Athletes take their religion too far.

The era from the end of World War I until the Great Depression is often referred to as the Golden Age of American Sports. Sports writers belonged to the "Gee Whiz" school of writing. Everything was wonderful and over the top, and likening the Notre Dame backfield to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was not only a properly admiring statement, but also one with true literary merit.

A generation later, following World War II, the sports department, driven by cynicism, moved to an "Aw, Nuts" attitude typified at a World Series when the guy who hit the winning home run told a writer his wife had not seen the hit because she was feeding the baby.

"Breast or bottle?" asked his neighbor?

Although a small handful of sports columnists believes in being as objective as possible, or still holds high the torch of ridicule to illuminate hypocrisy, most of today's writers--and newspaper executives, too--seem to seek the glow of the people they cover. Part of the executives' goal is to sell papers, marketing the newspaper as a triumphant public relations arm of the athlete (Mark McGwire), or of the team (the Rams). Sports stars are easier to re-create as idols than are bankers, or teachers, or actors, or politicians.

The recent partnership of sports and religion, like that of politics and religion, is a frightening thing. It marginalizes, even disenfranchises, too many people. And it isn't just non-believers who are marginalized. It's minorities, too, and anyone else who does not choose to pray to the same specific God as the athlete or politician who claims to live in His world.

There's an arrogance involved, an arrogance which says that only the loud believer is correct, and it seems to be loudest and most arrogant among born-again Christians.

People of faith should be allowed to worship freely, and their worship should be protected, but I question their dogmatic assertions that only they know the right road, and that I am banished to hell, along with Buddhists, and Shintoists and millions of other people around the world. And Christians are not even a majority of the world's population, though, their arrogance keeps rising to higher levels.

With a few exceptions, the media back away from challenging these people--not for their beliefs, of course, but for the in-your-face flaunting of that faith, the marginalization of others, the scorn aimed at non-believers, the self-serving egotism that believes a person who calls to Jesus at a crucial time will live while millions of others die. Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated called out Isaac Bruce for his claim that Jesus kept him alive, that it's too bad Bobby Phills and Derrick Thomas died but they obviously did not know the right words, or the right tone.

Bruce's claim to immortality may be the most egotistic remark I've ever heard from an athlete, and I've heard a lot of them.

Frank Cusumano of KSDK (Channel 5) did a "special report" that-was promoted by asking if the calls to religion are too strong, but with the exception of a-statement by Ray Hartmann, who agrees that the attitude is absurd, Cusumano lay down and purred before the God squad. Of course, Cusumano is the ultimate fan, the ultimate homer, but Bernie Miklasz and Mike Eisenbath and Kathleen Nelson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch can run him a close second.

Football players seem to be the most egregious about this, and some speculation about causes is possible, but that's a bad can of worms to open. Baseball, of course, was the first to get into-the act, thanks to Billy Sunday, the Billy Graham of the early 20th century, though Sunday was talented enough to play several seasons in the major leagues. Football pushes its Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but the founder of the group, Paul Dietzel, was fired from a head coaching job at LSU and one of the reasons was his proclivity for affairs with the wives of his assistants, there and later at the U.S. Military Academy. Even Thomas, a man who gave much to the youth of Kansas City, is now causing some head-scratching among the NFL insurance and pension types, who are trying to figure out how to divide his benefits among the six children he fathered--and has been supporting-- by five different women. The Post sent Nelson to Kansas City to cover the outpouring of grief, but his other activities obviously were not co nsidered newsworthy.

And on the other side of the coin, a couple of major league baseball teams have been criticized for putting so much faith in God they found no reason to extend themselves. "We lost again" they say. "Guess God didn't want us to win," and that's the end of it.

Not everyone in the media is as profoundly accepting as St. Louisans, but that's the hometown style. Mike Wise, a New York Times basketball writer, gives mixed reviews to the Knicks' Charlie Ward, who "clings to his strong religious convictions like a mother to a newborn, enough so that jaded journalists turn off their tape recorders at the first utterance of 'Jesus is my life.' Personally, it's refreshing that a modem-day athlete can find faith and comfort in something other than his agent or his entourage. You just wonder if He is not concerned about more important world events than whether Ward's 3-pointer is dropping."

I tend to agree with sports stars, and there are many, who feel it is not their responsibility to be a role model for children, but at the same time, they have to realize that children copy and try to imitate their elders and betters, whether a teacher or a minister or an athlete. But if kids learn about jump shots, and knuckle balls, and post patterns, they also learn about cheating, and hot-dogging, and unnecessary roughness, and temper tantrums, and greed. They learn about hypocrisy, too, but that's another column. Or several columns.

For the time being, however, let's try to leave God out of it. He has to worry about starving children in Africa, and homeless ones in the United States, and crippled ones in the Balkans. Must He also worry about highly paid professional athletes?

Joe Pollack is a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist.