Will Athletes Finally Reject Code of Silence?

Major League Baseball’s suspension of 12 players for using performance enhancing drugs reminds us again that a Code of Silence among athletes protect and abets illegal and unfair drug usage. Players in clubhouses generally knew who cheats; but everyone keeps silent.

 Fellow athletes know that using performance-enhancing drugs is illegal; they know users put the rest of them at a disadvantage in competition; they know using stops other younger players from playing; they know these enhanced players denigrate the game’s integrity. They know it is wrong, but they remain silent. Their silence undermines integrity as they collaborate in the cheating and scandals.

 

Until this Code of Silence dies, this cheating and unfair advantage will continue.

Let’s be honest. In the search for advantage in a brutal and competitive landscape, some players will cheat. This happens in any profession in a competitive world with real stakes. Every profession, sports included, has to self-regulate to limit the cheating and advantages that accrue to the cheaters.

The two ways to discourage cheating involve:

1)   Change the risk/reward calculation of the person tempted to cheat. The equation balances the probability of getting caught and the projected severity of the punishment against the gain in production, salary and longevity. 

2)   Change the culture of support or silence among teammates and fellow professional. If this culture is a “no snitch culture, athletes will not report and tolerate the use of performance enhancing technologies. When fellow professionals do not speak up, this makes hiding it easier and tilts the risk/reward calculus towards using.

Any sport seeking to discourage performance-enhancing technologies must have a rigorous, comprehensive and up to date testing system. To be accepted it requires due process to protect athlete rights, and serious and consistent penalties that players will accept as fair. This is a hard and requires evolving techniques to deal with the stealth and technologies of the cheaters. Strong programs need the support of professionals, in this case, athletes, to ensure wide compliance, a culture that supports it and avoids litigation.

This is where so many sports failed. The hostility between athletes and owners or regulating bodies generates a we versus them approach. Teammates band together against the “other.” This we/they intensifies the natural dynamic of any team to band together to support each other. The protective bonding grows from athletes’ desire to protect each other’s private life from the prying and reckless inquiries of the media.

This hostility is deepened in union policy and a history of owners who have colluded against players in baseball. The hostility of unions to strong drug testing programs reflected this distrust and the players’ legitimate fear that owners would misuse the testing to target them. Only in the last seven years have unions and management comes together to agree on stronger protocols, confidentiality protections and appeal processes. Both sides recognized that the credibility of the game itself had come under attack. But the Code remained intact and almost all the discovery of cheaters occurred with testing or investigations, none involved peers reporting users.

Leaving aside the travesty of modern cycling and the bankruptcy of sprints with its Ben Johnson’s and Marian Jones, no major sport has been so afflicted by performance-enhancing technologies as baseball. An entire era and all the accomplishments of that time are contaminated by wide use. This usage was common knowledge among other players, but everyone remained silent and collaborated in the era’s dishonesty; everyone but the reviled Jose Conseco. As Curt Schilling pointed out his accusations turned out to be accurate.

This Code of Silence can nullify strong testing programs. The testing programs need players to reject the Code. The Code of Silence among professionals reflects shared values and keeping each other’s back. It reflects everyone’s awareness that no one is pure and that the media will tear careers apart on the slightest excuse. It may even reflect an awareness that players feel they are benefitting from having the cheaters on their team at the moment or the fear that at some point in the future a player might want to use PEDs to augment their own declining career.

In many ways, however, modern professional sports do not have teams in the traditional sense. Teams turnover occurs every three to four years. Players are regularly cut, traded or sent to the minor leagues. During the course of a year, a baseball team can have a thirty percent turn over. The Code of Silence has its most power on teams, but has been embraced by the entire profession as players move so often now. This extension to the entire league makes even less moral sense because once you are on another team, the player you know who cheats will hurt you by his enhanced performance.

This Code possesses great moral weight as a “no snitch” rule among players. However, it strikes poses serious moral threats to the game itself and to players’ own integrity and career chances. Use of performance-enhancing technologies violates the integrity of the game, violates the integrity of the players who remain silent and collaborate in its use. The Code permits use and this hurts the silent players by shielding athletes who as opponents will have a decided advantage over honest players who do not use.

The Code’s power is impressive because players hurt their self-interest and violate their own commitment to the game’s integrity by remaining silence. The no snitch rule, us against them, and having each other’s back all push athletes to remain silent or “live and let live.” The problem here is that this is not live and let live.

Letting live means letting users prey on other players, including you. It harms all honest players. It also harms the future of the league because scouts cannot accurately assess talent if minor leaguers are using performance enhancers.

Silence and protecting performance enhancing users denies younger players a chance to get into games. It also keeps younger players who deserve a chance in the minors when enhanced athletes stay in the major leagues by virtue of enhanced performance. Silence indulges users. This behavior is wrong and hurts people. It is not live and let live.

