Sports Ethics: No Excuses

“No excuses,” how many times have players heard this from coaches? How many times have good coaches stated this to the media or fans when accepting responsibility for a failure. These two simply words reflect a profound acceptance of responsibility for actions and a commitment to get better that reflect core of professional growth.

We all prefer excuses—“not my fault;” “Mr. Nobody did it;” “the sun was in my eye;” “the ref botched it;” “my partner missed the signal.” I could go on because the ways to duck responsibility stretch endless and tempting. Having an excuse avoids the pain and demands of responsibility. Having an excuse avoids being singled and taking the blame for an action’s consequences. No excuses is the flip side of the buck stops here.

The concept of excuse is old and important. It arose legally to exonerate and justify pardon for actions. A person offers excuses to explain that he or she had reasons to guide their action. The bad consequences of the action really flowed from good reasons and reasonable responses, so they were not guilty of malfeasance.

An excuse is not an apology. An apology accepts responsibility for an action and consequences and seeks forgiveness for acting and the consequences that follow. Apologies accept responsibility as moral core of the action.

Excuses really mean to escape from “cause” of an action—excuses nullify responsibility for actions. Excuses carry huge import in legal and moral assessment of blame. Determining negligence makes them even more important in moral life because if a person has prepared and done due diligence and makes an honest mistake or faces impacts beyond their control, they offer an excuse to avoid charges of negligence.

Excusing oneself possesses serious moral weight. It offers an explanation for why it was reasonable for me to fail and reasonable to make a mistake. It deflects responsibility from my decision making to external influences or deflects it to others. Sometimes we may even have good reasons for our mistaken actions as in “excuse me” when we sneeze or inadvertently insult someone.

No Excuses takes a different tack towards oneself and responsibility for actions. Essentially it refuses to let oneself or team off the hook of responsibility. Maybe one mistake or bad call or luck influenced a game or decision. No excuses, however, means players and coaches look at the entire context of the game, not just one actions. They do not use excuses to release them from seeing their failure and from working to find the causes and working to correct them.

Rejecting excuses puts the onus on players to embrace responsibility. No excuses for oneself or team pushes players to want to take action when under stress. It creates a mindset that motivates players to practice and learn from mistakes. Players, coaches and professionals prepare by practicing scenarios and anticipating future actions.

In professional and sport life publically stating “no excuses” extends responsibility to go back and learn from what happened. It requires a post mortem and sometimes scenario testing to get better. This may mean going back and relearning basics or changing patterns of recognition. Often it involves mental work where individuals and teams refocus intensity or learn how to handle the buffeting of luck and bad calls and maintain their focus despite the slings and arrows of fortune.

Mistakes, losses, blowups all tend to linger in the back of one's mind. People can nag and diffuse focus and intention. Worse, they struggle to rationalize away what happened and are tempted to blame anyone or anything but themselves. No excuses as a team culture does not eliminate this self recrimination, but buffers against it and drives players to the future, not the past. To responsibility to grow and learn, not blame and gnaw on oneself or teammates. 

I believe no excuses makes sense as a public position for players and coaches and one worth internalizing for high performing teams. I think, however, that in private relations among professionals excuses matter profoundly and need to be acknowledged. For instance, players often play with injuries or at limited strength. This debilitation constitutes a reasonable excuse by any moral standards, and coaches and fellow teammates need to understand this. People have “brain farts” as they say. Sometimes luck intervenes or bad calls happen. Sometimes despite preparation the other team is more talented and focused and the team struggles to make a game of it.

Coaches, players and professionals need to acknowledge and integrate these assessments of themselves and teammates in assessing blame and praise. Inside the team, people need room for support, mercy and pain. A player who plays through pain and injury may deserve as much praise as excuse.

No excuses not only isolates responsibility and obligations to learn, but it generates another imperative. Once admitting “I contributed,” no excuses helps players and teams move on. 

This approach demands honest recognition of what happened and people’s contributions to it. But it insists that once this has been done, people have to let go and move on. As Nick Saban likes to preach, “last race doesn’t matter.”

High achievement and learning requires being full present to the moment and open to seeing the patterns and needs of a moment. To learn requires total presence and focus on technique and situational awareness. Players cannot afford to have the past nagging and shadowing their action. Acknowledge, learn, let go.

Players, teams and coaches have to “let go” of the past to be present to the future. Offering and accepting no excuses lets this happen.

Is Sports Just Entertainment?

Super Bowl mania descends on us, and the endless stories about the bowl clog sports and mainstream media outlets. I am always struck this time of year by how much of the coverage casually refers to the game as “entertainment.” A quick Google search culls over 934,000,000 references linking the two. It comes out in a different but telling way when athletes talk about themselves. Some athletes use to deflate the obsessive American hero worship that plagues by saying “I’m just an entertainer.” They don’t say, “I’m just an athlete”—being an athlete matters too much to them. They don’t say “It’s just a game”—the game really does matter. By refocusing on entertainment, the athlete like many commentators who dismiss things as “just” or “mere” entertainment downplay its worth by hinting it does not really matter too much.

