The TV camera turns toward the player’s bench at a Los Angeles Lakers game. It scans the sweaty, intense faces and bodies of the ball-warriors, then settles on a older player clutching a ... green teddy bear?
The player is A.C. Green, a veteran of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the fuzzy green bears are tools that help him share God’s love and urge sexual abstinence until marriage. These are concepts so foreign to players in the glamour world of the NBA that Green stands out like a redwood in the desert.
It’s no big deal to Green if millions of television viewers see him, a 36-year-old man, clutching a teddy bear when he sits on the bench during games.
“I tell people that’s the only guy I can relate to on the team,” Green says with a laugh before a recent game.
The green bear is Green’s latest effort to spread the message of sexual purity before marriage and fidelity after marriage. His first initials are monogrammed onto the bear’s chest, but in this case, the A.C. stands for “abstinence committed.”
Now playing for the first place Los Angeles Lakers, Green — a born-again Christian since 1981 who plans to be a pastor after his playing career ends — created the concept for the bear this year. HolyBears Inc. of Houston, Texas, manufactured the bears for him. He then convinced the Lakers to give the bears to kids as a Christmas gift before a game in late December.
“The kids love it,” Green says. “The bear is where we’re really trying to get the message of abstinence across. We have a curriculum in 15 schools in Phoenix and that’s been the tie in. They see the bear, see me holding it — the feedback I receive is from people seeing me on TV with it.”
The bear might be cute, but Green’s own commitment to abstinence is his most effective witness. He is well-known throughout the 28-team league for still being a virgin, and he is proud of it. The best thing is, he says, it gets easier with time.
“Your nature changes. It becomes a habit, then from a habit to a pattern, a pattern to a lifestyle change and a lifestyle change to a nature change. The development process is in full effect.”
Getting that message across to teammates isn’t quite as easy. The NBA has a reputation for promiscuity among its players. When Green and his teammates walk outside their locker room after a game in any city, they usually encounter collection of young women and teenage girls, clad in revealing dresses or low-cut tops with tight pants. They are “groupies,” known to be easily wooed into a player’s hotel room for a tryst. A national sports magazine last year reported on about a dozen players who have had children out of wedlock to multiple mothers.
Green says the NBA, despite its promiscuity, is no more difficult to penetrate with his message than any other industry.
“It’s no different. It is still a sin issue, a sin problem,” he says. “You have to deal with lust as well as the immorality. It’s not a matter of when or where. It’s a reflection of the heart no matter where it happens. To keep the strength inside in this industry is still the same.
“It’s very dark here on a moral level ... by choice. But at the same time, when you do something on the brighter side, it shines very brightly ... “He pauses and grins.
“By choice, too.”
There is another “streak” that Green has going that is just as impressive to those in basketball. He has played in more than 1,100 consecutive games, spanning from November 1986 to present. No other player in U.S. professional basketball history has played as many in a row.
“It really is hard to fathom,” said Los Angeles Lakers executive Jerry West, a former long-time NBA player, in a Los Angeles Times report in November, when Green broke the consecutive-games record.
Basketball is a physically taxing game full of huge bodies constantly crashing into each other. Green, who stands 6-feet-9 and weighs 225 pounds, actually is shorter and skinnier than most of the opponents he matches up with. The opportunity for injuries is enormous, and Green has had a few, but not serious enough to keep him sidelined.
“There hasn’t been a game where I thought about not playing,” Green told the Times. “My thought always has been, ‘God, give me the faith to be able to play.’ You can only prepare yourself so much to get yourself right and ready. Sometimes, that’s just not enough, you have to ask for extra help. That’s why I firmly believe the power of God lives within me.”
