Exemploids: Gary Carter

Sports Spectrum 1998

I’m one of those people who grew up in the backyard being somebody else. During baseball season I portrayed a variety of characters in an imaginary league. During basketball season I’d re-enact the revisionist history of Syracuse University. On my court the Orangemen went to the Final Four in 1976, not Rutgers. And Indiana lost its status as the last undefeated national champion––to SU in the final, not Michigan, of course. There were some sacred cows; I never did let the Orange beat UCLA.

I had to keep sports in that larger-than-life realm, for every day I acted out what I hoped to become someday. Most of all I admired the leader of my adopted team, the then-up-and-coming Montreal Expos––Gary Carter.

I appreciated Carter’s clutch play and his exuberant personality. I loved watching “This Week in Baseball” highlights where Carter either blocked the plate on a tag or bear hugged Steve Rogers after a playoff victory. But my most vivid Carter video played at the 1981 All-Star Game.

He had just been named MVP after hitting two homers, including the game-winner in the ninth. Before answering the first question during the obligatory post game interview, Carter thanked Jesus Christ for the position he was in. Then he answered the question. With that proclamation, I discovered an eventually life-changing concept: There are great athletes who place Christ first in their lives. Having a sports hero began taking on a deeper meaning.

If you compared my life then to a pennant race, God was about 14 games behind sports, like the Yankees trailing the Red Sox in 1978. He was a part of my life––I went to church every Sunday––but harmlessly out of contention for control. Shortly after Gary’s All-Star comments, I heard a radio program in which he talked more about what Jesus meant to him.

Gary’s expressions of faith helped raise the credibility of Christianity to me. Here was the guy I looked up to most in the milieu that meant most to me––telling the world that Jesus Christ was Number One. And I slowly began acknowledging he was right.

Eventually, after a series of personal crises, I began questioning my destiny when I died. In the spring of 1984 I turned my life over to Christ. I quickly learned to model Gary’s commitment to telling people what Jesus meant to me and what He could mean to them. But a more personal lesson from Gary came nearly ten years later.

I attended a Christian baseball fantasy camp in 1993. The camp gave men like me a chance to rub shoulders with current and former big-leaguers and receive Bible-based teaching on men’s issues. More significantly, Gary Carter was there, and I met him face to face.

One morning we had a lull in an instructional drill. Gary happened to be standing nearby, so I told him about that night when he thanked Jesus Christ after the All-Star Game. I told him that I’d been watching and listening. I told him, “When you did that, you didn’t realize what an influence you had on my life.”

Later I played a round of pitch-and-putt golf with Gary. As we played I learned a secret to Gary’s athletic success. Every time I downplayed my overall abilities or my chances of making a putt, Gary kept repeating, “Don’t say ‘I can’t.’” He’d help me line up my putts, all the time telling me I was going to make them. And more often than my truly meager golfing abilities would dictate, I did.

Through Gary’s help in focusing on what could be rather on what wasn’t, my meeting with him became, in a sense, a return to my boyhood backyard, where anything was possible––even Syracuse winning the national championship.

Jesus taught essentially the same thing, in the context of inheriting eternal life. He said, “With God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Before I asked Christ to control my life, I rationalized many reasons why I couldn’t do it: “I can’t because I’ve got some sin I don’t want to give up,” or “I can’t because God might make me live in a grass hut someplace where you can’t watch Monday Night Football.”

But twice in my life, after the 1981 All-Star Game and at the fantasy camp, Gary helped obliterate my objections both to following Christ and fulfilling the potential He gave me. Gary likes to talk about being more concerned about making God’s Hall of Fame than about election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he’s already a charter member of Paul’s Hall of Fame.

To read Sports Spectrum magazine online, visit http://www.sport.org

Paul Schwarz is a copy editor for

Worldwide Challenge magazine in Orlando, Fla.

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