I think this is a mistake. 

To entertain can involve activity worthy of respect and attention. Many domains of human excellence and achievement have their own inner logic and beauty and deserve respect, but they also entertain. This entertainment can bring joy and appreciation to us. The link between sports and entertainment matters.

James Carville famously remarked “Americans view politics and sports as entertainment.” I for one have no problem with being entertained by an activity. We use the word entertain to cover a huge range of experiences such as reading literature, attending concerts, conversing with a friend, playing or watching a game. Being entertained can involve appreciating an activity and its form, and beauty and structure. It can involve pleasure, but far more such as delight or being transported or learning.

Being entertained can arise from serious endeavor and being entertained does not reduce to pleasure. One can be entertained by tragedy or serious conversation or plays or endeavors like a political campaign. People can experience pain and sorrow as well as exhilaration or delight from entertainment.

The deep roots of the word entertain derive from two areas. The Indo-European root “ten” means “hold” or “grab.” These meanings continue through the French tenir to English. “Enter” suggests gathering together and inviting one inside to be together. The root of entertain points to people gathering together where they find their attention held by the actions or people or object they engage.

Being entertained does not just mean to be amused or charmed or even pleased. Entertainment does not require pleasure or happy endings. Art can entertain. People can entertain. Spectacle can entertain. Competition can entertain. But none guarantee that we made happy by it.

Being entertained means that we are grabbed; our attention is focused and we attend to what is before us. We can see, hear and experience in a visceral way. Good entertainment pulls us into the emotional, cognitive and perceptual possibilities of an experience. A book a play, a symphony, a class, a game, a conversation can entertain us.

All these experiences require is human attention and openness to experience. Entertainment can be a trifle for our amusement, but it can elicit profound emotions such as a symphony, rock song or a play, novel or inspiring lecture. All entertain but they capture our attention and interest at different levels. This engages us, and the level of engagement opens the possibility of learning or changing from the experience. At the least, entertainment can divert us and permit us to appreciate an experience, but it offers more. Entertainment can influence or change us. The key becomes the level of engagement from us that it captures from us.

I think that sports can be entertaining in all these ways because it can arrest out attention, engagement and influence our emotions. It can provide delight, sorrow, ecstasy, sadness or even boredom. It can call forth intellectual and emotional interest, study and attention. Almost any aspect of life can do this for people interested in a domain. The mimetic arts like dance, theater, and music evoke this reality with extreme clarity and power. Sports live in that same family.

What makes the entertainment of sports so compelling is that sports competition is open ended—we do not know and cannot predict the outcome. This means that every sport competition possesses an edge of uncertainty and risk—it is why I cannot watch when my team is trying to make a free throw with one second left or a field goal kicker is kicking a game winner with two seconds left.

The sheer uncertainty can compel attention and heighten interest and passionate engagement. I do not want to deny the capacity of scripted and predictable outcomes to entertain and educate us. Rereading a book, re-listening to a record or re-watching a movie can provide endless satisfaction and appreciation as well as being a Rorschach test of who we are at different times. But the possibility of the unexpected and the new adds luster and interest to entertainment. Sports possesses a reality and real time component that scripted life and works can never provide.

Art introduces competition all the time. Ancient Greece from which we inherit both our art and our sport connected them both with beauty— they conducted competitions for plays, dance and sculpture. They played war games from which western sports developed. Today we regularly stage juried art shows and competitions in all areas of art and production. Products and artists boast of winning awards at shows. These competitions with winners and losers supplement the competitive market place where over time products but also artists discover if people will spend money and time to appreciate, use and be entertained by their creations.

Sports can carry this uncertainty and competition to logical extremes, but we experience it in many areas of life. Every time a symphony or drama is performed, the script interacts with the unique interpretive power of the performers. In classical music credenzas permitted and encouraged improvisation and virtuosity among performers. In jazz the basic themes and structures open up to improvisation that defines the art. Live performance even of scripted art entertains in a unique and powerful way with the edge of risk and creativity that accompanies each new performance even of well-known classics.

Entertainment is quite consistent with powerful purpose and commitment. We see this in drama and performance art and in live human performances such as courts or war or politics or market competition. We can see it when painters or dancers or composers push established boundaries and rules to create new forms or reinvigorate old forms. None of these has guaranteed outcomes and all can entertain and engage by virtue of the uncertainty and risk and unpredictability of the competition.

Sport games synchronize a powerful narrative in a controlled way. Human life is rife with ambiguity and unknown outcomes. We constantly embark on risk ventures at work and at home. Competitive athletics both regulates and intensifies this driven contrast through games with rules that determine winners and losers within limited space and time. Winners and losers are clear and celebrated. But then the next game, the next competition, the next season begins again, just like life. Coach Nick Saban won his third national championship in four years in football and put it well, “I will have one day to enjoy this, then it begins again.”