Finally enhanced athletes as teammates and friends because they must lie all the time. PED users lie to fans and carve out performance records that are lies. But they also lie to themselves. We know from psychology that anyone who tells him or she a narrative long enough can come to believe it to be true. Self-deceivers lose their identity and live a lie given how much time they spend lying to themselves. Marion Jones, Ben Johnson, Alex Rodriquez, Mark MacGwire all could probably pass lie detector test because they had convinced themselves of the truth of their charade.

I hope that the cracks in the code are widening with the last round of exposures. The deceit of Ryan Braun is especially important. Braun is a widely liked and marketed star. He had publically apologized and swore to fans, teammates and owners that he was not enhancing his performance. He swore to athletes who regarded themselves as his friend and protector like Aaron Rodgers the quarterback of the Packers who claimed he would bet one year of his salary on Braun being clean.

Players, coaches and owners feel betrayed at a very personal level by Braun’s actions. The lies of 12 other players compounds and ripples across the major leagues. The deceit required poisons team cohesion and friendships. It also taints the achievement of every honest star that might fight the perception he or she is using.

If the Code is broken it can occur in three ways:

1. Some players will whistle blow quietly but effectively. One of the issues that has hurt all investigations is the militant silence of the players towards other players on these issues. This needs to end.
2. Players need to shun and shame the abusers and enhancers. This will take effort in the locker rooms and in union meetings and in discussions. Peer pressure can discourage would be users and at least ensure that past users can’t just pretend it never happened and return to normal. Peer pressure and force can be as powerful as occasional whistle blowing.
3. The most powerful change in player attitude can play out with strong union support for permitting contracts to be broken and renegotiated with abusers. The union could also negotiate two strike rules against athletes who get caught a second time; this avoids the false positive issues. Both these approaches will take real constraints upon the owners who players fear will use drug issues to abort bad or foolish long-term contracts. But a change in player attitudes can play out with changed and harsher penalties in the contracts.      

Up to this point fellow athletes have sacrificed their own integrity and their own career prospects by abiding by a Code of Silence to protect cheaters and enhancers. This silence helps keep young players on the bench and in the minor. It disadvantages every player who must play against the performance enhancers. It makes the game a joke to those who love it and play it. It is time for players to reject the code and whistle blow, ostracize the users and push to change the penalties.

Being an Athlete not a Jock

College sports seasons loom on the horizon. Talk radio hosts count down days to football; no one talks about the seven other fall college sports which is sad but predictable. I think it is a good moment to remember why athletes can be considered students and why student athletes often struggle to grow into the role as a student athlete and move beyond their socially anointed role as jocks. I think one of the keys lies in the need to shift identity from being  jock to becoming a real athlete. 

Tim Manson is a trainer who helps mentor college student athletes. He speaks about the journey many  young athletes must traverse to make sense of their entry into the world of college sports and being a student athlete from the world of high school and elite club teams where being a jock displaces being an athlete.

"We talk about how you can either be a jock or an athlete. When a jock loses something like that, they've lost their identity They put all their hopes in the football bucket, and then when it's gone, they look in the mirror and don't know who they're looking at. An athlete, when he loses something, it doesn't define who he is. An athlete makes adjustments. An athlete overcomes."

These comments capture a fundamental challenge for college athletes but especially in football and basketball. Young football and basketball  along with others have clawed their way out to succeed in football or basketball. Many believe they will be pros.


These young student athletes have invested everything in their identity as "jocks." Their parents and followers and fans and recruiting gurus do the same. Everything of value in their life and their future hinges upon being a successful jock. Yet to grow up and succeed in life, these young men and women have to grow into a different identity beyond that bestowed by being successful at sports at the high school and club level. Their real futures lie elsewhere.

Jock is a social role that becomes a way of being in life. The word speaks for itself, an old English slang for male genitals. As a role, being a jock defines how you should relate to yourself and the world.


Jocks swagger and succeed by physical prowess. They disdain study and disdain most culture because to be a jock is to be worshipped for the success gained by sheer physical achievement in all its most infantile manifestations. Jocks don't need life, they have sport.

The world young successful jocks. Jocks get girls; jocks get scholarships; jocks get passed through grades; jocks get under the table rewards in high school. Over time the young men internalize this role. Almost anything of value in their life and all their self esteem grows from being a jock. So the young men internalize the worst caricature of themselves as physical specimens who can win, drink, get laid all due to their status as jocks. Most jocks disdain study and grades because these activities dominate other subcultures like nerds and beside, being a jock will get them to college if they wish.

Take away the jock, and the person collapses. 


Jock-hood defines a social role, when the role is gone, everything disappears. People who peak at 18 from physical success have no future; they have no friends; they have no reality.All their relations are mediated by their athletic status, take that away and the relationships melt away. Like the pixillated hero of Bruce Spingsteen's Glory Days, all they have are memories, they could have been contenders.

Athletes are different. Athletes are not jocks. 

This picture of a discus and a javelin thrower captures what it means to be an athlete. Athlete derives from the Greek  ideal of contest. Athletes are human beings who master skills through struggle, effort and thought. Discus and javelin are born of war skills as were most original Olympic sports. Both required intense practice to master a complex form and technology.


