Sports Ethics: Lying & Deception in Athletic Competition

Juke  Feint   Misdirect   Fake     Disguise  Sneak   

We know all these words and expect them from good athletes. Everyone depends upon deception and lying in sports. How do we square this with the centrality of sportsmanship to defending the worth of athletics? And somehow by teaching deception and lying as a normal part of the game are we undermining the ethics of both players and fans?

Everyone defends sportsmanship. Ethically it is  fundamental to the moral worth of sports. We speak of how athletics teaches loyalty, self-discipline, sacrifice, overcoming odds and working with others to achieve excellence. At the core all these attributes depend upon integrity and the ability to make and keep commitments to oneself and to others. This argument lies at the center of aligning sports with schooling and making it a widespread adjunct to parenting in our society.

Yet at the center of  athletic competition lies practiced strategy of deception. Every competitive sport where athletes play against each other has built in imperatives to deceive the other side. The speed and power of modern elite athletics requires successful athletes to anticipate and act, not just react. If you react to a serve in tennis or volleyball or a feint in basketball or soccer you are too late. So the dynamic of success requires a trained ability to predict an opponent's response to a perceived action. If a player or team can feign or fake that action to get the opponent to commit and then act in a different way, they use deception and misdirection to achieve their goals. Athletic competitive success requires a mastery of deception.

Because success depends upon anticipation, much of sport relies upon disguising actions so that the other side anticipates incorrectly. If I want to succeed in an action, I need to convince my opponent that I am not going to do what they think I am. I try to disguise, deceive or intentionally lie about what I plan to do. If the opponent takes the bait of my fake, then they move out of position. They are not prepared for the action I actually take and  and are caught lunging for a volley or kick. They are out of position on a run or suddenly face a mismatch between one defender and offense player. We spend hours teaching athletes how to fake and feint and create mismatches. We teach athletes to project false intent in their interactions.

Elite athletes watch immense amounts of tape to understand their own tendencies, learn their weaknesses and practice to suppress them. Unless an athlete literally is one of the greatest, they cannot afford to have the other side anticipate and predict what they will be doing. Every athlete facing an opponent tries to avoid predictability and throw the opponent off track of what the athlete may do. The better an opponent can anticipate my action, the lower the probability of my succeeding.

Athletes also  watch tape to anticipate their opponent's best moves. Athletes watching tape seek out the quirks, tells, and ticks that give away an opponent's next move. If you are one move, one split second, one half step ahead, you can win. 

Both sides know they study each other and both sides prepare to deceive the other and project a lie for their actions. Deception and anticipation enable teams with superior game knowledge to overcome superior talent.

We worship sportsmanship but teach deception? We honor effort but play to win?

The only way to make sense of this is to remember sport competition involves a GAME. Games have closed rules. The rules define what constitutes winning and losing. They encompass the range of actions and skills needed to perform well. Athletes must master the physical, cognitive and emotional skills needed to excel within the games rule bound universe of behavior.

To excel good athletes must master pattern recognition of all the players around them. They learn to read other player's signals; they learn to control their own signals and read opponents. The skills of pattern recognition unfold during competition. Deception and feints occur within this world of recognition and competition and rules. The misdirection occurs within the bounded relation of competition. Misdirection, misreading, sneaks and feints, intentionally projected lies, become part of the game. Good athletes even learn to read the signs of feints and you get feints within feints within disguise.

The rule bound world of athletic competition thrives upon deception and anticipation. Any good negotiator or litigator or politician will practice the same strategies within the rules of their own professional practices. This is good competition and strong development of an athlete's cognitive and emotional capacities. But the real boundary world for deception in sports is CHEATING.

Athletes and coaches cheat when they consciously violate the rules of the game and try to disguise it. You see it in coaching when a coach moves beyond mastering the art of deceiving with feints, fakes and misdirection. Instead coaches or team cultures teach athletes to violate rules and get away with it. It falls apart when athletes use PEDs and hide and lie about it. It falls apart when coaches and athletes intentionally violate rules to win.  It falls apart when coaches teach and reward  athletes to intentionally injure opponents.

One is good athletic competition, the other is degradation of the person and sport.

Athletics and Self Discovery

“Who Am I?”

This classic question haunts modern western individuals. I think many persons find athletics offers a moral and psychological field of endeavor that helps an individual discover and create self-understanding. I recently went to the graduation ceremony for our student athletes and listened to them talk about the tough journey they travelled as athletes but also as individuals trying to grow beyond a primary identity as an athlete into a richer sense of themselves and their future possibilities.

