Sports Ethics: Winning Ugly

A win is a win. This is a fundamental maxim of competitive sport. But a second level of discussion always occurs around how a team wins. Teams can win well; games can be well fought and competitive; teams can give up; games can be one sided, you get the picture. Games won by cheating carry a particular moral stigma and if discovered are discounted; but I have always been fascinated one kind of win—winning ugly. This weekend I witnessed several ugly wins and got a sense of what it means.

The UW football team managed to beat the California football team but not for lack of trying to lose. UW “won ugly” by the assessment of its coaches, players and fans. I recall one sequence where four turnovers occurred in eleven plays and another play where four simultaneous penalties cancelled each other out. The team won but it was an ugly win.

Now ugly is one of those interesting words with a cavernous etymology. It emerges from references to the frightening and horrible and fearful in life. Later versions add a moral meaning of profoundly morally offensive and wrong. By the 15^th. Century it had taken on its reference to appearance as something “frightful or horrible” in appearance which set such events apart from the normal run of things that appear unpleasant or unattractive. To be ugly means something really has to be frightful or horrible.

These links bring an ugly win back to its roots in dread and fright. An ugly win despoils the line and form and smooth technique of a sport that provide the aesthetic and performance core. This violation of the internal logic of the sport is reinforced by the external appearance that lacks the smooth crisp precision and power of watching a well-played game.

Remember despite all this the team wins. This accounts for the interesting nature of the word. The team wins but players leave relieved and worn out rather than exhilarated. Many are disgusted or angry at their play, but they still won. This is the type of game coaches breath a sigh of release and at best say, “we can learn a lot from this game.”

Winning ugly means that the quality of play was low by the standards of the sport. The team may “win” but it did not demonstrate fine skill or excellent form. To be blunt, they played badly. Their technical execution was sloppy and not crisp. This lack of execution permeates their fine individual skills as well as messy coordination on schemes and play. I have talked about this moment for an individual when I discussed what it means to have to “grind it out” when a player does not possess his or her best stuff. People have to step up even when they do not have their best skills at hand.

The counterpoint here is when we know a player or team is at the top of their game. We can see the smooth flow and crisp execution and admire and enjoy the sheer virtuosity and skill unfolding before us on the field. Coaches, players and fans have an idea in the back of their mind of what great or perfect form looks like. Sometimes one team will hits their stride or at rare times both teams will be competing at their highest emotional, physical and intellectual level. Those games we remember for their sheer force and beauty.

I believe ugly play moves beyond the failure of execution and the inability of players to discover and deploy excellent form in their assignments. As my example from the Washington game suggests, ugly wins are also riven with mistakes. Teams and players are literally beating themselves in ugly wins.

Ugly wins are larded with an excessive number of penalties, fouls, turnovers, and saturated with errors of the mental and physical varieties. These errors and penalties further disrupt the flow and smooth performance of the game. They take away accomplishments like runs or points scored or give the other team advantages like a penalty kick or an extra man on the field or free throws or loss of a down. The point is that a team starts to beat itself by cumulative errors. The self inflicted errors like off sides in football or steps in basketball or double faults in tennis add up, each one undercutting smooth execution, giving the other side an unearned advantage and denying the team a chance to gain an advantage.

These add up to a form of sloppiness that can be contagious. It can play out as frustration that leads players to try too hard which in turns undermines smooth flowing execution. Errors and mistakes generate anger or frustration with each other, and players can turn on themselves rather than focus upon the other team. The internal cooperative schema can be thrown off, and this lack of synchronicity leads plays to start to not trust each other which in turn leads to more sloppiness as players try to do too much or jump too quickly or mistake hurrying for quickness.

Yet amid this disorganization and mistakes and failures, a team can pull it together just enough to win, and they came to win. Winning when you are playing ugly draws upon its own particular strength and trust that grinding it out also requires. Jim McLaughlin the coach of UW VB team had a similar straggling match this weekend that his team pulled out despite its errors and lack of cohesion. As he put it, “sometimes you've got to just kick, bite, and do whatever you have to do to find a way to win, and we did. Utah played well and we faced some adversity and didn't back down, so that's the good part."

