The Essence of My Coaching Is to Serve: Monty Williams, Faith, and Relationality

Abstract

Oftentimes, an athletic coach is tasked with establishing a player–coach relationship that is built on trust, commitment, accountability, hard work, and a belief in process. More recently, however, head coach of the Phoenix Suns, Monty Williams, has garnered considerable public attention for adding faith into that equation. Though faith is primarily considered a theological outlook and expression of spiritual value, it has extended beyond religiosity into his coaching praxis and pedagogy. In the paper, I look to add the voice of Monty Williams to the rich cohort of Black people assembled by Carey Latimore in Unshakable Faith: African American Stories of Redemption, Hope, and Community, a text principally concerned with illuminating the diversity in thought and expression of faith. Additionally, I draw on theories from Black Studies, post-colonial studies, and the sociology of sport to interrogate a particular discursive formulation advanced by Williams—“[…] the essence of my coaching is to serve”. I explore the nature of a faith-based coaching philosophy in the game of basketball and how the notion of coaching as service expresses a dynamic, complex set of religious histories, but also embodies a form of relationality centered on the following question: What does it mean to navigate sociopolitical life and death in community?

1. Introduction

After Game 6 of the NBA Conference Finals, an image of Coach Monty Williams hugging star point guard Chris Paul circulated in the media. Paul had played for Williams in New Orleans in 2010 and over a decade later, the two reunited in Phoenix, where the Suns would advance to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1993. Since then, Williams had lost his wife, Ingrid, in a car crash, and bounced around the league as an executive and assistant coach, including a brief two-year hiatus from basketball altogether. Nevertheless, Williams and Paul maintained a bond deeper than the usual player–coach relationship. In a postgame interview with Scott Van Pelt, Williams reflected on his relationship with Paul as they cemented their place in the 2021 NBA Finals, saying “Chris has meant so much to my career, so much to my life. The darkest moment of my life [losing Ingrid], Chris was right there […] and I am just so grateful to God for him” (Doering 2021). But he also explained that his relationship with Paul is the locust of something greater: “I explain to every in the organization and every person coming into our program that the essence of my coaching is to serve” (Doering 2021). For Williams, faith is woven into the fabric of his everyday life—from his relationship with Chris Paul and the rest of the team, to learning how to mourn and narrate loss. For Williams, his attentiveness to the power of deep relation began in high school with his coach, Taft Hickman (Lee 2021). Each time they travelled for a basketball showcase or tournament, their bond grew stronger. “Monty is more like a son than a player to me, and I was not going to let nothing happen to him”, Hickman said (Lee 2021). When it came to, Williams described Hickman as “foundational for me” (Lee 2021).

Though faith is primarily considered a theological outlook and expression of spiritual value, it has extended beyond religiosity into Williams’ coaching practice and pedagogy. As Carey Latimore (2022a) also demonstrated, Black people have not blindly kept the faith; they have continuously studied and cited scripture in their writing, politics, and everyday life, maintaining a vision of the world acutely centered on Christ. Time and time again, Williams has referenced the Bible, saying that it is not merely a “glorified modesty-type thing” (Evans 2018). For Williams, in sport, “we often feel like we can overcome and withstand anything […] but then you realize how small you are and how much you need a relationship with God. And I felt like that was where I started to grow” (Evans 2018). In the case of Monty Williams, faith is not merely a belief in a higher power or the practice of Christianity; it is a deep ethical and spiritual commitment to growing with and in community—a pedagogical orientation that has been stated as critical for both team building and creating a welcoming organizational culture.

Over the course of the paper, I look toward coach Monty Williams to examine the nature of faith-based coaching philosophies in sport, namely basketball. I work in conversation with Onaje Woodbine (2016) and his text, Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip Hop, and Street Basketball, where he critically examined how the question “What is the meaning of death?” is expressed and inscribed on the basketball court. I also draw on scholarship attending to the relationship between the body and sport to help build and explain the kind of relationality often advanced by Williams. Pierre Bourdieu (1978) famously argued that sport was an important locus of conflict between social classes; it is a relational social space that does not neatly fall into the dogmatic dualism of individual/collective, conscious/unconscious, interested/disinterested, and objective/subjective. For Bourdieu, thinking relationally is not only crucial for the sociology of sport as a subfield but a helpful approach in expanding beyond these binaries. Here, I see relationality as both methodological in nature and as a theoretical investigation of incommensurability. The shorthand of incommensurability is that Williams simultaneously queries a set of colonial histories linked to the game of basketball and expresses a politics of care that has become of grave interest to many in the world of sport.

