John Ernhout and Basketball

Likely I've given the impression so far that if mainline protestant clergy would simply embrace sports it would be clear sailing.

'taint so, I'm afraid.

I remember, when I was a very small boy, my father came home from work absolutely fuming about this fellow whom I knew as John Ernhout -- which was his name.

I knew that Mr. Ernhout went to our Liberty Methodist Church, and I had really only two impressions of him: first, that he was old (like about 70), and second, that every thing about him was starched. I cannot remember what his face looked like, but I can recall clearly that his white shirt was extraordinarily stiff. In retrospect, he probably had his underpants starched.

My father was fuming because Mr. Ernhout had evidently been overcome with religious zeal and, with a sidekick of his, had removed the basketball backboards from Memorial Hall, carried them to the back lawn of the church, chopped them up with an axe, and burned them.

I cannot say exactly why Mr. Ernhout committed this zealous act of vandalism, but I can theorize that he had concluded that young people were committing the sin of having FUN by playing basketball, and that while fun was bad enough wherever it took place, when it took place in a church-owned structure it was completely unacceptable. Thus, he may have reasoned, he was called to eliminate the root of the fun, namely the basketball backboards.

One supposes that, while chopping and burning, Mr. Ernhout envisioned himself as one of the Old Testament prophets.

However, sanity did prevail. Ernhout and his sidekick, while not ostracized in the church, were at least marginalized. New basketball backboards were in time fabricated (although they were not as handsome as the ones Ernhout had chopped up and burned) and hung on the end walls of the tiny gymnasium.

And, in fact, basketball was again played in that little church gym -- albeit with a new sense of insecurity, the realization that mean-spirited people could, at their whim, in the name of mainstream protestant religion, abolish joy.