Sports Ethics: Why is Winning So Important? Part I & II

I believe almost all the moral ugliness that mars athletic competition arises from the obsession with winning at all costs. Elite athletes, however, proclaim that the challenge to win drives them to excel and improve. This paradox of the drive to win helps explain the complex motivation around winning that drives excellence but tips over into cheating and dirty play.

The sports world is full of stories and myths and legends for whom one motto dominates. Vince Lombardi said it best although out of context, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." The immortal Ricky Bobby's dad really got it clear when he announced to his son, "if you ain't first, you're last."

The motivational drive to win is fascinating because the ideal of winning in athletics remains inherently artificial. Sport competition involves a “game.” The artifice of the game constructs the rules of how to play and defines the goal—what constitutes winning. The designation of winning generates metrics that permit the athletes, spectators and judges to understand transparently whom wins.

The power of the metrics lies in the shared assumption that they measure something valuable. This value shapes the skills, knowledge, training and commitment that athletes and coaches invest in trying to win. The metrics and logic of achieving them mold the behavior and excellences of athletes who commit to mastering and winning under these rubrics.

The etymology of win hints at the depths of the idea. The word’s ancient Germanic roots grow from the idea of laboring and toiling. The word emphasizes striving and contending against not just others but nature or challenges thrown by life. Win applied to all aspects of life but mainly property. Later it took on the wistful idea of “winning the heart” of another through effort. Winning came late to sports and was not applied in German or English until mid nineteenth century.

The Germanic concept of winning matches the Greek roots for athlete. Athletes contest each other. The contest requires striving and sacrificing to achieve a goal. Both emphasize achieving ends that require effort and often pain or suffering to achieve an end. Winning in both traditions converges upon the notion of work, sacrifice, struggle to achieve a success.

The ideal of winning focuses the motivation and training of individuals who pursue athletic goals. In this train of thought winning becomes the marker of success in an endeavor. It fits with the deeper meaning of effort and striving to gain an end. 

Winning creates a public and transparent way to test oneself against others in seeking a goal. Again as Lombardi said, "if winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?" These metrics of winning and proving one is the best at the competition can vary widely. The metrics can measure points scored against each other; they can measure sheer speed at a fixed task such as running or swimming. The distance in throwing or jumping might gauge the best. The crucial point to remember is all these metrics are artificial and linked to a ritualized game with rules—the definition of winning is ultimately arbitrary in sports.

Yet even with its arbitrary parameter and artificial aspects, winning engrosses fans and players alike because of its potential for clarity of outcome. People and competitors know who wins at the end of competition. Winning as striving ends with clarity and measuring across opponents and competitors.

Winning in sports competition has always enthralled competitors and spectators because it occurs in real time with uncertain outcomes. Unless rigged or cheated, athletic winning tests competitors in real unpredictable conditions. The testing challenges people in unique ways under uncertainty and calls forth maximum and smart effort to win. Upsets can occur, favorites can lose, people can get better over time and once lowly players can become masters. The risk resonates with life in the way a written show or other scripted entertainment cannot provide.

Testing oneself against others illustrates how the process of striving to win can bring out some of the best of athletics. Athletes who love their sport express excellence by pushing themselves to their mental, physical and emotional limits. Pushing to the limits and mastering higher levels of achievement engenders deep fulfillment and self-respect. This respect and fulfillment provide the deep intrinsic joy of integrated mental, emotional and physical achievement that they first knew as children expressing their physical qualities.

The athlete originally competes against baselines, against ideals of form and against themselves to stretch and extend their reach and competence. Athletes often work alone especially in the beginning as they discover their love and talent for a sport. This path does not necessarily require the need or desire to dominate or vanquish others.

Winning can then be a means and motivation to progress and grow in these domains. Individuals and teams test their expertise against others; winning or losing a competition identifies where their achievement stands relative to others at a similar level of stature. The press and test and drive to excel and demonstrate this in winning matches an intrinsic drive and appreciation with an extrinsic reward from the prize and approbation and stature of winning. A winning athlete can know the quiet satisfaction of being the best (if only for a moment).

