few seconds of game time can be made to last a much longer time

So it is actually to a team's advantage to foul in this case. This brings up two problems Christians might consider. The first is ethical. Fouling is against both the spirit and letter of the rules, so should Christians commit deliberate fouls? The second problem is also ethical but of a more concrete nature. Late in a game when one team tries to deliberately foul, the refs often won't call it. They know it is to the offending team's advantage so they will only call it if it is very, very obvious. The practical result is that these late, deliberate fouls are often very, very hard fouls. So again, should Christians commit these deliberate fouls?

Some would say it's just part of the game. That is a somewhat legitimate argument. Sure the letter and spirit of the rules say that fouling is wrong, but anyone playing the game knows that these type of late game fouls will occur. No one is surprised, so in a way these fouls are a part of the unwritten rules for the game. That is just how it's played.

But there is still the potential problem of injury, and the problem we should have with deliberately "biffing" someone. Sure it's a part of the game, but it doesn't have to be.

In the Golden Bears' Summer Basketball League almost everyone is at least 6'2" and the average weight is somewhere above 200 pounds. The fouls in this league are already hard fouls and the league's organizers really didn't want to see any harder fouls late in the games.

So instead of calling fouls the regular way the Golden Bears did it with a twist. If you committed a foul your opponents got one point and kept the ball. If you committed a foul on a player shooting the ball and he scored, the basket counted, and he still kept the ball. The clock never stopped and you could never regain possession of the ball by fouling a player. There was never an advantage to fouling someone. The end result was a league in which almost everyone had fun, and no fights occurred.

It's just one approach, but it's worth considering.