2. Inviting Humanistic Processes into the Study of Race, Religion, and Sport

In his recent text, Unshakable Faith: African American Stories of Redemption, Hope, and Community, Carey Latimore advanced a template sure to remain steadfast in academic scholarship for the foreseeable future. Part historical narrative, part devotional, the broader question raised by Latimore in the text is the following: Where can faith take us? Latimore assembled an incredibly diverse cohort of Black people—Cyrus Bustill, Phillis Wheatley, Lott Cary, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, LeCrae, Chance the Rapper, and more—to showcase not only the power of prayer but that faith is not a mere coping mechanism; it is a process of seeing beyond what is deemed likely or possible. Amid persistent racial violence, terror, and subjugation, for Latimore, faith was an important medium for Black people to displace their disdain for whiteness and plantation logic. Instead, Latimore showed how many chose to love—God, their enemies, and themselves—and did more than blindly keep the faith. Many relied on scriptute to not only shape their personal relationship with Christ but also inform their broader political and social orientation. For Latimore, we could be doing ourselves a disservice, spiritually and intellectually, if we do not expand the study of faith to include an even wider array of action, thought, and people—“We may be silenced, abused, or forgotten by history because we love. Yet our faith can transcend our need for distinction and recognition […] Radical love will not only require that we work to wipe out injustice but it will also demand our humility […]” (Latimore 2022b). Ultimately, I would like to expand the cohort of people assembled and examined by Latimore to include Monty Williams, a voice that academic scholarship could easily ignore because it does hold a loud or staunch empiricism.

Furthermore, I see the paper here as an extension of the ongoing research in the Black digital humanities, most notably the work done by Kim Gallon (2016) and Jessica Marie Johnson (2018). Gallon referred to the Black digital humanities as a kind of “technology of recovery”, a crucial tool for understanding the histories of marginalized people that continue to remain scant and scattered. For Gallon, with the digital, we can enlarge the field of “sociocultural meaning” (Gallon 2016, p. 47). Relatedly, Johnson posited that engaging with the digital sphere is a way for Black people to “hack their way into the system (modernity, science, the West)” and “live where they were never meant to survive”. For my engagement with Coach Monty Williams, I draw primarily from available digital media content. I went onto Google and played around with entries into the search bar—Monty Williams; Monty Williams and Faith; Monty Williams and Service; Monty Williams and Religion; The Essence of My Coaching is to Serve—and I came across commentary from the NBA, ESPN, NBC News, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and more, that would often be hyperlinked to relevant digital content on Monty Williams. From there, I allowed myself to explore (and even spiral), note-taking and searching for thought and language that could assist me in contextualizing and illuminating what I felt to be significant regarding Williams and the articulation of ‘service’.

Although Monty Williams is a well-known professional basketball coach, there is currently no extant scholarship on his life or coaching praxis. Nevertheless, that was not enough to discourage me from attempting to engage. As I wrote, I attempted to place some of the commentary from Monty Williams in conversation with postcolonial social theories of relationality and the sociology of sport to build a loose archive, or at the very least, a point to commence thinking. As the technical apparatuses of race, religion, and sport collide, our methodologies, too, require some adjustment. Like Gallon and Johnson, I embrace the possibilities and power of the digital and various approaches we can utilize to tell stories and theorize our world.

3. Histories of Faith in Basketball

A common word used to describe the sport arena is the following: passionate. For example, Alexander Riley (2020) discusses a kind of quasi-religious air to how the public experienced the death of Kobe Bryant. For some, Bryant was more than a mere basketball champion. He was a hero, one that brought great joy to the city of Los Angeles and around the globe. On another hand, Bryant was charged with felony sexual assault in 2003. Many argued that the young woman involved with Bryant experienced a level of public backlash and harassment so unbearable that it was impossible for her to safely come forward. Here, Bryant was seen as yet another example of a man that willfully used his status and power to reconstruct the meaning of justice and avoid accountability. Death, similar to life, is complex and the status of hero-villain that Bryant occupied raised a challenging level of discourse. Kobe became seen as a “Girl Dad”, a man of service and philanthropy. At the same time, he was seen as an abuser. Revisiting Bourdieu, one could argue the complex public reaction regarding Kobe Bryant signified a form of intersubjective negotiation, that is, what is acceptable or what one could get away became partially dependent on the social network in which such activities occurred (Bottero 2009). For some, Kobe Bryant was someone that could be redeemed because he was not just another human being. He was the Los Angeles Lakers. He was a basketball champion. He was a world-shaper and world-maker. He was more than an athlete.

Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower (2014) argued that it could be worth considering the presence of a post-secularism in sport. Although sport may not be considered a religion by most, it has become a crucial social enterprise for the public and those actively participating in sport to transcend their daily existence and reflect their personal commitment and conviction, their behavior toward one another, and their broader place in the world. For example, in his memoir, Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Obstfeld (2017, p. 24) offered the following:

“[…] by changing my name in such a high-profile way, I was announcing on a much grander scale that I was no longer Catholic, but Muslim. No longer Lew Alcindor but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and that I had no intention of going back. Because of my fame as a professional basketball player, and because so few American people knew anything about Islam back in the 1970s, there was a lot of angry backlash. People did not want me messing with their idea of who I was or what I represented to them. To many, by changing my religion and name, I was no longer the typical American kid playing a typical American sport embodying any typical American value. I had become something foreign and exotic, like a newly discovered species of tree frog that just might be poisonous.”

Similar to Kobe Bryant, Abdul-Jabbar also emerged, more than ever, as both hero and villain, a reflection of divided politics and culture. At the same time, the writer Roger Kahn also posed a looming question to Abdul-Jabbar: What is your role in the Black freedom struggle? (Goudsouzian 2017). In the era of Black power, he could no longer just play, spout a cliché, and win the goodwill of liberal white America. “I know that”, said Abdul-Jabbar (Goudsouzian 2017). During a time when the nation seemed to be cracking apart, there was an urgent responsibility to define himself, not only as a ball player but politically and spiritually. Both on the court and in his broader entrance into professionalism, Abdul-Jabbar described and promoted a new kind of cultural landscape, one caught between spiritual conviction and the need to maintain a personal shell.

In March 1996, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, formerly known as Chris Jackson, later spawned a comparable conversation to Abdul-Jabbar when he refused to stand for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, stating the American flag represented nothing but oppression, tyranny, and domination. Across the country, the public response to Abdul-Rauf varied, ranging from patriotic outrage to sympathy and admiration for his principled stance. Abdul-Rauf characterized his dissent as an act of his “Muslim conscience” (Grewal 2007). However, as Zareena Grewal argued, the statement made by Abdul-Rauf did not seem to conform neatly into a secular division of religion and politics. For Grewal, his reason for not standing was viewed as incoherent or contradictory in wider media coverage. Islam was often represented as a static “eastern” religion and subsequently, Abdul-Rauf was rendered an inauthentic, misguided religious novice. Additionally, Grewal also forced us to contend with the immense racial insulation concerning Abdul-Rauf. On 30 July 2001, Abdul-Rauf returned home and found Ku Klux Klan graffiti on his property. The white supremacist, Christian nationalist group attacked Abdul-Rauf because they viewed both his race and religious practice as a public threat to the country which ultimately became an important case for understanding the added layer of social insulation Black people could fall into if they differed in their faith practice. Here, sport became a stage where the competition for religious authority between Black people and immigrant communities was enacted. It also offered insight into the secular and racial logic that continue to structure the media, race-making, the complexities of racial politics, and the pervasive national debate on patriotism, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf became a prime example of how Islam was not only raced but erased by American dissent, as his “Muslim conscience” was oftentimes viewed as more of a biographical detail rather than a foundational aspect of his politics and commitment to justice. And so, in response to the notion of erasure, one aspiration of mine is to draw attention to the long, wide, and diverse history of Black people in basketball, from Maya Moore to Amar’e Stoudemire, that have continuously expressed faith as central to their sport performance and relationship to the game of basketball. The modern athlete has not merely followed their own religious tradition in private. As Maya Moore said, “My faith is the core of who I am” (Mercer 2020). When she elected to step away from WNBA basketball amid her illustrious career to address the injustice of criminal punishment, she offered a similar reflection, “God has given you one thing to do. Seek justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (paraphrase of Micah 6:8). Relatedly, in his post-NBA career, Amar’e Stoudemire went on to play for Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv because his faith was “pulling him” (Kestenbaum 2018).

