They Wore Their Faith in Public and Paid for It

Commentary.

On Sunday, July 6, 1924, the heats for the 100 meters ran in Paris without the fastest man in Britain in them. Eric Liddell was at church. He'd known for months the schedule put his best event on the Lord's Day, so he'd spent that spring retooling himself for the 400, a race he had no business winning. Five days later he won it in 47.6 seconds, a world record.

That's the version everybody likes. Underdog switches lanes, God honors him, credits roll over a beach in slow motion.

Chariots of Fire compressed the timeline for drama, and in doing so it hid the more interesting thing: Liddell decided early, in a quiet room, with nobody watching and no medal on the table. The stand cost him the race he was built for. He never got it back. He was 22, the best sprinter in the country, and he simply traded the sure thing for the long shot because he'd already settled what Sunday was for.

Then came the actual bill.

The part the movie doesn't cover

Liddell went to China as a missionary. In 1943 the Japanese interned him at Weihsien camp in Shandong province. He taught the kids there science, refereed their games, gave away his own rations. He died of a brain tumor on February 21, 1945, months before the camp was liberated. He was 43.

So the price of Liddell's faith wasn't one Olympic final. It was a life, spent all the way down, in a place with no press box.

Keep that scale in mind, because every story that follows is smaller than his. That's fine. Most of ours are too.

Koufax sits, and somebody else eats it

October 6, 1965. Game 1 of the World Series in Minnesota falls on Yom Kippur, and Sandy Koufax, the best left-handed pitcher alive, doesn't pitch. Don Drysdale starts instead and gets hammered. When manager Walter Alston came to pull him, Drysdale delivered the line that outlived the game: I bet right now you wish I was Jewish, too.

The Dodgers lost Games 1 and 2. Koufax came back and threw a shutout in Game 5, then another in Game 7 on two days' rest, and Los Angeles won the title.

Notice the shape of it. Koufax's conviction landed on his teammates before it landed on him. That's the honest part nobody mentions when they hold him up as a hero. A stand taken inside a team is never free, and it's rarely free only to you. Drysdale ate the loss with a joke, which is its own kind of class, but he still ate it.

If you're the guy with the conviction, say thank you to the guys who absorbed it. Out loud. That's the cost of doing business.

Ali, and the difference between a gesture and a bill

You don't have to share Muhammad Ali's faith to see what it bought him. He refused induction in 1967 on religious grounds, was stripped of the heavyweight title, and didn't fight for more than three years, right through his athletic prime. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction unanimously in 1971. By then the years were gone.

Nobody gives back prime years. That's the tell that separates real conviction from a brand play. A stand that costs you nothing and gets you a sponsorship isn't a stand. It's marketing with a cross on it.

The Tebow problem

Tim Tebow wrote John 3:16 in his eye black for the BCS title game in January 2009, and searches for the verse spiked so hard it became a national story. In 2010 the NCAA banned messages on eye black. People still call it the Tebow rule.

What it cost him wasn't a rule. It was that his faith became the thing he was, which meant every incompletion was a referendum on it. "Tebowing" went from a posture to a punchline inside a month. He shot a Super Bowl ad with his mother in 2010 and drew organized protest before anyone had seen a frame of it.

Here's the trade-off worth naming. When you make your faith the headline, you hand the world a bat. Every bad game, every bad decision, every flaw becomes evidence in somebody's argument against the thing you love most. That's a real reason a sensible believer might keep it quieter and just live it. Not cowardice. Stewardship.

Jonathan Isaac made the other choice. On July 31, 2020, in the Orlando bubble, he stood for the anthem while his teammates knelt, and he said plainly that his faith was the reason. He took the coverage that came with it and has kept talking about it since. Both men paid. Different currencies.

How you say it's also a cost

In February 2016, Nike ended its relationship with Manny Pacquiao after he made remarks about same-sex relationships that compared people to animals. He apologized for the comparison. He didn't change what he believed.

That distinction matters more than anything else in this piece. There's a bill for what you hold, and there's a separate, avoidable bill for how you say it. Pay the first one. Don't run up the second. When you insult a person rather than argue an idea, you've handed everybody a reason to dismiss the idea without ever engaging it, and you've hurt somebody made in the image of God on the way.

Reggie White, an ordained minister and one of the great defensive players who ever lived, learned a version of the same lesson after a 1998 speech to the Wisconsin legislature. Conviction isn't a license to be careless with people.

Bremerton, and the seven-year version

Joe Kennedy was an assistant football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington. He prayed at the 50-yard line after games. The district told him to stop, he didn't, and in 2015 he was put on leave and his coaching career ended.

Seven years. That's how long the case took. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District came down on June 27, 2022, 6-3 in his favor. He got his job back, coached the 2023 season opener, and then stepped away for family reasons.

One game. Seven years of lawyers for one game on a Friday night.

If you'd told him in 2015 that's how the ledger would read, would he have done it? He says yes. But understand what you're signing when you sign. The romantic version says the stand gets vindicated. Sometimes it does, in 2022, after your kids have grown up and your whistle has rusted.

What this means for you on Friday night

You're probably not going to the Supreme Court. You're going to a locker room, a dugout, a bus, a Little League field where you're the coach.

Decide before the moment. Liddell settled Sunday months out. If you're working out your convictions in the tunnel with the crowd already up, you'll fold or you'll overplay it. Neither one is good.

Know whether you're paying or posing. If the move gets you applause from the people whose applause you want, it isn't costing you anything. That's fine. Just don't call it courage.

Don't make your teammates pay without acknowledging it. Somebody is your Drysdale.

Hit the idea, never the person. You can hold a hard line and still be the guy on the roster everybody likes. Those two things have never been in conflict, no matter who tells you otherwise.

Liddell gave away his rations in a camp where food was the only currency left. Nobody wrote it down at the time. Somebody remembered anyway.