John Rocker, one of the true knucklehead of recent baseball history, offers a different take. Defending the use of steroids in baseball he suggested that baseball and all sport really are just entertainment. "When people are paying their $80 to $120 whatever it may be to buy their ticket and come watch that game, it;s almost like the circus is in town."..."They wanna see some clown throw a fastball 101 mph and some other guy hit is 500 feet. That's entertainment."  It may be, but it is not athletics, just look at the World Wrestling Federation.

We can be entertained by sports in so many ways just as we can by art, people, politics, markets and the rest. I want to insist that being viewed as just entertainment does not denigrate sport just as it does not denigrate movies or drama or dance.

The ancient Greeks understood that each human practice involves skill and a unique form of beauty. Competition in sport or playwriting or inventing can breed excellence in achievement. It can push masters beyond themselves and motivate young artists and athletes and entrepreneurs to innovate, adapt and produce greater accomplishments. The Greeks also insisted that each practice possessed a unique dynamic and virtues and beauty that can earn our appreciation and respect.

Sports entertain us; just don't call it just entertainment.

Sports Ethics: Mistakes Were Made

I was startled last week listening to a coach interview when the coach uttered words no coach or leader should ever say, “mistakes were made." I cannot think of a worse statement by anyone in authority. The phrase is designed to hide responsibility for an action and make it even harder to isolate and rectify the problems. Mistakes were made is one of the worst ethical assessments a leader can make.

I don’t know who invented the passive voice in English but you could not ask for a better way to get people off the hook. The key to passive voice is that the object—a mistake becomes the subject, and the verb moves to past passive construction. Notice the key-missing ingredient—no subject exists, the actor, the doer disappears. Mistakes were made is a favorite locution of corporate and political leaders on the spot.

Bureaucracies love the passive voice. The passive voice hides responsibility and authorship. Any institution that creates products that emerge from committees moves to the passive voice that provides wide plausible deniability for everyone associated with the process. The organization can then hide responsibility or better yet disseminate it over so many people as to make it meaningless. This in turn permits people to go about doing crazy or failed or horrible things with relatively clear consciences. It also means no one has an incentive to learn or get better because no one internalizes responsibility for the outcome and no one is held responsible for the outcome. Accepting responsibility impels learning and growth.

The ethics of the phrase begins with its construction where no one accepts responsibility for the actions done. The speaker does not accept responsibility nor does the speaker accuse anyone else of making the mistakes. The phrase represents a completely neutered moral claim—I am not responsible and I am not claiming anyone else is responsible. It is hard to imagine a more worthless phrase except to escape responsibility or to exonerate oneself.

Beyond the responsibility denying construction, the word mistakes compounds the ethical elusiveness of the claim. Traditionally when we make mistakes, even when we accept responsibility, we basically state that we did not intend to do this badly or do this harm.

A mistake is a mitigated ethical category where one admits harm was done or failure to achieve a good. A person can admit responsibility for it—although not in this construction—but the person denies that he or she intended to harm or not achieve the goal. A mistake is not done on purpose.

This is not the place to discuss in detail, but mistakes can sometimes occur because of negligence. More often, however, people make mistakes because they misread or misdiagnose a situation. A person may see the situation unfolding but miss a critical point and diagnose it wrongly. Or a person might simple respond a little too quickly too slowly after the diagnosis. Sometimes people just go blank, the mind paralyzes and no obvious pattern or meaning occurs to them. They react rather than initiate action. I could go with the myriad ways we as well intentioned people may make mistakes such as when facing surprise they were not trained for. People might react to planned deception and not see through it. All of these actions do not involve intended harm or collapse of a plan.

The language matters deeply here because patterns of language create patterns of expectations and norms. Coaches, players, and leaders who rely on the passive voice teach the wrong lesson about not accepting and claiming responsibility for actions. Claiming responsibility involves the motivation to get better and learn from mistakes.

I can understand a coach, player or leader trying to avoid calling out a colleague in a public setting. The coach I heard may know damn well who made the mistake. Often coaches know more because as spectators we only see the person who looks like he or she made the mistake, The expert, however, knows that the perceived “goat” is actually merely the player left in the lurch when others failed to follow through on a scheme or misread a pattern. The person who appears to make a mistake in fact represents the end game of a cascade of mistakes from the whole team.

So mistakes were made might be used to protect a team/player in public, but it would be much easier to use a collective “we” made mistakes or “our team” made mistakes. Leaders emphasize and isolate the collective endeavor and remind everyone, coaches included, that the team’s decisions and actions made this possible.

When my kids were growing up we had a song we loved to sing called “Mr. Nobody.” The key refrain was that whenever something bad happened and a parent would ask, “who did this?” The answer, “Mr. Nobody  did it.

Mistakes were made suggests a habit of thought that veers from accepting, isolating and speaking in private and public about common accountability and responsibility.

Speech habits can shape expectations and shape our very thoughts. If we speak one way enough, then we actually start to think that way. Worse, if we hold responsibility, then those for whom we set expectations start to internalize them

Good leaders, good coaches, good players avoid the passive voice; they do not hide, deny or duck responsibility. Even if they have not yet figured out who is responsible or what went wrong, they know it went wrong. A good leader ensures people accetp responsibly and work to make sure everyone learns from their mistakes.