The paradox of athletics is that it rewards youth and most of the greatest accomplishments occur in your teens and early twenties. The vast majority of even professional athletic careers end by age 25. I often wonder about how being an athlete can contribute to that growth of strong individuals and not become a trap that defines a person too early, gains their greatest successes at a young age and leaves the rest of their life as an ex-athlete like those characters in early Bruce Springsteen songs.

In a  class a student of mine, a student named Mindy Reger, wrote a very suggestive essay on how playing sports at any level can engage a person in a way that challenges them to discover whom they are and express their selfhood. This insight makes a lot of sense to me when we remember that most of us do not discover who we are in our heads but in our actions.

Have you ever had the experience where you surprised yourself when you acted? Maybe you disappointed yourself? Maybe you thought, “I didn’t know I could do that!” “I didn’t know I was capable of that!” Indeed, this need not always be a good self-revelation about how we really act under stress or in face of daily challenges. We can be surprised by good or bad, appalled or proud of ourselves, but we face the reality of how we acted. Actions reveal and create our selfhood.

Being an athlete involves a fundamental human feature—goal seeking. All humans seek goals and achieving a goal requires certain character attributes and skills be mastered. So the self-discovery of being an athlete can transfer to many dimensions of life.

Athletes first discover their capacity for tenacity or will power. It takes hard work, time and focus to master athletic skills. Talent guarantees little beyond an affinity for the skills required by the game and will carry an athlete only up to a certain level of struggle. Players filter out and find different levels of competition. In every area work, commitment and practice can compensate and even overcome lack of raw talent.

Self-discovery matches self-creation. Any goal seeker and athletes experience failure. Learning to hit topspin, do a reverse lay up, dribble with your off-foot take endless efforts and thousands of misses and mistakes. At this critical point a person must decide, “Will I keep practicing?” “Will I ask for help/” Even when discouraged or after they have loudly sworn to themselves and anyone who will listen “I will never play this stupid game again,” an individual can decide two days later to take on the challenge, make more mistakes, experience failure and then practice again and again.

This practice, character and skill expression plays out when a player learns to “earn” their success. Like in any area of life, athletes can take the easy quick way or the long hard way to mastery. Athletes learn this about themselves, and more than a few choose the easy way, get so far, and fail. At that point a person can quit or learn to commit to the long hard way, very much like real people mastering a life. They discover or decide if they can endure amid challenges, failures and at some point others competing with and against them.  Succeeding in athletic goals demands hard work, focus and learning.

Being a competitive athlete, not an elite athlete, but just one who hangs in there and plays and competes effectively with others, calls for self confidence and the ability to stick up for yourself. Being shy won’t work; being tentative won’t work; being a fearful won’t work. Stepping onto the field or pool or court braces a person even when they are terrified of failure or success. But on that ground, a person learns to act as if he or she is confident because they and their teammates depend upon standing a teammate standing up for themselves and for the team.

Our actions reveal ourselves to ourselves. We prove ourselves to ourselves, not just to others.

Finally a person expresses and creates a self in the arena of athletic endeavor when they reveal to themselves whether they will cheat or not. Every athlete seeks to master a goal, and most of the time this means winning. Sports depends upon complex rules, and sportsmanship means competing within the rules. Yet everyone who wants to win will be tempted to cheat, to take the easy way. Not only will they be tempted to take shortcuts in practice and training, but a person who happens to be an athlete will discover if they have the courage and discipline not to cheat, to play fair, not to descend to the level of those who do cheat.

I am not seeking to idealize athletics or athletes, but I think Mindy correctly identified a moral possibility for persons who compete as athletes. No guarantees, but persons can learn about and help create their selfhood in sports. That is not a bad thing.

The NCAA Vacating Victories Makes Moral Sense

“Well I know who really won.” “They can pretend to take away victories, but they can’t take my memories.” “This is stupid, the NCAA is trying to rewrite history. We know who won the game.” Once again pundits and newscasters willfully misunderstand the NCAA’s increasing use of “vacating” wins and titles from teams that cheat to win.

The last point is critical to remember. Strong moral reasons exist to “vacate” wins and titles as ill begotten gains. We need to remember this because more games and titles will be vacated this year.. At this moment both football teams in the national championship are facing scrutiny for just such ill begotten gains issues. The NCAA basketball champion also is under scrutiny.

So why vacate game at all?