Ugly games possess neither beauty of form nor execution. People labor and stumble and willfully grind out their assignments. Nothing comes easy or flows. It is not pleasant to watch the sport of such a game. Fans and players alike are just glad to get off the field with a win. Their relief comes from an exhaustion that can only come battling incessant mistakes, crumpled confidence and fixing them on the fly. Ugly wins are born usually of desperation and drawing deep. The team hangs on to win, but it does win.

Retiring Calhoun Represented College Hypocrisy on Sports

One down and a bunch more to go.

Jim Calhoun the championship winning coach of the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball team retired this week. Calhoun won three national NCAA championships, and coached and recruited with a passionate intensity to win at all costs. He collected as many violations and probabtions as championships, but he and his school did not care. He embodied the coach whose sole purpose in life remained to win, period. He was not worried about character, grades, education, but about winning championships, and he succeeded and his University rewarded him for it.  I'm glad he's gone.

The predictable econiums are coming his way from the paid literati of sports media—he always made good stories, valiantly fought cancer and defied the NCAA. The media made him into a sort of a bandit folk hero rather like Gerry Tarkenian at Nevada Los Vegas. This is misplaced praise and respect. He’s a schmuck. I will not miss him and neither should anyone else.

Calhoun epitomized a long and ignorable tradition of college basketball coaches who won and won big, but could care less if his players got an education. He treated NCAA rules as signposts to be ignored when convenient. He ranks up there with Bob Huggins of Cincinnati and West Virginia with his mockery of the academic and student side of being a student-athlete. I would put him with John Calipari of Kentucky, but John Calipari lives in a different moral universe entirely where students, grades and academics not only don’t matter they don’t exist.

Calhoun is interesting from another aspect. Despite his resolute inattention to academics and graduation, the various UConn Presidents supported him. Why? Because like Joe Paterno at Penn State, Calhoun helped put UCONN on the map. No one knew about the university until it became a basketball power. The school, like Penn State, hitched its reputation and recognition to its athletic program. Like Penn State it has been willing to look the other way and put up with penalties and undue booster influence to win championships and market itself. Who knew about UConn before Calhoun? So the University defended its coach even as he made a mockery of its educational mission. 

I won’t go into Calhoun’s record, nor his championships. His strength was playing to his talent. Players loved playing for him although he could be cruel, demanding, irascible and relentless. After all no one had to go to class, no one worried about grades or about money and the players won. Two dozen went on to three and eight year careers at the professional level. His teams played with relentless intensity and players reached their maximum athletic potential under him. He knew how to draw out the best athletic performance from the talent he recruited. For this he deserves recognition.

But from the perspective of the NCAA and someone who believes in student athletes as both an ideal and a possible reality, Calhoun represented the worst, except for Calipari, that college basketball could offer. His kids did not go to class and when they did, they did not perform.

Calhoun was not a big character guy; he was a winning guy. Most of the really good coaches try to impart character and life development through the skills and focus needed to succeed on the court. Calhoun, to his credit, never claimed to care about character or about teaching kids to live well. This fit with his utter lack of concern about them actually getting an education. The kids cooperated in this because at the talent level he recruited many expected to and would play professional ball.

We will leave aside the fact that the average professional career is three to five years and 70 percent leave the pros bankrupt. The great advantage of the American system over the European system lies in the fact that college can leave its student athletes with a life and career and skills after sport abandons them.

A team has to work hard to have a low APR, which is a surrogate measure for staying in school and graduating. But the APR provides a pass for players who become professional athletes early. This means we are looking at a very small number of basketball players at Connecticut under Calhoun. The only other master who approached this was Huggins in his days at Cincinnati where he burned through players and left them by the way side without a degree or an education.

Calhoun and Connecticut have unique honor of being one of the first schools for being denied entrance to the NCAA tournament for failure to graduate students at the 50 percent rate demanded by the APR. You have to understand that this rate excludes students who leave early to become professionals—they are given a pass. So this means that the students who do not go professional do not graduate and do not get the educational advantages or tools that the colleges promised the kids but especially the parents and guardians.