The intrinsic satisfaction of expressive excellence can be joined by the joy of experiencing, as a fan or athlete, the beauty and delight in significant athletic excellence. Fans can appreciate the sheer beauty and technical virtuosity of athletes in competition. This involves not just technical appreciation but realizing the combination of strength, intensity and technique involved in physically tense competition where bodies and teams collide with each other. Players, coaches and spectators can all enjoy this. To the extent that desire and drive to win motivates perfecting this and giving one’s all during the competition it supports the aesthetic dimension experienced as intrinsic.

One of the ironies of winning as athletic obsession lies in the fact that the best athlete or athletes do not always win. Sometimes luck plays a part as the Greeks and Romans knew with Fortuna. Sometimes an injury limits one’s performance or someone becomes sick at the last minute. A referee can make a bad call or weather can undermine one’s strengths or play to the opponent’s strengths. Sometimes the coordination or plan of a team will permit the less talented athletes to win over a more talented but less unified team. While the best athlete and best team in a technical sense of consistent superb manifestation of the skills of the sport can converge with winning, this is not a necessary convergence. The best can lose and this is one aspect of the allure and often tragedy of sport. Many great athletes never end up winning championships because they compete on teams that fail. This accounts for the often criticized but perfectly understandable desire for great athletes on losing teams to use free agency or the market to end up with a winning team and have a chance to not only be great but win a championship.

This paradox that the best athlete does not always win creates a broader motivational opening for many athletes. It permits individuals and teams to deploy intelligence, collaboration and work ethic to overcome talent limits. It calls an individual to assess his or her own skills and improve or to assess an opponent’s skills and anticipate and prepare for them.

Winning, however, can take on a more ethically dangerous cast of motivation. Winning not only determines which person or team is better on a particular day and contest; it can metamorphose into exultation and domination. Again the roots of this can be deep. In the classical world the origins of play and athletic competition arose from their link to battle and war. In the contest of war, the outcomes are brutal and final. In classical times the losers were killed or sold into slavery. Their homes were conquered, their families taken as slaves or killed; their land taken or defiled. The game of war was played for mortal stakes. And the practice for war as exemplified in athletic competition reflected those brutal and naked stakes.

Winning wars and wining athletic competition become forms of domination. An athlete who carries over this mind set revels not just in their achievement but in the downfall of their opponents. They revel not just in their distinction but in the loss and humiliation of their opponent. The psychological matrix of winning becomes more extrinsic and mean spirited linked to its origins in war.

This relation to winning as validation for worth reduces to: I beat them therefore I am. If I lose, I am worthless. The driver here lies in the external vulnerability of the motivation and the ultimately limited or even hollow satisfaction. On this path, one's worth and excellence is not internalized and worn with dignity, but it is brittle, anxious, often hidden by bravado, and goaded by the need to prove oneself again and again and again. One can never enjoy the victory because one's worth is only a shell depending upon the next contest. The world and one’s relation to oneself resemble a king of the mountain game where any accomplishment depends upon external conquest and remains inherently unstable and endlessly challenged.

Seeking to win as domination is intensified in two ways. First many individuals or teams represent communities. Their team is linked to a city or country (as in the Olympics or World championships). This communal connection gives a patriotic gloss and increases the emotional stakes and investment for not just the team—often they may just be a collection of professionals gathered together for a season of competition—but to the fans who fanatically follow them. The followers invest their own identity and gain joy or sorrow at the wins and losses of the teams.

Fanatic followers may mark their life events by losses, wins and championships of their teams. Teams entwine with personal and communal histories. College sports in America along with deep local and national ties to professional teams all reflect this. This loyalty can blow up into violence or feigned even real dislike against other communities or teams. Some coaches thrive in demoniziong other teams; something most professionals resist since they may end up playing for those teams at some point in their career. This communal aspects links to cities, nations and colleges spreads an aura of emotional dynamism around team games and seasons and championships. 

Owners add another variable to obsession with winning in professional sports. The game at its highest levels in countries across the world has become a game of billionaires or corporations. These ultra-rich individuals do not buy teams just for fun; but there is an immense amount of ego satisfaction and celebrity to team ownership.

