Don Sestina, the Kentucky player's father, said he and his wife will attend next weekend's Kentucky-Louisville game. Father Paul Siebert, the priest at the Emporium, Pa., church the Sestinas attend, plans to join them on the trip to see the next installment of the commonwealth's version of basketball good versus evil.
Of Siebert, the elder Sestina said, "He has some pretty good connections from above."
This playful reference to divine intervention raised a question: Does God care which team wins a basketball game?
Bart Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, said he did not think so.
"Obviously, prayer has nothing to do with it," he wrote in an email. "Otherwise both sides would win."
This echoed something Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural speech about the ongoing Civil War.
"Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God," he said of the North and South. "And each invokes His aid against the other. ... The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."
Siebert said he "very definitely" agreed with how Ehrman and Lincoln viewed the idea of divine intervention. A loving God is not partisan, Siebert said. But He hears prayers for, say, the healing of a player's injury. Coincidentally or not, Nate Sestina returned from a broken left wrist for UK's games in Las Vegas. His return was earlier than expected.
"We will pray that Nate's going to be back in great shape," Siebert said of next weekend's UK-U of L game. "Because God can do that."
Still, fans pray for divine intervention. The bigger the game, the more fervent the prayer, said Dan Wann, a Murray State psychology professor who studies fan behavior.
"I think the quote was something like 'there are no atheists in foxholes,'" Wann said. "And I've always thought there are no atheists in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series."
So why might fans pray for their favorite team to win or for a rival to lose? Fans seek influence on the outcome.
"Any chance that they have to try to gain control over this important outcome that they hardly really have any control over, they'll do," he said. "And fans, they resort to prayer all the time."
This attempt at influence takes many forms. Superstitions. (Adolph Rupp, who certainly did not lack a measure of control in games, considered finding a bobby pin good luck.) Chants to lift up their favorite team. (Go Big Blue! C-A-T-S!) Yelling at referees.
"And one of the things they do is they pray," Wann said. "It's a pretty common response."
Wann said he had participated in a study of fan behavior for a yet-to-be-released report. It had come to a finding that might surprise.
"The more likely they are to pray, the more they are likely to yell cuss words at the refs," he said of fans. "I think that's really funny."
As Wann explained, the pattern is: If prayer doesn't seem to be working, fans resort to, uh, earthier means.
"He just can't take it anymore, so he prays," Wann said of a typical fan. "And when that doesn't work, he starts screaming things at the refs."