I am not a Pollyanna. Most college basketball and football players are not particularly excited about going to class and learning. They believe in, and often their entourage is invested in, the dream of going professional. But most fail and even when they achieve it, they end up at age 25 without sports or an education. So good coaches and committed schools use the motivation of play, or practice time and invest in tutoring and guidance to help those reluctant students learn to learn and grow into students by their junior or senior year. We have abundant data that this can and does occur with a very high level of frequency; it also happens far more now than before the reforms of the last six years.

Calhoun was not a good college coach. He won, but he was not a good college coach from any perspective linked to education. He leaves his team on probation and banned from tournaments. If the rules had been in place earlier, they would not have gone to a tournament for years.

But let’s be honest. Calhoun, Huggins and Calipari could not exist if the colleges pledged to the idea of student athletes did not let them. The colleges not only let them get away with not attending to education, but pay them huge salaries, name buildings after them. The Presidents of Connecticut and Kentucky praise their coaches as educators. As a teacher I can rail all I want and as a teacher I can respect the coaches who do take education seriously, get their students to class, made education and character aspects of coaching—but modern college Presidents are notoriously willing to hire and lionize coaches who do nothing but win. Calhoun is a representative of the worst moral hypocrisy of the system. I won’t miss him, but there are plenty more like him.

"Shutting Down" Stephen Strasburg is Ethically Right

Why are sports commentators and players so upset over Stephen Strasburg? The Washington Nationals long ago decided to limit the total innings of their prized pitcher Steven Strasburg. Strasburg, who is one year out from a Tommy John surgery, will end his first year of pitching after180 pitches. Now he has ended it even earlier after a three inning stint where the psychological costs of being the center of a firestorm finally got to his concentration.

Even locked in a pennant race, the Nationals’ GM Mike Rizzo decided to protect Strasbug’s healing and avoid arm fatigue that has derailed the career of many fine pitchers. The decision has unleashed a firestorm of criticism for “shutting down” Strasburg. The criticisms come from an old school mythical view of sports and ignores the science and economics of what the Nationals are doing. We should be proud of a team that is putting a player’s welfare before winning at all costs. In a world where coaches risk the health of players to eek out a win, we should celebrate the courage of this action, it is the right thing to do.

Baseball pitching is one of the most notoriously inhuman actions performed in sports. 50 percent of major league starters will end up on the long term disabled list in the normal course of their career. We have ample empirical evidence of the costs of over pitching. We know managers like Billy Martin who road pitchers to championships only to have them ruined for the rest of their careers.  Jason Stark who has been the most reasonable commentator on Strasburg from the beginning has it pretty much right on the pros and cons of the decision to limit pitches one year out from surgery.

The Nationals consulted with a large number of medical personnel and have gotten almost universal respect from the medical and training community for their brave decision. The medical community has been trying to introduce a much stronger emphasis upon pitch count and sophisticated accounting for years, and the Nationals’ decision represents the high water mark of this attempt. This becomes increasingly important given the unique inhuman nature of pitching and the size and strength of modern pitchers who easily average 94-98 miles per hour.

The decision resonates with me because managers, coaches and general managers have traditionally been willing to risk careers of individuals to win championships. Too many incidents exist of players pushed by peer pressure, coaches or collaborating trainers and doctors to play when they should not. I’ve talked to doctors who ultimately left professional service because of the pressures they felt upon their medical judgment. Yet Rizzo very flatly stated, “We want to do what’s best for Stephen in the long run.”

In a world where athletes are treated as disposable commodities deployed to win at all costs, we should celebrate this decision, not vilify it.

I want to emphasize the players want to take this risk too. Most of the pressure to play through pain and risk comes from the internal drive of players to compete as well as the powerful almost ecstatic feeling of dominating performance when you are on. Players also feel strong obligations not to let fellow teammates down. When Manteo Mitchell finished running the first leg of the Olympic 800 meter hurdles on a broken leg, he knew the leg broke but kept running. As he put it, “You don’t want to let anyone down.”