The owners, many of whom are very successful business people or corporations, expect a return. They want a profit in money but above all in psychic return. Both profits arise from winning. Winning fills the stands and gets media contracts and creates high-sustained revenue streams. Winning increases their profile in the community where the team lives. The owner becomes a celebrity and benefactor who can be lionized and is heroic; the downside is that the owners can be vilified if they sponsor a consistent loser. This vilification can drive owners to focus obsessively upon winning. This obsession can play out in high expectations, very short time lines for coaches and players, and this pushes coaches and players to search for edges to win and keep their jobs and keep their owners happy. This passion to win or dominate and share in the extrinsic glory can obsess owners and fixate fans around teams. It drives the fanaticism of fans and the insane hype and hyperventilated language as well as the fights and meaningless strutting of fans who glory in the wins of the technically superb squad of mercenary athletes who make of “their” team.

Here you can end up with coaches illegally filming practices or putting up bounties to players who injure other players. Here you find coaches condoning or looking the other way when players use illegal performance enhancing drugs to get an edge or keep their job a little longer. The range of cheating and abetting or collaborating in it is wide and exacerbated by owner’s manias. At a fundamental level to win at all costs ultimately denies the wider context that sports requires both respect for the game and for one's opponents. The game and the opponents remain essential to the very activity itself and the sole focus on winning misses this wide and critical aspect of athletic respect and success.

This fanatic concern to win spills over into civic life. It can motivate communities and owners to go so far as to subvert the justice system. Criminal behavior by local athletes will be ignored or treated with leniency to protect the ability of the local team to win. The disturbing corruption ranges far and wide in civic circles around the globe.

Winning as the ethical centerpiece of athletic competition possesses both a powerful influence on growth and achievement. It can also devolve into squalor and cheating. At its best, however, it can grow from contests where champions or winners emerge from testing and developing carefully developed athletics skills and stances.

The desire to win leads to testing oneself against others as a way to increase one's own development as a human and athlete. The outcome of these encounters can be not only personal growth but excellence in the form of the sport driven by encounters with other athletes who may be more proficient. These tests also generate innovation as each competitor seeks to develop better ways to compete and refine their skills. This test forces the athlete to develop or stop. In this justification winning marks growth and excellence not simply dominance.

At the end of the day athletes should always remember another aspect of winning. The Romans called it “being a god for a day.” The critical point is “for a day.” Being a winner or champion is a precarious business that remains profoundly mortal. Any day you can be dethroned. The next day in season offers another contest. At the end of a championship season the winner possesses the honor for a cycle, maybe a year or a four-year cycle as in the Olympics or World Cup. The winner and champion is challenged again and can lose or fail or not even make it to the championships again.

Winning is a gossamer achievement, real & powerful, but delicate, fragile and doomed to evanesce at the next cycle of contestation. The cycle of fighting for and winning in sports, as in most of mortal life, offers a chance to grow into excellence and joy or to breed into meanness and domination. So winning connects with all such mortal aspirations. 

Sports Ethics: Keep Your Edge

“I lost my edge.” Athletes and professionals mutter this when they struggle with their skills and when they begin to feel their skills eroding or when they feel competitors starting to surpass them.  I think the idea of keeping our edge generates powerful ethical and psychological insights about what how high achieving individuals live. What does it mean to play at the edge?

Think of edges in two ways. First, edges can be sharp, dull or somewhere in between. Generally dull edges do not function efficiently; cutting or acting takes more effort and is less responsive.

Second, edges function like boundaries. Athletes and people confront several ways of being at the edge. They grapple with the edge of their own talent, training, character or focus. Individuals also face the edge of the skills and training required to succeed in their endeavor whether sports or any professional capability. Individuals live at the edge where they rub against other competitors.  Finally individuals risk falling off the edge of their emotional, moral or professional lives.

When a person plays at the edge of their talent and energy, they marshal internal energy and attention. This internal organizing helps them function with maximum effort and efficiency. People at their edge push their skill and attention and energy. They see each achievement as a new boundary, a new edge to perform that they hone as an edge, but one that they struggle to surpass. Individuals perform flat out and they are always pushing themselves to get better at what they are doing. This level of acting can exhaust people quicker, but being at the edge keeps athletes and people more alert and functioning at high levels. Facing a competitor playing at their edge forces contenders to push themselves harder. Self-aware individuals know the risks they take by treading at their boundaries, but risk it to succeed and win.