However, when considering both Maya Moore and Amar’e Stoudemire, religiosity was not solely limited to a social justice context; it was also a performance enhancement technique and foundational component to their professional decision-making. Instead of holding a social fixation on talent, Moore and Stoudemire linked their success to the need to look beyond physical prowess and embodied competence. Similarly, for Monty Williams, faith is more than a personal endeavor. It is an organizational intervention. By intertwining faith with team building and leadership, Williams has drawn attention to the wealth of interpersonal, group, and organizational processes that effectively shape performance and well-being, actively dispelling what Christopher Wagstaff (2016) termed the “myth of individualism in sport”—the notion that sporting success or failure is largely determined by a combination of individual effort and ability. In short, recurrent success in elite sport is not entirely dependent on individual performance, but rather how people build and maintain relationship within a systematic collective of sociality or, as Arnold et al. (2019) noted, their interest in the “team behind the team”.

At the same time, another important emergence in the field of organizational sport psychology is that a sport organization is far more than a systematized collective focused on athletic success. As Wagstaff (2019) further noted, a sport organization has the potential to develop, maintain, and promote a far-reaching sense of social responsibility. More recently, many have pointed toward sport organizational culture as a productive model for understanding the management of injustice within an institutional setting. Against the backdrop of the Donald Sterling (former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers) and Robert Sarver (current owner of the Phoenix Suns)—arguably the two most recent, high profile controversies concerning racism and sexism in NBA ownership—the sporting workplace has not only been marked as a place laden with social and cultural hegemony but it has also brought attention to policy processes and institutional governance within elite sport organization. In professional basketball, however, we have seen faith used to not only condemn injustice but facilitate institutional continuity. For Monty Williams, faith has been implicated as part of the everyday organizational life of a coach. “Whether it is winning or losing or getting a contract or not getting signed by a team and all the in-between, my faith is something to hold onto”, Williams said. (Storm 2021).

Nevertheless, the expression of faith is not limited to the game of basketball either. Muhammad Ali (Boxing), Tony Dungy (Football), Allyson Felix (Track & Field), Clayton Kershaw (Baseball), Tim Tebow (Football), to name a few, have also garnered significant attention for connecting their sport performance to religiosity and spirituality. Mari Womack (1992) famously theorized the nature of religion in sport, particularly the fact that so many in the professional sporting arena attest to the importance of embracing a ritualistic overtone to help block out excessive environmental stimuli like fan interruption or distraction strategies from the opposing side. As far as sport is concerned, to use the language of Kendall Blanchard (1988), there is something about sport that is “inviting to ritual”—a transmission of both culture and value. Revisiting the importance of the digital humanities, Faith Driven Athlete has curated an extensive digital archive with stories across the sport world that broadly revolve around the collision of sport and faith. Not only does the archive include podcast, stories, video, and magazine categories but it also encompasses a diverse range of faith communities and people, extending from the vantage point of the player to the fan. Although I do not intend to propose any hierarchy of sport, I would like to hold space and attention for the specificities of the game of basketball. So, in the next section, I focus on some of the histories of the basketball court, namely how the court has come to operate as a distinct vessel for feeling, emotion, embodiment, and talking to the dead.

4. Death Inscribed on the Court

In the Introduction of Black Gods of the Asphalt, Onaje Woodbine is quite critical of the current literature on Black basketball, namely because it is either overly deterministic or too keen on reducing basketball to a strategy used to contest anti-Black racism. As Ben Carrington (2010, p. 6) has also noted, sport has tended to occupy a marginal position in academic scholarship. It is often referenced in passing or as an illustration of some more fundamental point, but it is rarely conceived of as a viable starting point for generating theory or empirical investigation. Consequently, Woodbine sought to challenge the perceived apolitical value of sport by documenting the deep, spiritual meaning of basketball to Black and Brown communities and simultaneously hold in view the often-ignored relationship between street basketball and Hip Hop.

