Depending on your spiritual bent, you may have been either thrilled or turned off by University of Connecticut women’s basketball star Paige Bueckers talking about her Christian faith in post-game interviews on her way to the semi-finals of the NCAA tournament.
“I’m a living testimony. I give all glory to God, “she told ESPN. “He works in mysterious ways. Last year [after injury], I was praying to be back at this stage. He sent me trials and tribulations, but it was to build my character. It was to test my faith to see if I was a believer. But I just kept on believing. I did all I could, so God could do all I can’t.”
Some probably feel, as Beneatha Younger put it in Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, “I’m just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything? . . . I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There’s only man. And it’s he who makes miracles.”
The media and the public are now accustomed to hearing athletes thank God for the abilities he has given them. But that wasn’t always the case. In baseball in the 1950s and 1960s, it was extremely rare to hear such pronouncements from athletes. Then in the 1970s in San Francisco, one of the great culture clashes between religious athletes, the media and the fan base erupted over a group of born-again ballplayers on the Giants who became known as the God Squad.
Giants’ relief pitcher Gary Lavelle became a born-again Christian in the winter of 1976. When he returned to the club the next year, he gradually and quietly began to share his faith with his teammates when they showed an interest. Several, including Bob Knepper, Jack Clark, Rob Andrews, and Randy Moffitt (brother of tennis great Billie Jean King) came to faith, and by the 1978 season there were eight or nine professing Christians on the team.
The Giants, who had suffered through several losing seasons, came to life that year and led the National League West for much of the season, only to fade in a September swoon and finish third. In post-game interviews, the players frequently thanked God for the ability he gave them, and the press raised no objection.
But when the Giants’ fortunes faded on the field in 1979, the media was quick to blame the born-again players, claiming their newfound faith had made them passive. The press derisively referred to them as the God Squad.
The cornerstone of that accusation was a quote attributed to pitcher Knepper, who supposedly told manager Dave Bristol it was “God’s will” when he yielded a home run that lost a game. Knepper and his Christian teammates have always denied the quote, as did Bristol. But the false story continued to hound them for years.
The media was merciless at times. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Glenn Dickey wrote, “It may be that the Giants will have to trade one or two of the most obvious born-agains on the club, to break up the clique. At the very least, their lockers should be separated in the clubhouse.”
Another prominent Chronicle sports columnist, Lowell Cohn, told me recently that he disagrees with Dickey on that score. However, Cohn, known for his biting satire, penned one of his most provocative pieces, “Can Satan Save the Giants?” in which he recommended that one of the Giants sell his soul to the devil since God didn’t seem to be helping the team too much!
Not only did the media blame the God Squad for losing, it also alleged that the Christian athletes caused division in the clubhouse and got two managers fired. These false claims spread to the national media, where prestigious columnists Peter Gammons of The Boston Globe and Dick Young of the New York Daily News repeated them. One of the more ridiculous accusations was that the Giants had two team buses to take players to the field, one for the God Squad and another for the others.
Mike Ivie, one of the God Squadders, returned to the club from a stint of mental exhaustion and sounded much like Paige Bueckers, who had made a comeback from physical injury. “He’ll put you through trials and tribulations and He’ll use every resource to help you find happiness in your heart,” said Ivie. “It would have been twice as hard for me to come back if I hadn’t believed in the Lord.”
Ivie and his teammates commonly made such pronouncements in a liberal San Francisco atmosphere and era that was not conducive to talking about faith. Cohn felt the tension and in his memoirs made this fascinating statement, “Until that day, I believed I was covering a baseball team. I was wrong. I had wandered into the middle of a deep religious debate, one that defined the Giants at that time.”
The God Squadders were spiritual pioneers who bore the brunt of attacks by the media. They paved the way for Paige Bueckers and other Christian athletes to speak boldly about their faith.
*Continue below to read an excerpt from “The God Squad.”*
Satan and the Giants
Excerpted from The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978, by Matt Sieger
San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Lowell Cohn did not write many columns about the God Squadders. He was a columnist, not a beat writer, so he wasn’t in the Giants’ clubhouse every game. Besides, he had to also write about the San Francisco 49ers, the Oakland Raiders, the Golden State Warriors, and the Oakland A’s.
But when he did approach the topic, he did it with gusto.
He wrote a column, “Can Satan Save the Giants?” on May 7, 1980, and it made quite a splash.
On the day the Chronicle published the column, the Giants were in last place in their division with an 8–18 record. In his satirical piece, Cohn concluded that God must hate the Giants. He wrote:
But what does he have against our local heroes? He’s downright prejudiced against them. No question about it. He has them so befuddled they can’t even count the outs. The irony in all this is that the Giants are a God-fearing bunch if there ever was one. I’ll bet, prayer for prayer, they’re the most God-fearing team in major league baseball. It’s not for me to say why God has singled out the Giants—His ways are very mysterious to man. But as long as things are already shot to hell, I have a suggestion. Join the other team, fellas. Throw in with the Prince of Darkness—the Big D.
Cohn went on to recommend that at least one Giant sell his soul to the devil to turn the team’s season around, just as long-suffering Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd did in the novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the inspiration for the 1955 musical comedy, Damn Yankees, which in turn generated the movie of the same name (Joe Boyd was renamed Joe Hardy for those productions).