The penalty responds to the fundamental fact—the “winners” cheated. They fraudulently fielded teams that by the rules of the game were illegal. So I don’t care who won; they won ill begotten gains. Good legal and moral principles lead to the conclusion that they should not be entitled to the glory, recognition or prizes associated with games won through deceit and illegality.

Vacating games or titles is a very clear and tight moral response to immoral and illegal activity. Notice it does not “forfeit” games. The NCAA does not award victories to teams that did not earn them. And it does not humiliate duplicitous teams by imposing a loss after many of the players competed with passion and good will to win. In addition, the decisions are timely compared to most glacial NCAA consequences; the punishment is immediate and clear.

The NCAA does not rewrite history, but it annotates history by pointing out the games “won” and titles “won” are not recognized by the authorizing and sponsoring bodies because the team cheated. So the name exists with an asterisk or a vacant space exists on the listings. The annotation reminds people that the victories were gained through dishonor. The “victors” are disgraced, and they should be.

The moral defense of vacating victories flows from two different moral sources. First, quality players like Marcus Camby at Massachusetts or Derrick Rose at Memphis should not have been allowed to play. They cheated and broke the rules to get to that place. (John Calipari of course knew nothing of this). Similarly Reggie Bush violated rules, and his coaches negligently denied and ignored this.Terrelle Pryor and other starters violated rules. Their coach knew but lied and withheld evidence to cover it up. 

These Massachusetts, Memphis, USC and Ohio State teams lied and misrepresented themselves. They claimed to abide by rules and authorized their players as legal and eligible, certified. So the players and the institutions collaborate in mutually beneficial denial and sometimes cover ups to field teams that are corrupted by the chain of illegal actions and complicity. The ineligible players compete, and the coaches, administration and other players are complicit or negligent as they deny or ignore the irregularities compounding the deceit. The team is immoral and illegal as constituted.

The second moral issue arises from fairness. Not only is the one team tainted despite its high caliber as one built upon deceit and illegal actions, but the other teams actually abided by the rules. The other teams are at a fundamental disadvantage because they played fair, and the cheating team did not. Vacating victories reasserts the priority of fairness in competition.

In other words, the team that “won” did not deserve to win. They cheated and defrauded others and had unfair advantages. Now Massachusetts may have won a championship without Marcus Camby and Ohio State may have won 11 games, the Big 10 title and the Sugar Bowl without Terrelle Pryor, but we do not know. The point is that they played and tainted the “victory.” The rest of the team may have played their hearts out and won fair and square on the field of play, but the talent and depth surrounding them had been acquired or sustained by violating rules and had an unfair advantage before they stepped onto the field of play.

I think the decision to vacate needs to be followed by requirements to pay back money from bowls or championships or at least to face major fines the compound and create strong financial as well as moral incentives to comply.

This approach can result in seeming punishment of the innocent. An angry letter of an Georgia Tech player dared the NCAA to pry his championship ring from “my cold, dead  of finger,” after the NCAA vacated 3 games and the ACC championship for  Georgia Tech for playing two ineligible players.” These punishments are not perfect, but the coaches who ignore, deny or abet the violations were negligent and often the other players know and do not disclose the issues. No one knows what the outcome would have been if the illegal players had not played, but the existing outcome does not have moral or legal standing.

Vacating does not deny the game or the effort and worth of the play. But vacating victories stands as a good and defensible moral response to illegal and immoral actions that created tainted victories.

Why Steroids Suck

Steroid users lie and cheat. They lie by claiming to others that they do not use steroids. They cheat by claiming to competitors that they are competing on the same ground rules.  They cheat by the unequal playing field effect. Their actions degrade the sport into an activity no longer connected to being human but to being augmented humans.

The deepest moral problem with using performance enhancing drugs extends the lying to stealing and betraying. Human sport as a practice grows from the drive to achieve excellence. In every society we know of the perfection and display of physical excellence in war and play exists. Play teaches humans to refine physical and mental skills through joyful repetitive actions. Play grows into sport and athletes develop what Aristotle would call virtue. They integrate mind, body and will to practice and through thoughtful repetition become better and more skilled at their fields.

The worth of athletics, the reason to admire it as a human endeavor lies in appreciating human possibility, human achievement. Real athletics is not scripted, it is not entertainment but carries a thrill and challenge of watching individuals and teams push themselves and others to excel and win. Athletics depends upon the attribute of its humanness and the uncertainties of being mortal.

This drive to develop our capacities and skills through games explains why we play and enjoy sports. We connect to the drive for distinction and the expansion of human potential in the best athletes. Beneath it all lies the sheer joy at play and skill cultivated from practice.