To start, Woodbine discusses the parallel histories of basketball and the Muscular Christianity movement within Harlem Black churches in the early twentieth century. One notion widely explored in Christianity is the focus on the inner self, on what is not seen, and on nurturing both the mind and heart. Here, the body is a sort of necessary evil, full of sinful desire that must be controlled by the inner self. For some, sport more often was viewed as a waste of time because of a belief that it did not have the potential to nurture the soul or control fleshy desire. However, the heralded inventor of basketball, James Naismith held a different view. Naismith believed the game had the ability to not only cultivate Christian value but that it could also be used as a companion to spread the Gospel. Through basketball, Naismith built upon Victorian concept of Muscular Christianity—a premise that one must center physical fitness and participation in sport to develop Christian morality (Watson et al. 2005). Most notably, Naismith drew from the idea that any follower of Christ should place high value on their physical body; they need to train it and exercise it so that they can effectively serve their God (Rains 2011). As Tony Ladd and James Mathisen stated, “For Naismith, basketball was more than a new game. It was a medium to evangelize people about morality and Christian value, the essence of American muscular Christianity” (Ladd and Mathisen 1999, p. 71).

However, Naismith is only a part of the story. As Woodbine showed, despite the game being invented in 1891, organized basketball did not start for Black people until roughly 1905 because almost every YMCA during the nineteenth and early twentieth century was segregated. Hence, Black churches often provided gym space, and as Woodbine argued, “fused a religious ethos of ultimate worth and community uplift into the game” (Woodbine 2016, p. 36). A history that has long been overlooked is that of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York, a network that became deeply committed to sponsoring basketball. The church was founded in 1928 by John Howard Washington, the first Black man to take the court for Columbia University. Johnson went on to establish several sporting and recreation activities through the church. After arriving from the West Indies, Bob Douglas saw his first basketball game at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. Bob Douglas went on to establish the first complete Black professional basketball team, the New York Renaissance Team. Nicknamed the “Father of Black Professional Basketball”, Douglas owned and coached the team from 1923 to 1949. Unfortunately, the wider public was relatively late to notice. The NBA did not allow Black people into the league until 1959 and well into the 1960s, an informal quota system remained in place to limit the number of Black people in the Association. Meanwhile, as Woodbine showed, the church worked tirelessly to cultivate the game for Black communities.

From there, Woodbine not only discusses how religion and Black basketball continued to exist parallel to one another, but also how the church nurtured a deep concern for racial justice and fought to condemn anti-Black dismemberment and fatality. Moving forward, Woodbine focused on how the court served as a memorial ground embodying the violence of the street and the legacies of the dead. By attending to the agency and subjectivity of the Black streetball player, Woodbine beautifully endowed their everyday practice and outlined how those actively playing deal with the insurmountable level of death and despair surrounding them.

“I feel like a free spirit. It is like, you know how they say your spirit goes to a different place, whether it is heaven or hell or you get stuck in between, which is the afterlife, which is the middle. I feel like my soul overtakes my body and it just do what it do out there […] I get a premonition when I bring the ball up the court […] before I get up to court, I know what is going to happen. Either I am going to shoot a three or it is going to be an alley-hop or pass or it is going to be me rolling on you.”

—Marlon, Streetball Player

“Man, it is just like you forget what is going on, pretty much everything else on the outside world. For that however much time that you are on the court, I mean, that is the only thing you are focusing on. You do not know the time of day, everything else is pretty much you are blacked out between those four lines. That rectangle is your whole new space for that certain time being.”

—Tyshawn, Streetball Player

As described by Woodbine, the court opened a doorway for those playing to move between present time and into an out-of-body experience, where they could passively observe themselves playing the game. For Woodbine, the basketball court as “fundamentally other” in nature is not a result of superiority or deviance. The notion of the “body taking over” is a mode of stylized experience that is somewhat beyond language, involving a spectral presence of the dead and a fully embodied practice, aching with transcendental meaning.

Returning to James Naismith, he was convinced that he could “better exemplify the Christian life through sport than in the pulpit” because it “developed the whole person—mind, body and spirit” (Rains 2011, p. 54). He believed that basketball had a unique “spiritual design” because it avoided the excesses of wanton brutality that too often occurred in football; it provided “personal contest without personal contact” (Rains 2011, p. 67). Although baseball was played at the college level, professional baseball was the most popular and prominent version. For Naismith, the strong association baseball had with professionalism made it less appealing as a character-building sport and exercise. As long as the game of basketball remained focused on those actively playing the game rather than coaches and larger managerial capacities, Naismith believed that basketball had a different level of social reach. Candidly, Naismith had a point. Unlike baseball and football, basketball was quickly adopted by women and further embraced by several other underrepresented communities—religious and otherwise—moving into the mid-twentieth century. Here, I am not only interested in the reach and scope of the game but also how the historical relationship between religion and basketball raised to the fore an important question regarding inheritance, particularly one related to the discursive and the rhetorical expression of faith. By inheritance, I also mean the various modalities in which the meaning of both life and death become insisted and imposed in the game. In the next section, I reintroduce the main character of the paper, Monty Williams, and critically examine the reason for which the phrase “[…] the essence of my coaching is to serve” is worth more than a momentary pause, namely due to the specificities of language and the context under which coaching as service is formed and articulated.