“I was joking around,” Cohn told this author. “I wrote my satire on the soul because that’s what people were talking about. I wasn’t accusing them. I was just trying to have fun.”
Almost a year to the day after “Can Satan Save the Gi¬ants?” Cohn wrote a sequel, “Lavelle and the Fiend,” inspired by the piece by George Vecsey of The New York Times that appeared in the Chronicle on May 12, 1981, under the title, “How God Affects the Giants.” Vecsey quoted Lavelle as saying, “One columnist wrote we were not getting anywhere by praying to Jesus and that maybe we should try praying to Satan. I remember that column well. I was not really surprised. The Bay Area is the center of devil worship, radical groups and homosexuality in this country. It is a satanic region.”
The day after the Vecsey column appeared in the Chronicle, Cohn published “Lavelle and the Fiend.” Recognizing that in the Vecsey article Lavelle was referring to Cohn’s “Can Satan Save the Giants?” column, the ever-satirical Cohn wrote, “Lavelle says he remembers my column well. Not true . . . I suggested they sell a soul to the devil, not just pray to him. I’m sure you’ll admit there’s a big difference.”
Cohn continued:
For a guy who preaches religious tolerance, [Lavelle] is guilty of intolerance. He’s intolerant of radicals, homosexuals and the Bay Area . . . There are tens of thousands of homosexuals in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco, but I’ve talked to some of those homosexuals and they say they always thought Gary Lavelle was a good guy and that they rooted for him when he came into the ballgame. Now I’ll bet they’ll change their attitude.
In conclusion, composing his own tongue-in-cheek version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” Cohn wrote, “Lucifer also made appearances in ‘Damn Yankees,’ ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ and ‘The Exorcist.’ In each case, I am told he went over real big. So I don’t know what Gary Lavelle’s problem is. Maybe I do. When it comes to religion, Gary Lavelle doesn’t have the least particle of a sense of humor.”
His column had repercussions with the Giants. He wrote about it nine days later in a column titled “Friendly Persuasion.” He had wandered into the Giants’ clubhouse when Johnnie LeMaster called him over. He was expecting LeMaster to rake him over the coals for his “Lavelle and the Fiend” column. Instead, Cohn wrote that LeMaster asked him, without a trace of anger, “What do you have against religion?’ Cohn wrote:
Like Lavelle, LeMaster is a born-again Christian. To them, Satan is no metaphor of evil, but a foul fiend who mingles with us and poisons our world. This never has been easy for me to take seriously . . . I thought LeMaster would drop to his knees and pray for me right there. He lapsed into si¬lence. We had always gotten along well, and now I had turned out to be an alien being. The air was not tense, only sad.
After LeMaster informed Cohn that Lavelle had received some nasty letters in response to his column, Cohn walked over to Lavelle, who was dressing in front of his locker. Cohn asked if Vecsey had misquoted Lavelle. Lavelle replied:
No. But my answers sounded different when you didn’t hear the questions also. I saw where you wrote I don’t have a sense of humor about religion. It’s true. How can I joke about damnation? People go to hell, you know. God says they do. That’s very serious. And God says homosexuality is a sin. You have to understand this. I condemn the sin, not the sinner. I still have friends who are homosexuals. I’m their friend, but I tell them God says it’s a sin.
Cohn concluded by confessing his frustration that neither LeMaster nor Lavelle had gotten upset with him:
The theology of LeMaster and Lavelle seemed so primitive to me—this taking Satan and the Garden of Eden literally, and seeing sexual preference in terms of “sin.” . . . Even if I thought some of their beliefs were wacko, I had to admit LeMaster . . . and Lavelle were patient and kind, and had even turned the other cheek. If they had been conspirators, they couldn’t have made things more difficult for me.
Regarding turning the other cheek, Lavelle told this author, “I think God calls us to do that, and he’s [Cohn] going to do what he’s going to do, so I’m not going to feed more fuel to the fire by doing something God says I shouldn’t do. I do remember him coming up and we talked about that. I don’t remember the whole discussion.”
How did Lavelle feel about Cohn’s contention that he was intolerant? He replied:
The way I would respond to that, and I believe this is what I said to him, [is] God loves the sinner, not the sin. And that’s how I feel. I don’t judge homosexuals. They’ve got to face God. But I go by what the Bible tells me, the Word of God. It doesn’t mean I’m intolerant. It just means I don’t believe the same way they do. And he took that and wrote that the way that it made me seem like I just hated the homosexuals and all that stuff, which wasn’t true . . . If the context of the question was, did I hate homosexuals, I would have answered no.
So I think when you make a statement like that to write an article to make you famous or whatever, that to me—I used to get death threats from that article—what he had said was totally taken out of context. And I also said the Church of Satan was started in San Francisco by Anton LeVay [Vecsey did not include that in the article]. That’s just fact. That’s not hearsay. And I said from a spiritual aspect, I think it’s [San Francisco] very oppressed spiritually—nothing else—spiritually. And I’ve never held any grudges against Glenn Dickey [another San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist who took pot shots at the God Squad] or Lowell Cohn. In fact I prayed for them. Everybody has to walk to the beat of their own drum and everybody is going to answer to God one day. And I’m not the judge.
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