Where exactly in the Good Book does it say, “Thou shalt not attend NBA basketball games on the Sabbath, especially not if thou liveth in or around Salt Lake City”?
Nowhere. That’s where.
So let it not be written, so let it go ahead and be done: You can go to Utah Jazz games on Sunday without feeling guilt or shame. And it’s a good thing because the NBA, you may have heard, is jamming such games — three home games this coming season — onto the Jazz’s schedule.
And it’s OK. Pray about it, if you roll like that. If you don’t roll like that, then you’d never have worried about it in the first place.
Former Jazz owner Larry Miller worried about it, thought maybe folks wouldn’t show up for home games on Sundays because of the religious attitudes of a good number of Utahns who otherwise would shell out plenty of cash for and at those games. So he asked the top dogs in the NBA, of which he was one, not to schedule regular-season home games here. And, mostly, the league complied.
Well. Not anymore.
With its newly crowded schedule, a Higher Power — Commissioner Adam Silver — is putting upon the Jazz and their most righteous of fans pressure, after a 20-plus-year hiatus, to come on back to the Delta Center on Sundays, at least on three of them.
It seems worth noting that Jazz fans, righteous or otherwise, had no problem attending past playoff games in the home arena, as on the occasions when Sunday games in the postseason were scheduled, Jazz fans packed the place. They didn’t just pack the place, they acted every bit as out of their ever-loving minds as they usually were and did, cheering their heads off, booing the visiting opponents as though they were enemies from an invading foreign land, cursing the stupid, idiotic, biased-and-blind refs, calling them names that rhymed with casseroles and brother-truckers.
I know because I was in the seats, covering those games. I saw Brother and Sister Thurston there, Sister and Brother Puddingstone, Bishop Johnson and Patriarch Williams. All of them thumping more than Bibles, carrying on like maniacs.
If it’s somehow OK for the staunch believers to attend playoff games on the Sabbath, it’s OK for them to attend regular-season games. To doubt that is to figure God checks the NBA’s schedule, differentiating between playoff games and regular-season ones before making judgments.
Moreover, if you want to get all scriptural, the King James Version of the Bible reads like this: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
(It adds: “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.”)
There’s no mention of the NBA, NBA players, the Jazz, Jazz fans, games on the Sabbath … no, nothing of the sort. NBA players themselves don’t work during Sunday games in Utah, they play. Coaches and concessionaires and ushers and a few others might have to work, but let’s just call that a gray area.
The entirety of keeping the Sabbath day holy, these days, is a gray area, often left up to the faithful, whatever the particulars of their specific religion, to decide for themselves how best to do so. To my knowledge, among Latter-day Saints, the business of being and acting holy is not scripted out in detail. It’s a personal, spiritual choice. Nobody’s following any Mosaic law, counting the proper number of footsteps to take on that hallowed day.
I know faithful families that after church won’t turn on their TVs on Sunday, unless it’s General Conference being broadcast. I know others, equally faithful, who invite the entire family over to eat dinner and watch Sunday Night Football. Some won’t turn on their sprinklers, others sleep on the sofa all afternoon and call it God’s work. I knew a football player who was selected in the third round of the NFL draft by the Raiders who declined to play, opting instead to teach high school math classes. I’ve known others who were drafted, who played, who made a gazillion dollars, and are living rich and righteous lives.
None of this matters, of course, to people who feel no pressure one way or another to either attend church or live by any special rules on Sunday, other than to find whatever happiness they can, doing whatever brings them that happiness, every day of every week of every month of every year of their lives, this one and whichever ones come in the great beyond hereafter.
Larry Miller, a man I respected, had his own ideas and his own reasons for the Jazz wanting to avoid Sunday games, and for him not taking his customary courtside seat at the ones the Jazz had to play. But if memory serves, I recall seeing him — or someone who was his doppelganger — in a Delta Center tunnel once, looking out toward the floor during a Sunday playoff game, sneaking more than a few peeks, every bit as emotionally engaged as you’d expect him to be.
I can’t speak for the Almighty. But anybody really think they’re going to burn in hell for going to a Jazz game on Sunday once or twice or three times a year? You might feel brief torture, like you’re burning in hell, depending on how badly the Jazz played and how much of your hard-earned cash you had to fork over for your tickets and parking.
But in that case, the only one of the Ten Commandments that would be broken, first, wouldn’t be by you and, second, wouldn’t be No. 4, it would be broken by the Jazz themselves, No. 8: “Thou shalt not steal.”