5. Returning to Monty Williams: Coaching Praxis, Ethics, and Relationality

When Scott Van Pelt posed a standard question to the Phoenix Suns coach on how he managed to balance rigorous coaching and caring mentorship, Monty Williams said, “As a believer in Christ, that is what I am here for […] I tell the team all the time, if I get on you, I am not calling you out—I am calling you up” (Barnett 2021). After losing the NBA Finals, another reporter invited Williams to say more on the role his faith played in bouncing back from a hard series. Here, Williams said, “I think the biggest thing about my faith is that I am just not all that. I am a part of a plan and an assignment that is much bigger than basketball, for sure. I try to have that mindset when I coach […] When you read the Bible, you realize that you are not all that and at that point, I am forced to lay it down for the staff and those playing” (Booth 2021).

When Harry Edwards (1973) examined the occupational hazard of coaching, he discussed how the combination of accountability, unpredictability, visibility, and the relatively objective measurement of success (i.e., winning) has placed exceptional pressure on those who coach. Edwards went on to argue that a kind of authoritarianism and inflexibility that developed in coaching was not a function of personality type but rather derives from the institutionalized demand of being liable for winning and losing. At the same time, Jay Coakley (1983) addresses the importance of acknowledging wide variance in coaching philosophies. Some coaches work themselves and their team especially hard via autocratic governance. Some coaches utilize motivation and look to be more democratic in nature. However, I hope to draw attention to one potential form of continuity. I would argue that basketball, a sport with a historically rich connection to both the church and faith, has produced a durable coaching philosophy linked to the notion of service, one loosely formulated as God-Player-Coach. As I mentioned above, Naismith asserted that great coaching required one to be committed to serving the Gospel and the team in a humble, almost non-visible manner. Akin to Naismith, Williams has articulated an ordering in which the coach is not only in second place but positioned as a servant to both Christ and the game.

Pivoting back to some of the work of Carrington (2010), Muscular Christianity did not merely call attention to a relationship between the mind, body, and soul; there is also an imperialistic account of Muscular Christianity, presuming a colonial notion of racial difference. British and American anthropology had long viewed the body as a biological entity and, even amid what some termed the “postmodern turn” in anthropological scholarship that looked to foreground the body as a cultural construction, it did not stop the body from becoming an object of intense scrutiny; an object that must be trained, disciplined, modified, displayed, evaluated, and commodified (Besnier and Brownell 2012). As Carrington noted, ‘the Black athlete’ became a highly commodified object within contemporary hyper-commercialized sport-media culture, sometimes viewed as an animal, sometimes viewed as almost human, sometimes viewed as even super-human. The very boundaries that define the ‘Black athlete’ come to be fought over and in turn, as Carrington suggested, become a site of political struggle. Sport could not be rescued by the nation; ideologies of race have continued to saturate the fabric of sport and crucially sustain the discursive construct of the ‘Black athlete’ (Carrington 2010, p. 3).

