Written by John Mark Adkison
If you have been a faithful reader of “While Warming the Bench,” you probably have figured something out: I’m not exactly the best sports writer in the world.
I took the sports editor position to leap out of my comfort zone that sat between the mystery and sci-fi/fantasy aisles of the bookstore. I was a Syfy channel addict who could not even tell you what channel ESPN was on. I could give you background information on both major and minor “Star Wars” characters, but when it came to scoring a tennis game, I was at a total loss. As the title of this column mentions, I was a bench warmer in high school, and I spent most of that bench warming daydreaming.
Fortunately, as a kid who spent most of his time moving through different schools, unfamiliar territory is my forte, so I took a nosedive into “sportsland.”
While I learned the fine arts of game coverage, athlete feature writing and coach/player interviewing, the art of sports column writing somewhat eluded me. If you read most other sports columns, they are all about predictions for who will win the championship, which rookie will be the next great American icon, and why this player should be or should not be taken out of a certain hall of fame after admitted steroid use. Mine, however, consist of quick sports-analogy devotionals,pondering on what sport would Jesus play and lessons from my experiences in tae kwon do.
I was a sci-fi fan expected to write a sports column, a duty I was glad to have and excited to take up, but there was one problem: I had no idea how to write about a field I had such limited knowledge of, especially when it came to making predictions, reviews, praises or critiques.
So I followed that ancient law of writing: Write what you know.
I know how to write cre- atively,and I know how to write about God. And since God is in everything, why not try to find God in sports? Unless I go work for a Christian pub- lication, Harding is the only place where I will be able to put God into a sports column, so why not do it now? And there is plenty of creativity to be found in the world of sports; just start asking some of Harding’s athletes about their backgrounds, and you will hear some pretty amazing stories.
So I hope you have enjoyed my little column in the sports section, and I apologize for not being more informative on actual sports. I can only hope that you’ve found something entertaining and refreshing, something out of the norm for sportsland.