The senior leadership of the Nationals is trying to set aside this type of pressure and romanticizing of pain. They have two strong justifications:

1.     1)          The team wants to protect the pitcher’s health. They already know that he can be injured and oversaw a model rehab. The decision flows from the desire to protect his long-term ability and lower the risk of career ending injury. The team has no certainty but has done its best to think about the dangers and stresses to a young strong power pitcher in his first year of recovery from ulnar collateral damage.


2.    2)             Economically the Nationals have made one of the major investments in the history of pitching in signing Strasburg (Thank you Scott Boros). The team has built carefully for the long run as witnessed by how they carefully husbanded another injured star pitcher Jordan Zimmerman as well as picking up veteran catcher Kurt Suzuki to work with them. The Nationals have every reason to want their economic investment to pay long-term dividends.

Strasburg is not 37 like Chris Carpenter for St. Louis last year. Carpenter went on a roll and and gladly risked what remained of his career to win a World Series. Nor is he Orel Hershiser in 1988 having one of the great seasons of modern baseball who showed no signs of stress or strain on the way to a World Series win and in the middle of 5 250 inning years. At 32 he blew out his arm and never had the same career. Strasberg is 23 and already severely injured. The Nationals do not have certainty but they know the heightened risk and have examples like the almost great career of Kerry Wood.

Ethics has a principle called the precautionary principle where individuals and institutions should prefer the outcome that generally avoids the maximum amount of damage. As the probabilities of the damage rises, the imperative of the principle rises. Yes the  Nationals are acting on probabilities. The have amassed and studied good information supported by an emerging science among doctors about how to protect and nurture the arms of modern power pitchers. They might be overly cautious but they are not wrong; they are much more humane, thoughtful and statistically sensitive. They are acting on the precautionary principle.  This is how teams should think of athletes, not as interchangeable parts.

Left to his own Strasberg would make the Achilles Choice I often write about. He is upset and angry about this decision. He would risk his long-term success to win all the glory of the World Series. We do not know he would win, but he would risk it. The Nationals will be competing for years, but this year looks special and he would do it. So would the Greek Chorus of fans and commentators and self styled old school players attacking the Nationals.

The attacks on Mike  Rizzo and the Nationals are many and varied but they all reduce to one narrative—athletes play to win. Athletes risk physical injury and that is their job. So let him take the risk and gain the glory.

Behind the critique lies the facile and wrong claim by the smaller, weaker, and slower ex-veterans that somehow this “shut down” (versus pitch control) indicts the coddled and pampered modern athletes compared to the tough guys of old. You see the same resentful logic among football veterans who attack efforts to minimize head trauma in football. To them, this decision defiles virtues of courage and overcoming adversity that gives sports narratives so much appeal in the USA.

These images evoke a bloodied Rams’ linebacker Jack Youngblood playing the Super Bowl on a broken leg. It conjures Kerri Strug with a torn ankle vaulting the US to Olympic gold in 1996. Strasburg’s “shut down” shatters this tale of courage and triumph.

I mean Strasburg is not even injured yet!!! They are taking him out before he is injured, and that makes no sense to the narrative of sport, to fans desperate for a victory or to players invested in their own self-image of warriors and gladiators.

The reality is different. Those unique heroic moments can occur because physiologically and psychologically athletes and humans can muster immense physical resources and surmount pain for short periods. High stakes, huge stress and strong loyalty amplify this power. We see acts of superhuman bravery and physicality during accidents, disasters and exceptional moments.

Most athletes and humans, however, do not achieve through pain. Their performance degrades, and the longer they stay in the worse they become and their teammates suffer for it. Injury and hurt degrades performance, and serious injuries can destroy careers in a nanosecond. Unless masked by painkillers or adrenaline, pain undermines performance quickly and radically. The realities in the broken lives and foreshortened careers-pitchers who lose their speed and delivery and end as journeyman because they were mismanaged and overused during their early careers.

The Nationals know the reality; they see through the myths we collectively embrace which are confirmed just often enough to reinforce its influence.

The average fan gets the moral and practical side of the decision to shut down Strasburg. They approved the decision by a 4-1 majority. They understand the fairness and risk with far more clarity about the issue than the commentators and ex-jocks. They know how teams usually exploit and toss off players to win.

The Nationals are right; this is ethical progress, not failure.