Carrington also discusses how our scholarship on sport has not taken the time to meditate on commonplace utterance (i.e., The Great White Hope). For Carrington, if we start to examine the nature of a popular sport trope more attentively, we may reveal something more fundamental concerning the colonial frame and the reproduction of white colonial desire. And so, in the case of Monty Williams, I believe an important question has emerged: What is the relationship between service and the body; as an activity; as a source of consumption; as an official institution? The concomitant ideological transformation of the body figured centrally to the colonial project, and the spread of organized, competitive, team sport can also be traced to such processes (Besnier and Brownell 2012; James 2013)—what Carrington relatedly termed “the racial signification of sport”. On some level, a coaching philosophy connected to service is bolstered by Muscular Christianity and caught in an ambivalent tension between the surpassing of formal governance and the continuance of neocolonial relationality. On another level, the intra-relationship between racial discourse, embodied sport performance, and the role of politics itself into the figuration of service (re)cast a non-static and somewhat liberatory definition of both humanity and the human, centered on positioning service as an act of communion. However, my intention is not to reduce Monty William and the phrase “[…] the essence my coaching is to serve” into an unending struggle between colonial reification and possibilities for resistance. Rather, I seek to explore the processes by which we theorize sport, or as Stuart Hall (1990, p. 237) stated, “the representation which is able to constitute us a new kind of subject and thereby enable us to discover a new place from which to speak”. I intend to interrogate the discursive move, formation, and deployment of the concept ‘serve’, a category of analysis that is both a technology of the self and subjectification but also, I argue, a tool of relationality. From Williams, we gather a figuration of otherworldliness (Feldman 2016), present yet buried in sedimented histories of coloniality and Muscular Christianity. For me, the relational ontology advanced by Williams is an ethical commitment to navigating sociopolitical life and death in community.

It is commonly known that Monty Williams and Chris Paul share a bond that is a decade in the making (Rohlin 2021). Retired NBA player Jason Smith, a former player of Williams and teammate of Chris Paul in New Orleans, said watching the two reunite in Phoenix is “absolutely amazing”. Williams admitted that he initially was a “my way or the highway” type of coach (Rohlin 2021). “[There] was probably a lot of insecurity, trying to show what I knew and prove it as opposed to just coaching” (Rohlin 2021). Smith acknowledged that Williams calmed down over his tenure, but what resonated even more was seeing his maturation into a beloved leader. Smith lost his father in 2011 and said “I broke down. You rarely expect your NBA coach to be there for the hardest thing you ever had to deal with in your entire life. But he was there. It really resonated with me that he cared about his entire team. It was bigger than basketball”. When Williams lost his wife, Ingrid, in 2016, Smith recalled the large group that showed up to support him. “He is really there for people”, Smith said (Rohlin 2021). “That is where we showed that we are really there for him” (Rohlin 2021). Now, when Smith watches Phoenix, he is quite nostalgic, recalling the synergy formed in New Orleans a decade ago. “Chris knew what Coach was going to call before Coach even called it”, Smith recalled. “It was amazing to see the interaction between them going back and forth. […] They were just so in sync” (Rohlin 2021)—a similar kind of cosmic foresight to that documented by Woodbine.

Since arriving in Phoenix, Williams noted that the team has widely embraced his coaching philosophy: “It has served us well” (Druin 2022). In charge of assembling talent and making the right call on the court, Williams also took home the NBA Coach of the Year honor for the 2021–2022 season. When current player, Devin Booker, sat down with USA Today and spoke on his relationship with Coach Williams and the honor received, Booker said, “[…] He is a real one. He is one of those people that when you are talking to him, he is looking you directly in your eye and you feel everything that he said. It is much bigger than basketball […] all the basketball stuff is a bonus. We just share a common interest or common love for the game […]” (Druin 2022). Service, then, is not only a commitment to the player but special attention to one-on-one interaction. To serve is to listen and share.

To conclude, I would like to ponder on the sense of deep relation experienced and described by Devin Booker. The genuine care ascribed to Monty Williams as a coach reminded me of the late bell hooks. Teaching, she explained, can happen anywhere, anytime (hooks 2014). For hooks, the challenge, then, is making our political commitment readily available and accessible (hooks 1990). In the case of Williams, his commitment to faith is relatively undeniable. At the same time, it has proven to be quite successful. Thus, on some level, Williams is a tangible example of how to effectively incorporate religion into elite sport organizational culture. Roughly seventy-five percent of those playing in the NBA identify as Black but unfortunately, head coaching and front office management have long trailed behind that number, even as the league became predominantly Black. Frequently, one would hear that a Black coach was not the right fit or lacked the right kind of experience. Though Williams already held professional coaching experience, it is worth noting that his faith-based coaching philosophy has been widely embraced by his team and the league. As fellow NBA coach Alvin Gentry said, “I really admire Monty and what he has done what he has established […] You can see that they play for him and I think that is true of a lot of the younger Black coaches that have been given an opportunity. You can see the result of their labor and what they have accomplished when given that opportunity” (Rankine 2022).