A person cannot drive to the borderlands of their sport unless they thrust to the edge of their talent and effort. At the edge, the best athletes and minds develop new strategies, new skills, new training approaches to exploit the possibilities of the game and persons. Facing the best, taking risks, trying new ways or mastering old ways, constantly adapting to the other side’s moves and training, all involve living at the edge.

I am not talking about being “edgy” for the sake of being cool or hip or being “edgy” for the sake of style of calling attention to oneself. To keep your edge in performance, involves internal discipline, self-awareness, situational attention and risk taking.Being at the edge takes harsh honesty about one's own potential and effort.  It means the courage to fail and the resilience to get back up and try again. Competing at the edge entails remembering that no one in your field is standing still and you don’t get better by being comfortable.

Unfortunately falling of the edge can wreck a moment or a person or an execution. Playing at the edge is not the same as playing out of control, but it can easily evolve into out of control. Losing control like honing a blade so that it becomes too sharp but thinned and brittle, 

Keeping an edge requires self-knowledge. People who risk the edge need to know their limits but always be pushing slightly beyond them. Edges can loom as precipices that tempt folks to fall off. On the other hand, once a person achieves an edge and masters it, the edge becomes solid ground for them. They live and act, and soon enough the edge dulls. They take it for granted and live that way too often. Pushing to the edge or sharpening skills, requires endless recalibration of skill sets and character and what one can do. It means not only being self-aware of strengths but motivated intention to push them as well as compensating for weakness.

In a critical way playing at the edge can alert athletes when they need to pull back. People use the metaphor to climb a mountain to capture the drive and ability needed to play at the edge in any area. But mountain climbing is dangerous and people fail, start-over and fall off edges. Sometimes individuals discover edges we could once transverse are blocked or no longer within our skill set. This does not mean quit, but it involves self-assessing, changing focus, developing new or undervalued skills and character to keep playing and competing.

Falling off an edge can lead us to get back up and try again but it can also warn us to change paths and proficiencies.

At the same time keeping your edge can mean always looking for an edge on your opponents. This drives innovation and work ethics. But, left unchecked by integrity and strong rule enforcement can lead persons to cheat. It may mean using PEDs or figuring out ways to live at the boundary of the rules or push them until caught. The dynamic of the edge cuts both ways and takes integrity and strong support from peers and leaders to stay on the edge and not fall off.

Being at the edge creates its problems. Keeping the edge should not be confused with being “on edge.” We’ve all been there, some of us more than most.  You know the moment when a person is so tightly wound up that they startle or jump. They tighten up under stress or anticipation. The tightening narrows perception, cuts speed and reaction and dilutes situational awareness. People on edge overreact and often react to the wrong stimulus, it makes them vulnerable to fakes and tactical misdirection as well as undercutting fluid and smooth relations with their fellow teammates. It makes it harder to listen because a person on edge internally constricts their focus and filters out important information.

Managing and leading professionals who live at the edge requires a different approach then just managing those who are good or even very good, but living within their comfort zones. Managing egos, keeping team together and just refining skills around the edges makes good sense. But this leadership style does not lead to maximum performance but it will minimize errors and that can count for a lot during long haul seasons or professional actions. Eric Wedge the present manager of the Seattle Mariners sums it up in a very existential way. “You’ve got to play every day like it’s your last.” This creates a moral and psychological edge that needs to be managed and watched.

Life and performance at the edge is critical to highest achievement and professional growth. But edges cut both ways and can erode a player and force them over the boundary if the individual and their managers do not manage the moral and psychological balance needed to live at the edge.

Growth and achievement lie at the edge of potential and challenge.

Going out on Top: Pia Sundhage & Tony La Russa

One of the hardest things in life is to know when to leave and how to leave with honor and respect. This weekend Pia Sundhage stepped down as the coach of the US Women’s Soccer team. No one forced her out. The team had just finished winning its second Olympic Gold under Sundhage. She had rebuilt the team and restocked it with young talent and a new style of play. She leaves to fulfill a life long dream coach her native Sweden’s national team and prepare for the Euro-cup. She had reached the pinnacle of success and knew it was time to move on and take up a new life challenge.

