I won’t venture to guess how many people have really been waiting for this day, but this morning’s papers bring news of yesterday’s announcement from Tiger Woods: he’s coming back for the Masters. Far too much opinion has been offered on this matter already. I won’t go there.

Meanwhile, the experts are high again on one Kobe Bean Bryant, the oft-titled “best player in the game,” whose nearly 28 points per game have again powered the Lakers to the top of the Western Conference and have the professional guessers speculating as to the possibility of an eleventh title for coach Phil Jackson.

Ah, Tiger and Kobe.

Linked by greatness. And by sexual calamity.

Two men needing forgiveness. As you and I do, of course--in the salvific sense of having not one breath of a chance without Jesus.

Maybe I’m wholly alone in what I am about to write here. Maybe I quit playing baseball too early and coached only those who are too young.

In a “meaningless” spring training game on Thursday, San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito, normally a deeply philosophical former Cy Young Award winner, drilled Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder in the back. It was not an accident.

You see, it comes to this. Last September, when the games did count and the Brewers and Giants were involved in a wild card chase, Fielder hit a walk-off home run against the Giants. Only Fielder’s teammates didn’t walk off. They fell down.

In a preconceived celebration, Fielder rounded the bases and jumped with his 270-pound frame on home plate. At that moment, his waiting teammates all fell over backward, like bowling pins struck down at the hand of Tom Smallwood (now there’s a guy with a narrative!).

When U.S. figure skater Mirai Nagasu took the ice in the women’s short program on Tuesday night, the cameras moved to capture her parents. This is normal for figure skaters.

So, according to my oldest son, is the story that follows.

Nagasu’s parents, who run a small family restaurant in Southern California, had their tickets paid for to the Olympics by Panasonic. The Nagasus would not have made it otherwise. Their income was too limited, their circumstances too difficult. Mrs. Nagasu, you see, has thyroid cancer. And while Mom’s prognosis is reported as “good,” the treatments she began last fall and will continue after the Olympics add a certain weight to Mirai’s competitive efforts.

Don’t know if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, but let me say this about it: it may be the single greatest argument ever for the sovereignty of God. If you want a shortcut to what I mean, just read the last chapter, where Gladwell describes his own life experience. He’s not a God guy that I can tell, so he attributes things to right-place-at-the-right-time explanations, but layer in what you know about the God of Scripture, and you’ll be blown away (unless you spend lots of time thinking about this stuff already).

Or you can do this: Start watching the Winter Olympics.

If these Olympics are teaching me anything, it’s that the best you can do is give yourself a chance. The rest is, as some still dare to say, “up to God.”

I'm intrigued by the wondering out there this week as to whether it’s kosher for athletes to praise God when they’re interviewed after a victory. Kosher may not be the right word, for literally that would mean it is acceptable to religious people—or at least a specific portion of them. And the question at hand seems to be whether it is acceptable to the non-religious people who have to hear all this “glory-to-Godding.”

So let’s think about this for a few minutes.

One of the key criticisms of athletes who thank or praise God for a victory goes like this: “Well, of course they’re praising God. They won.” It’s not a criticism that’s too verifiable because, well, normally postgame reporters only interview the winners.

Phew! Glad we all survived that Tim and Mom Tebow commercial.

In what promised to be—if you let yourself get carried away with all the pregame hype of the political kind—the most controversial moment of the game, a lot of folks who spent a lot of bluster over the whole deal must have melted in their chairs under the sheer weight of the nothingness that the ad contained.

Of course, if you have any sense of what Focus on the Family is all about, you know that that all is a whole lot more than abortion. Not that those who were so foresightedly upset about this deal wanted to admit this. They took their stance: what good could anyone who actually includes the choice of life in the pro-choice world have to say about marriage or parenting or overcoming depression or household management or—no way!—sex?

Let’s begin with the lingering question: do sports form character or reveal it?

When my wife, who is a sometimes sports fan, asked what I would first write about in Competitive Juices, I posed that question to her. Her answer was perfect. She said, “Yes.”  

For those who play sports, even at a “recreational” level (where, of course, a score is still kept), sports may form one’s character as he or she learns discipline and perseverance and camaraderie and even, we hope, humility not only from failure but in success. But the most daunting moments in sports also reveal one’s character, particularly as it relates to the words of one’s mouth spewing forth the abundance of one’s heart.

Some writers coined “the Tiger Slam” to describe the golf star’s four consecutive major championship victories (though not in the requisite calendar year for a “true” slam). But the Tiger Slam could just as easily refer to what Woods frequently does with his club after he has hit a bad shot. Is this the heat of competition or a revelation of his character? I might say “You decide,” but it is really for Tiger himself to wrestle with and perhaps to confess to.