Conceivably, the notion of service advanced by Williams signifies a discursive practice of postmodern Blackness, an effort to lean into open totality and embrace communicative, intimate relationships. As described by hooks (1990), the notion of postmodern Blackness is not one in which we appropriate the experience of ‘otherness’ to separate a politics of difference from a politics of racism. Rather, it is a kind of yearning, shared by many of us, to cut across the boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, and more. From Williams, we see a kind of crisscrossing of the conceptual apparatus, where the notion of service is concurrently undercut with struggle, spirit, yearning, and love. At the same time, we see that service cannot be so easily assimilated into histories of Muscular Christianity or the oft-structural capacities believed to (re)orient coaching philosophies. Here, we also face a broad twofold question: (1) How does the meaning of service change as it is moved from context to context? (2) What does the discursive formation of service entail and require? From Monty Williams, service is motivated and informed by an unbounded collision of race, religion, and sport, but also imbued with revived sensibilities around the meaning of ‘taking one for the team’—a motivational sequence derived from his faith and personal orientation toward communication, trust, and mutuality. To borrow some of the language Nicole LaVoi (2007), service is a kind of “expansion of the interpersonal processes” of sport, moving beyond the traditional operationalization of relationship closeness between a coach and player toward a form of coaching that is both art and science.

6. Conclusions

In sport, faith has an important, though often neglected, role. On a practical level, faith can be recognized in any relationship between an athlete and coach (Pisk 2017). On a more theoretical level, faith has somewhat transformed sport into a “secular religion” for the masses. As the sociologist Edwards (1973, p. 86) once said, “There is more than a minimal degree of plausibility that […] if there is a universal popular religion in America, it is to be found within the institution of sport”. Precisely because it is secularized, sport can function as a symbolic system that unifies across political and social divisiveness. Sport may be inextricably connected to a slam dunk, touchdown, goal, or record-breaking dashes, but it is also an expression of the human spirit and has long retained a close, symbolic connection to religion.

As an alternative to providing a singular answer or research conclusion, I hope to end the current mediation on the expression of faith in sport with an invitation to the academy. In The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel De Unamuno (1977) discusses how philosophy and religion need one another and, in fact, have long remained mutually constitutive. For Unamuno, philosophy and religion may seem like enemies, but together offer new entries into understanding life, death, and the moral imagination. If we insert sport into the equation and recall what CLR James (2013, p. 16) offered us in his seminal text Beyond a Boundary—“[sport] had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I found out that I did not have much to learn”—we may fall onto uncharted terrain. Again, I embrace the intellectual possibilities that a collision of philosophy, religion, and sport can produce. I suspect that I am not alone. Though Douglas Hartmann (2016, p. 94) was more concerned with the midnight basketball phenomenon, he argued that basketball “gained a cultural power far beyond that which even the most strategic, political leader (not to mention any literal-minded, institutionally oriented scholar) may have realized.”

As Carey Latimore also suggested, for some, it may be easier to conclude that religion is on the decline but that does not negate the right to examine and tell stories that we may not have heard before. From Monty Williams, I argue we can discern compelling theories of relationality that constitute and enable connection, linkage, solidarity, and resonance—both descriptively and analytically (Feldman 2016). From Williams, we see a prioritization of God, the player, and the organization well before the coach and also encounter a notion of servitude that is both resistant to commodifying the body and committed to community—a rather compelling orientation to hold against the backdrop of Muscular Christianity and other structural capacities that designate and define discourse.

There is also an applied side to relationality. In practical theology, the model commonly referred to as “holistic care” or the “holistic development of the athlete” has posited that an increased valuation of respect and holism, power and empowerment, choice and autonomy, empathy, and compassion in sport is related to coaching ‘stewardship’—an ethic that embodies responsible planning and increased social support (Waller et al. 2016). Broadly, there is an ongoing conversation in the world of sport on the meaning of care for the importance of relating to a team. Here, my hope is that Monty Williams can further that conversation and operate as a productive model for critical inquiry into the discursive processes in which Black thought is occurring (Weheliye 2014). Furthermore, I would also like to encourage future studies to explore the practice of deep relation across race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, geography, to name a few, and further interrogate functional discourse within sport. Discourse can grow strong and in the spirit of Veena Das (2006), I sincerely hope our scholarship at the intersection of race, religion, and sport can be motivated by the larger possibilities of phenomena and the singularity of lives.