Performance enhancing drugs have three moral problems in how they impact competition. The first, we might call the equal playing field problem. This means that using them gives a player a special advantage over everyone else. Secretly using them gives you an immoral competitive advantage because everyone else is playing by regular rules. Part of the issue is fairness, but the deeper issue is that the player is living a lie. He or she is pretending that they are playing by the same rules. They pretend to practice, condition, work just like that other players and they win because their work ethics and refined skill surpasses other players. They live a lie, even worse, they deny and lie about it as did the three baseball players and Marion Jones and the whole crop of cyclists who perpetuate the frauds on the cycle tours.

The second moral problems is one I've often talked about, the Achilles Choice problem. Once the fair and straight players discover others are cheating and not only not getting caught, but getting rewarded, they start to use them. The prisoner's dilemma, if I don't cheat, I won't win or stay on the team, pushes many players to use them who normally would not. They do so because of fear of losing and outrage over the cheaters winning. This corruption seeps down into high schools and club ball where young athletes emulate the stars and come to believe they can only win by using drugs, drugs that will undermine their minds and bodies in the long run.

Third, it degrades the sport into a charade. Athletic competition no longer drives outcomes, chemical cheating does. Baseball, cycling, or football reduce to World Wrestling steroidal enhanced entertainment rather than real human sports. This rush to performance enhancers leads to human loss and cost. As we continue to discover from the awful fate of East German and Russian swimmers and track and field athletes, long term damage is done to the body and even to the children of athletes who use the drugs. Short terms damage distorts the mind and judgment.

I have mentioned the tendency in humans to cheat in order to win and excel. This is not unusual, it exists as a temptation and reality in all domains of life. It is why the role of referees is so vital. What matters with athletes and steroids is that the athletes deny the premise of acting on the basis of their body and effort. They augment their body and betray themselves, the sport and their achievements.

The issue comes up often in battles over technologies whether new softball bats, swimming suits, tennis rackets or golf balls change performance of similar athletes by virtue of the technology alone. Most of these are solved by equalizing the technology used across competitors so that the game remains a human contest. To the extent technology affects it, it does so equally. The circus that passes for the American cup racing now has no relation to sports but has become a mere technological arms race.

Some suggest just letting everyone use performance enhancing drugs and pretend it is still a human sport. But this misses the point that it not only means the quality of the human beings changes chemically, and  the sport moves to technology and arms races much like what happened with the East Germans who created an entire pharmaceutical industry to support their Olympic achievements.

Steroid using athletes steal false gain. Just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods, athletes steal  performance enhancers to make themselves more than human. This disqualifies them as honest human athletes.

The most common steroids and human growth enhancers have two related impacts. First, they help generate human protein and muscle faster from the same amount of effort. They permit this through enhancing the efficiency of protein production and utilization but also promoting recover time. You can get bulked up monsters like Barry Bonds or smooth toned muscles like Alex Rodriquez depending upon the sophistication of the applications. Second, the steroids enable faster recovery time from effort. This helps with conditioning, but more important and the reason so many aging or borderline pitchers use them is that they enable a much faster recovery time. So age impact can be staved off, and work loads can go up with less cost.

The key here is that an individual human could achieve a certain degree of excellence upon the basis of his or her own work, talent, skill. They can push to their boundaries by their work ethics, which really separates those of roughly equal talent form each other.

But a Mark McGwire on steroids is not longer an honest human competitor; he is an augmented human. His muscles build faster, larger and stronger. He recovers quicker than a non-using human being because of his  drug use. Given the same effort and same talent, he will succeed more than an equal by virtue of his chemical use, no other reason. This makes it unfair and inhuman.

Steroids and human growth enhancers can help people recover from illness or  hold off debilitations of aging and chronic illness. These protect against conditions and illness, but steroid using athletes use drugs to enhance their performance beyond what their own body and efforts would achieve.

Steroids users betray their humanity. They betray themselves. The early Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriquez were great athletes as human athletes;  the later ones sacrificed their integrity. None of them was the same physical being after they used steroids. In fact none of them was the same psychological being given what we know about the impact upon judgment and emotions. They literally are not longer the person they were before they ingest the drug.

These athletes steal from science to become more than themselves. They betray themselves. Finally they betray the game by pretending that they achieve  by honest means. They lie to everyone and claim records, victories and championships based on the false premises that their human bodies achieved them, not their scientifically altered bodies and minds. This is the moral failure of  performance enhancers.