The beauty of line in the picture and Greek art emphasizes athletic endeavor as not just physical activity, but rather actions imbued with form, discipline and practice. In the Greek and Olympic tradition athletes combine qualities of spirit and character--self-discipline, intense focus, reflective practice with characteristics of the mind. They intellectually mastered the form of the activity. The practice of an athlete manifested the beauty of the form.

Successful athletes embody character and form in achievement. An athlete masters the form through knowledge, practice and self correction. The form emerges in the crucible of competition where individuals watch other athletes compete.Loss can teach as much as victory, sometimes even more because losing demands an emotional and intellectual challenge to get better.


This is why athletes are not jocks.


The social role of being a jock internalized by young competitors confers social status and rewards but limits whom they can become. As a role its worth depends upon external perks and validation, winning, praise, adoring fans and groupies. A jock embodies a wrong headed masculinity based upon sheer brute strength. Being a jock as a social status grants privileges and excuses failures. All it depends upon is visibility in sport carried over into social dominance in other domains.

Good athletes study their craft and game. Good athletes need to be learners, one of the very activities reject by jocks. 


Success grows from learned mastery or patterns and skills and integrating them into team play and surprise and uncertainty of competition.  This is really the challenge of college athletics (not sports) to help the young men who enter as jocks to grow into being athletes.

Sports Ethics: Being Replaceable

“Everyone is replaceable.” This fundamental truth underlies modern organizational life. When we leave, another will do our job, differently, but our job will get done. If I get sick and cannot teach my class, another professor will take my place. If my doctor cannot show up for a surgery, another will perform it. Someone on an assembly line gets fired or sick and another trained and competent person will step in. Modern life cannot afford indispensible people.

A sport engraves this truth for all. A player goes down in a game and another one trots onto the field and takes his or her place. Someone is having a bad game and the coach yanks them and a substitute takes his or her place Some times the replacement does worse, sometimes better, often they perform competently; they fill in. Sometimes they excel and replace you having done their apprenticeship and take advantage of the opportunity.

The other day one of our local “sports radio” gurus opined, “closers are like half backs now. They are simply replaceable, you can find them anywhere.” He described everyone on every sports field. Obviously superstars exist and gradations of excellence exist among athletes and in life. But the function can and must have backups and even superstars can be replaced when they are injured or fade.

Athletic competition highlights the replace ability that shadows all our professional lives. For me the modern baseball statistics such as VORP—value over replacement player—or WAR—wins above replacement--isolate this truth with singular clarity. The world of sabermetrics has constructed a model—the replacement value player. This model predicts the performance in vital offensive and presently measurable defensive skills. They can do this for the average team but also for the average position player especially pitchers.

The key to the statistic lies in the fact that aside from remarkably outliers whose skill sets are quanta above everyone else, most players hover around this statistical portrait, this mean of player. Even when they have “good years” they regress to this mean over their career.

Being average is not a death sentence, in fact it can guarantee a long career across a number of teams. It means you are the player included in blockbuster add-ons or one that involves two obscure names or a second level prospect for you. Consistent sports average performance locks in a strong predictive reliability that varies little for as long as a decade. It defines the reliable expert performance of a seasoned professional.

Remember to be average among the elite athletes of the world places the “average” player light years above the skill sets of all the other professionals who aspire but fail to succeed at the elite levels. Average defines superb technical skill and endurance.

In baseball a team of average players will win 82 games, not enough to win a championship, but not a disaster. Every team needs reliable average players or better yet a cluster or players who hover 2 or 3 runs or 1 or 2 wins above average to complement their superstars.

This statistical model reduces players like all of us in a capitalist system to profiles of productivity. It makes them and us faceless for the most part. Faces and personalities generally belong to the superstars or people having their day in the sun being on their peak performance years.

It also means that any player who falls below the average model loses both economic value and probably their career fairly fast. The economics of player compensation combined with the pipeline that rigorously culls players and forges high skill potential replacements mean that players who slip below the VORP line in any sport can soon be replaced by younger, lower cost and higher upside players.

Knowing you can be replaced haunts everyone one of us who derive self-worth from work. Athletics just makes it visible and clear to all of us what our real fate is.

It also reminds us that athletes must pull their own weight. They must be able to contribute. The harsh beauty of sport exposes people so brutally. It puts a spotlight on not contributing. Average may be barely good enough for a while, but the economics of younger players reaching average make it a career ender after awhile.

The insights of VORP and WAR are now spreading to all sports. Most general managers now understand the role of replacement value and the fungible nature of most players. They can now think far more intricately about trades and drafting since a collection of +2 and +3 players can lead to contenders without anyone noticing. You see the same mind set in modern American football’s attitude towards once revered running backs, nonguaranteed salaries and NBA’s nameless array of “role players”who  surround the stars.

Being replaceable not only reminds us of the cost of average, but the powerful aggregate worth of cumulative above average high performance. Success for most teams and organizations resides not in the superstars but in the depth of above average consistent performers who together produce reliable winning teams.