Refusing to Play on Sundays

The battle over Sunday sports has been forgotten, but a few athletes have refused to give in.

The backdrop of the novel Never on Sundays is a young, star baseball player who tells his team he will no longer play baseball on Sundays so he may attend church. There have been real athletes who have taken similar stands, though none so prominent and drastic as the fictional Roy Adams playing for the fictional Indianapolis Hawks. The following adapted excerpt is from chapter 21 of the novel. It is the summary of a lawyer’s (Will) research on the precedent for Adams’ stand. The excerpt shows that not only are novels a source of insight into human conflict, character, and attitudes, but they can be a source of knowledge of real history.

There had been athletic stars of long ago who refused to participate on Sundays, among them Olympic sprinter Eric Liddell (one of the subjects of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire) and women’s tennis player Dorothy Round, but that was in a day in which events on Sunday were much less common.

One Hundred Years of Sunday Baseball

In most major cities, Sunday baseball games had not been legalized until the early twentieth century. Philadelphia was a holdout despite legislative attempts and court battles to overturn Sunday blue laws, but by 1933 it, too, had legalized Sunday baseball. By the 1950s, many teams held doubleheaders on Sundays to maximize attendance.

Roy was not just joining the losing side of a societal debate over Sunday sporting events. He was joining the side that had already lost, with most people alive not knowing there had once been a battle.

Rugby Star Euan Murray’s Stand

There had been others. In 2009, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that Scottish rugby star Euan Murray would miss a match against France that fell on a Sunday as a result of his Christian faith. He had played a Sunday match the previous year, but his faith had since deepened. Neither he nor the team would comment on his contractual situation. The same thing happened in 2011, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, when Murray missed a Sunday Rugby World Cup match against Argentina. Murray was quoted as once saying: “It’s basically all or nothing, following Jesus. I don’t believe in pick ‘n’ mix Christianity. I believe the Bible is the word of God, so who am I to ignore something from it?” He also reportedly said, “I want to live my life believing and doing the things He wants and the sabbath day is a full day. It’s not a case of a couple of hours in church then playing rugby or going down to the pub, it’s the full day.”

The team knew Murray’s position about Sunday play and went on without him.

Koufax and Greenberg and Rosh Hashanah

There were some examples outside Christianity, including among Jewish and Mormon athletes. The closest parallel to Roy was Sandy Koufax, the great Jewish Dodgers lefthander. He did not pitch on the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and the first day of Passover. In 1965, Game One of the World Series fell on Yom Kippur and Koufax refused to pitch. He was still able to pitch Games Two, Five, and Seven, throwing shutouts in the latter two with the arthritic pain that would lead to his retirement after the next season. However, Koufax’s refusal to pitch for religious reasons was limited to major holidays. He regularly pitched on the Jewish Sabbath throughout his career. The biggest difference was that Roy was not a pitcher. He was an everyday player.

Thirty-one years earlier, another Jewish star, Detroit Tigers first baseman Hank Greenberg, anguished over but ultimately decided to play in a key pennant race game against the New York Yankees on Rosh Hashanah. Greenberg later sat out multiple Yom Kippurs. Dodgers outfielder Shawn Green later followed the example of Greenberg and Koufax in sitting out Yom Kippur.

Mormons, BYU, and a Little League Team Forfeits

The Mormons had an entire institution—Brigham Young University—that did not participate in athletic events on Sundays. That created some scheduling issues when, for instance, the BYU men’s basketball team made the NCAA Tournament, which held games on Sundays, but college games were spaced apart enough that those issues were capable of being worked out without forcing the forfeiture of games. Some smaller Christian colleges followed the same practice with less fanfare outside of the money and popularity involved in Division I college athletics.

In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Utah Little League baseball team mostly comprised of Mormons forfeited rather than play a Sunday game during a Little League World Series qualifying tournament. According to the report, some of the parents were more upset than the kids about the forfeiture.

Even though BYU does not play on Sundays, there have been many BYU alumni that became professional athletes who played on Sundays. One who did not was an offensive lineman by the name of Eli Herring. Herring had told National Football League teams not to draft him because he would not play on Sundays. Nevertheless, the Oakland Raiders took him in the sixth round of the 1995 draft, hoping to entice him with money. He turned the Raiders down and became a teacher. Professional football was different than baseball in that almost every game was played on a Sunday. There was no option to play sometimes. It was either play on Sunday or almost never play.

Where is the American sports star who will say “every day but Sunday”?

There were lots of examples of Christians with strong professions of faith who said they felt God wanted them to remain in their sport as a witness.

While all of these situations had similarities to Roy’s, none of them involved a professional athlete in the midst of his career suddenly refusing to play on a certain day each week for religious reasons. Unlike Scotland’s accommodation of Euan Murray, the Indianapolis Hawks appeared to have no intention of accommodating its player.

There was no precedent for Roy Adams.

Copyright 2013 Jason M. Steffens. All rights reserved.

This above excerpt has been adapted by deleting some sentences and adding the headings.

Never on Sundays is available for purchase as a paperback and in all the major ebook stores.