To leave at such a moment takes a rare and powerful self-knowledge and brave discipline. Her action reminded me of Tony La Russa’s decision to retire from baseball last year after a magnificent job of managing his underdog St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series victory. After three world championships and 33 years of managing, the 67 year old La Russa stated very clearly that he believed he did not have the energy and commitment to come back for another grueling season. He knew he had not only reached the zenith of his career and profession but also that staying on would be  permanent aftermath.

Leaving when on top is incredibly difficult. Every athlete and professional faces the question of when to move on. Successful people rely upon the equation of SKILL+EFFORT+JUDGMENT to succeed. Over time all of them can erode due to the stress of competition and work, the costs of aging and the ever-increasing intensity of younger competitors.

Most of us continue on because we need the money and enjoy the satisfaction that comes with mastery of expertise and the fulfillment of working with colleagues. Most of us will continue on past the peak of our achievement for all these reasons. Athletics seldom gives people that option. Few  professions are as brutal at exposing limitations as athletic competition where even slight erosions of the skill-effort-judgment matrix can lead to plummets in success. It’s hard for anyone to step down especially if our identities are linked to our professions and in athletics most players are pushed out or fade away.

But to be the best! To achieve the top honors and do so consistently puts someone at a different level of competition and stature. To climb to the top of the greasy pole and leave, that take courage. La Russa and Sundhage’s decisions much like John Elway’s famous decision to leave football after his second Super Bowl win, reflects a clear eyed and honest assessment from a position of strength. They decide not to slowly fade away or lose their edge or outstay their ability to motivate themselves or a new generation of athletes. They quite self-consciously walk away heads high and draped with honor and garlands. 

La Russa sums up the logic of both their decisions, "There isn't one (factor) that dominates (my decision). They all just come together telling you your time is over. We went through the season and I felt that this just feels like it's time to end it and I think it's going to be great for the Cardinals to refresh what's going on here. I'm looking forward to what's ahead. I'm ready to do something different.”

They both had accomplished what they set out to do and that was enough.

Now they could find new challenges.

At 52 Sundhege is much younger and now moves on to fulfill a dream to coach the Swedish national team. Four time Olympian Christie Rampone put it, “But I know she’s done everything she can here.”

  

Neither spent a lot of time explaining why, and that makes the decision all the clearer. They were not being run out of the game; they are not quitting; they were not leaving their cupboards bare. But the fit between maximizing what they could accomplish and working with a team that responded to their style and won occurs in rare windows of time. High-level coaching demands not only tactical excellence but managing complicated and talented and often fragile players and stars and daily facing the emotional black holes of insatiable fandom and media.

We have all seen athletes and coaches who got it right. They looked inside and saw that they had reached the perfect moment, the apex of their achievement and profession. They knew in their minds and hearts that not only had they won glory and achieved greatness but that if they stayed, the relentless toll of athletic endeavor and the expiration date on their bodies and skills, not matter how hard they practiced, would only lead down hill.

Michael Jordan left professional basketball after his perfect shot at the buzzer to win his sixth championship. Lance Armstrong retired after his seventh Tour de France. They both epitomized these perfect moment decisions. Larry Brown left coaching after leading his underdog Kansas Jayhawks to the NCAA title. I could go on but many athletes and coaches get it right. The problem is leaving is very hard. Leaving at the top even harder because you know you could still contribute and everyone else wants you to stay.

The sheer joy of playing and the adulation of the crowds, the intense ecstatic satisfaction of elite competition and the immense money as well as continuing fame draw them back. Many athletes or coaches figure out the negative trajectory of their talent and energy versus the rising competition and got it right. They know their own limits facing the emotional and cognitive costs to fight through the conditioning and rigors of the season. In an act of honesty they knew they did not have the commitment or stamina or skill to continue, so they stepped down. The first decision was the right one. The results of the “comebacks” are painfully predictable.

We suffer through the third act of Michael Jordan’s comeback or the third act of Magic Johnson’s comeback or the third, fourth or fifth act of Larry Brown returning to coaching. They seldom ever achieve that epitome of greatness. Instead their continuing play slides into very good to good to painful to watch. They never regain their glory and people wish they would just stop deflating their greatness. In Lance Armstrong’s case, his hubris lead him to try again and lose everything.

Sundhege and Russo leave at the perfect moment—on the moment of a great and glorious victory. Both came to the realization that it was time. Like the ancient Greeks counseled, they left at the moment of maximum glory and achievement. Such self-knowledge and self-discipline is rare. They should be honored for this.

Perfection in Sports & Life: Felix Hernandez's Perfect Game

Perfect is very rare. Perfect is very hard. Perfect beckons us as a goal, elusive but challenging. Sports engages us because it always offers the possiblity of perfect. Yesterday Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners threw a perfect game--one of 21 in the history of the sport. If you looked at the scoreboard for hits, runs, walks, errors, all you saw were zeros, another perfect figure. Congratulations to Felix and thanks for providing a reminder of why sports can hold the attention of so many people by intensifying an experience so important to us all, finding moments of perfect.

Most of us don't find perfect in our daily live. Sometimes we have perfect moments. Moments where everything works, everything comes together. Moments when we get it right. We find it anywhere--at work, at home, even walking on the street when the light, sky, buildings and sounds carve out a pefect moment. Being perfect usually lies outside our reach, tantalizing as an ideal that can inspire us and serve as a way to assess our progress and limits.

Sports, however, has stronger rules than life and clearer outcomes than daily life. In a few moments and places, sports presents the opportunity for perfection. This latent possibility lies behind the endless fascination with live sports. A gymnast at the vault, a tennis server at the toss, a quarterback in the pocket reading progressions. Each moment opens the space for a perfect unrepeatable moment.

This is why sports can be so enticing, not just winning and losing, but achieving human excellence.Yesterday Felix Hernandez threw a "perfect" game for the Seattle Mariners. He faced twenty seven batters in nine innings, the absolute mathematical minimum. Not a single batter reached first base. Although a number of perfect games have erupted in the last six years; his remains only the 21st. in the long history of baseball. Like Mark Buehrle two years age Felix gave up no hits which is much rarer.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
TB	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
SEA	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	-	1	5	0

This is a masterful accomplishment of discipline, talent, focus and teamwork. Sports opens a daily window into the possibility of perfection. We can experience human beings achieving perfect excellence in their chosen field. We can identify with the quest and celebrate the accomplishment. Many fans of other teams and opponents rooted for him and congratulated him in recognition of the beauty of the achievement. They are fans of the game, not just their team.

Baseball's unique structure also enables teams and pitchers to measure perfection in very clear statistical manner and measure it against history. No other sport really provides a definition of perfection similar to baseball's. The graded ones always struggle with the unevenness of judges and the almost impossible task of getting unbiassed judging. Although one could see things like never letting the other person score a point in tennis or volleyball or never letting the other team gain a single yard in football. In many way baseball's perfect game represents a triumph of defense over offense. The perfection lies in the utter denial of the chance to win the game by making it impossible for the other team to score. Teams have won "no hitters" but no team can win with a perfect game pitched against them. Most sports like life rely upon perfect moments rather than what we would call perfect games which goes far beyond a moment to a perfect performance over time of an incredibly complex task.

Hernandez's perfect game reminds us that human perfection remains fragile and unpredictable. In the first inning newly acquired right fields Eric Thames made superb running catch moving from light to shadow. A great catch but who knew that nine innings later it would be the cornerstone or history? Later Brendan Ryan made dazzling stop of a ball that whizzed by Kyle Seager's diving arm and made an superb throw to get the batter out. Most perfect games rely upon one or two amazing defensive stops. Although none really match the ninth inning of Mark Buerhle's perfect game when  DeWayne Wise leaped over the wall and caught a sure home run taking it from the hands of a fan. The perfect game could have been lost in an instant when Wise fell and bobbled ball, but he held on. But Thames and Ryan like Wise demonstrate how reliant sports perfect is upon other players and luck.

A perfect game overcomes imperfections and relies upon the skill and effort of everyone.

Welcome to human perfection; we have it daily in our lives and often miss it, but sport provides us with a daily chance to witness it because it has rules and ideals that enable us to see it. If it can happen in baseball, it can happen in our lives.