The governing bodies of professional sports (e.g. NFL, NBA) regularly impose sanctions upon professional athletes who violate their rules.  In addition to discouraging illegal behavior, explicit in these sanctions are a desire to have these athletes serve as role models for today’s youth, which is admirable, given the inordinate role that these athletes play in shaping the psyche of the next generation.  The question of why athletes and other entertainers play such a large role is best left for another column.

Athletes are routinely punished for drug abuse, and occasionally for violation of laws proscribing other behavior.  What strikes me as odd is that there is not a greater insistence on integrity in the conduct of their performance of their professional duties.  While there are penalties for personal fouls in football, technical fouls in basketball, and yellow and red cards for unsportsmanlike behavior in soccer, where are the penalties for obvious dishonesty?  For example, several weeks ago, Miami Dolphins wide receiver Davone Bess was credited with a catch that obviously hit the ground first.  He protested otherwise, the instant replay camera was broken, and the play was ruled a completion.  Several plays later, Bess again trapped a ball that had obviously hit the ground, and again arose protesting that he had in fact made the catch.  This time, an official had seen the ball hit the ground and the catch was disallowed.  Here was an example of a player obviously trying to defraud the system, successfully once and unsuccessfully the second time.  The lesson was plain to all, including those who look to athletes as role models: the ends justify the means; get away with whatever you can.  Is this what UCLA coach Henry “Red” Sanders meant when he said that “[w]inning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”?  This quote has been oft repeated, particularly by Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi, as an essential tenet of American sports, supplanting sports writer Grantland Rice’s equally famous aphorism that it’s “not that you won or lost but how you played the game.”

This theme is recurrent in society today, most spectacularly in politics and our legal system.  Victory has become an end in itself, instead of the result of fair competition.  Truth, honor and integrity are expressed as ideals, but are not deemed to be as appropriate for enforcement as late hits or grabbing the facemask.  These actions are punished because of the physical damage they can inflict, while the moral decay caused by blatant dishonesty is ignored.  Of course, our legal system’s professed intolerance for perjury took a hit when Bill Clinton thumbed his nose at the truth and his supporters defended it by claiming that his lies were told merely to avoid personal embarrassment.  Is that justification applicable to sports; would it be unfair to diminish a player’s self esteem by expecting him to admit that he dropped a pass that he could have caught. 

While we’re at it, what about the “flops” taken by players trying to convince the referee that they were unfairly hit?  This would apply primarily to punters in football, and to virtually every position in basketball.  I’m thinking of Rick Barry, a Hall of Fame NBA star who cried more than a Jerry Springer guest.  After all, these games are videotaped, aren’t they?  It wouldn’t be necessary to stop the game, either; when a review of the tapes indicates that a player is attempting to gain an unfair advantage by deceit, a fine can be levied by the league, just as it is occasionally when the tapes reveal unsportsmanlike conduct as currently defined. 

Character has been defined as “doing what’s right when nobody is looking.”  Implicit in this definition is the concept of doing the right thing because it is the right thing (normative ethics), not merely because one is afraid of the judgment of others.  Professional athletes are regularly punished for ingesting subjects that have been banned, either because they are illegal or because they have been deemed to confer an unfair advantage.  However, can such behavior possibly be as corrosive to civilized society as the message that anything goes, as long as no one sees you?   If professional sports are serious about serving as responsible role models for the next generation, their governing bodies will start paying attention to what is happening when the officials aren’t looking or cannot see, and start punishing behavior that displays a lack of personal integrity.  Notwithstanding the Saints’ 10-0 record, I think that Grantland Rice had it right all along.