Righteous Risk

This morning on ESPN Radio I heard host John Kincade moralizing, and I broke one of my own life rules and listened to him do it. What he said was revealing of the culture in which we find ourselves. He said a number of things concerning last night's college football games.

Kincade praised the University of Oklahoma (last year's national runner-up) for scheduling a tough team, Brigham Young, even though it lost the game, 14-13. In the process, the Sooners may have lost something even more valuable, the services of star quarterback Sam Bradford, who won last year's Heismman Trophy as the best player in the nation. Bradford had to leave the game right before halftime due to a shoulder injury. His replacement played hard but was unable to rally Oklahoma to victory.

So Kincade gave Oklahoma kudos for taking a risk and not merely scheduling a patsy for its first game. Conversely, he ripped last year's champion, the University of Florida (my alma mater), for scheduling what he called a "high school team," Charleston Southern University, which the Gators whipped, 62-3. I watched much of the game, and Kincade has a point: the team from South Carolina made a few decent plays and tried hard but didn't belong on the same field with Florida. It was like watching a schoolyard bully take the lunch money from a scrawny freshman in the cafeteria.

Now it gets interesting. Kincade mocked Bradford, not because he got injured and his team lost, but because he was wearing an Oklahoma uniform instead of one from a professional team. Bradford, you see, had had the unmitigated naivete to return to the Norman campus when professional stardom and millions in guaranteed money were beckoning. Bradford liked his team and wanted to take one more crack at a national championship. Now, depending on the doctor's report, all that could go down the drain.

What a stupid decision, Kincade said. Bradford may have cost himself millions. He should have taken the money and run. A bird in the hand, and all that.

Kincade has a point, I suppose ... if money is the only thing that really matters in this world. Maybe it is that way for John Kincade, but I have a sneaking suspicion Sam Bradford has other values. And he's not the only one. Gator quarterback Tim Tebow has also returned for his senior year, hoping to parley his fame into more opportunities to serve Christ.

Remember a couple of years ago when the Gator basketball team won the national championship and then did the unheard of thing, told the NBA to wait, and returned to Gainesville and won another one? That team had commitment, not only to a goal, but to one another. I'm sure the decision cost several of the players (particularly Joakim Noah) a lot of money, but that wasn't the point. It was a risk for all of them, a risk they believed was worth taking. And even though Bradford's risk may not work out, isn't it possible he understands he is a better man for having taken it?

Not all payoffs in life can be reduced to dollars and cents. And what would you pay for a memory, for a friendship, for joy? These things are rare and precious, and it is not our place to barge in on someone's sacred space by saying they don't make economic sense. If you had an inoperable cancer, what would you rather have, $10 million, or another year of life?

Further, Kincade and all the bean-counters like him are panning Bradford for doing the same thing for which they are today praising the University of Oklahoma: taking a risk. If it is right to praise the university for doing the manly thing, doesn't Bradford's manly risk merit the same respect? I know this: I respect Sam Bradford for his choice, and I would sooner serve with him in some great task than with the likes of certain talk show hosts.

As Teddy Roosevelt once said:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."