Sports Ethics: "Body of Work" & Responsibility for a Life

People around sports will often refer to a player or coach's body of work in comparison to a particular game, season or even  moment in their career. They point out that sometimes this is the best way to judge a person. This theme arose quite often as individuals struggled to make sense of and eulogize Joe Paterno after his death and in light of the sex abuse scandals that helped end his coaching career. This phrase has wide currency and to me makes a lot of sense.

Body of Work offers a powerful way to view a human being or institution. Looking at the body of work requires a particular moral point of view. It insists that a person or institution should be judged by the entirety of the work they have done, and the entirely makes room for both good and bad. To achieve this point of view a person must step back from the clamor of the moment and call up a person or institution’s history in all its intricacy.

This frame of reference often arises when a person is begin discussed for an award like the Hall of Fames, All American or all star teams. Sometimes it arises when people struggle for eulogies such as people trying to make sense of Coach Joe Paterno’s life given the disgrace of his last months. It invites a person to stand back and assess the history and arc of a life, not just a moment. This approach offsets the American and sports penchant for very short memories and shifting between anger and adulation on the swing of a bat or shot of a ball.

I believe assessments should always try to account for the body of work especially in these broader assessments. I think “body of work” matters because this angle of vision offers individuals the chance for redemption or to balance mistakes or sins.

Let’s face it we all make mistakes and often sin. By sin I mean committing an act we know is wrong, sometimes from lack of courage or negligence or just momentary bad judgement, but we do it. This is not one of those “it is what it is,” this means we blew it. As Tom Brady so succinctly put it at the end of the Western Division NFL championship game, “I sucked big time today.” As coach Mike Krzyewski mentioned on an interview on Joe Paterno, “we all sin.”

Body of Work also matters because it balances off the human memory’s tendency to remember the worst and forget the best. So many people get enshrined for a mistake. Think Bill Buckner in the sixth game of the world series when he booted the ball and the Red Sox went on to lose the series. Many regard this error as definitive proof of the “curse of the Bambino.” It took an entire team to lose the series, but Buckner, a solid and fine player who has gone on successful business and coaching career, is frozen in time with that one error.

I think Body of Work captures nicely the pattern of human life. Our lives have ups and down. We flourish, we fail, we get up or others help us get up. We have good years and bad years. But beneath a good life lies a tenacity to achieve and colleagues and friends who help each other along the way.

An individual can view life the same way. Seeing life as a body of work enables a person to forge a moral balance. We make mistakes or we may do the wrong thing. We know it and accept responsibility. We may pay for our mistakes in humiliation or like Michael Vick and his infamous treatment of dog betting, going to jail. But each of us can work to right the moral balance with actions to help or build up the good. People perform penance for wrong done and redeem themselves all the time. Mortal men and women strive to rectify and learn from mistakes and overcome the failures.

So body of work matters for assessing a career by others but also by myself. Italian renaissance thinkers believed that creating our own life is our greatest work of art. They believed each of us carries a responsibility to fashion moral balance and beauty in our life, even with our flaws.

We respect a life, not just a moment. Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers has struggled with addiction and alcoholism for years. Recently he relapsed. Appearing before the media, he reiterated his own faith and insisted, "I could hide in shame and not show up tonight and be withdrawn, but I didn't want to do that…I'm doing what I had to do today. I am fessing up. I am going to be a man about it, I am fessing up. People are going to call me a hypocrite, but I am a sinful man."

Granted any good spin-doctor will script such a phrase, and people like Tiger Wood or Bill Clinton live and die by the repetition of such a script. But even its abuse suggests the strength of this life narrative. The body of work offer all of us, mortals and hypocrits, the opportunity to restore a moral balance. My own religious tradition insists that we do not need to be good per se, but if we act as if we are good, we may grow into integrity.

The conflicted and tortured eulogies around the death and burial of Joe Paterno at Penn State reflect this. People wanted to acknowledge the power of his body of work but somehow ignore or downplay the moral failure around the child abuse.

I think of another approach. Joe Paterno was no saint. College coaching is not a profession for saints. He was hard nosed, demanding, ref baiting, domineering but he could touch certain type of young man and help him grow into a better human being. If we do not demand that he or anyone be a saint but a mortal flawed human capable of good and bad, integrity and error, then the remembrance becomes less torturous.

He permitted his considerable reputation and winning to benefit Penn State University. He also made a moral mistake and abetted by negligence a culture that hid a pattern of child abuse. As a Catholic he would have known well the desire to do penance and right the moral balance. But judgment balance by the body of his work.

Body of work builds on the metaphor of humans as artists, but it may be too kind. It suggests a coherence or orderliness while I think our lives possess immense chaos and randomness. We struggle to give it shape and meaning with effort, grace and a little help from our friends. We should always remember this in judging.

“Old Men Forget:” Presidents Must Tell Coaches When to Leave

Playwrights often depict tragedies where the blindness of an aging hero leads to acts of hubris that doom them. Aeschylus, the great Greek playwright, reminds everyone, “call no man happy until he is dead.”  In Shakespeare’s King Lear, “robes and furr’d gowns hide all,” tells the familiar story of how position and success can lead to hubris, bad judgment and spawn the “cankers” of the mind that destroy judgment. Old age and unaccountable power ferment a witches brew that through history has corrupted leaders in all walks of life.

The story is all too familiar in every culture—a young hero and leader triumphs. They continue their success and aggrandize power and position and come to they identify with their position. They see themselves as indispensable and refuse to step down with dignity or honor intact. College sports is not immune to this unfolding tragedy.

Woody Hayes assaulted a player on the sidelines during the 1978 Gator Bowl and then attacked his own coaches as they tried to hold him back. Lute Olsen finished out his fine career amid embarrassment, recriminations, strokes and depression. Bobby Bowden was forced out of an extraordinary career after five mediocre years amid the humiliation of having a successor forced on him and being stripped of 14 victories. We have all watched the 84 year old Joe Paterno fall from grace over alleged disinterest in the sexual abuse by an old coach and member of the Penn State family.

Ohio States’ Hayes was 65 and had been regularly reprimanded for loss of control and assaulting people during his career, but despite the warnings of his superiors continued with his behavior. Olsen was 74 at the end of a brilliant and largely untarnished career, a gentlemen coach. He had bitterly resisted efforts to provide an honorable exit for him as he lost control of his game and life. Bowden was 80 and had forged Florida State into a football power He had fought efforts to move him out tooth and nail and the Board did not side with the President just as with Paterno.

Knowing when to leave with dignity and honor intact is a rare skill that few of us arrive at on our own and often we need help from friends or more vitally from our leaders. This is where Presidents should come in.

But knowing when to leave with dignity is hard but not impossible in life and in sport. Tony Russo’s recent retirement at the age of 68 after winning the World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals illustrates how it can be done. John Wooden stepped down at the age of 65 after winning his tenth national basketball championship. Dean Smith of North Carolina stepped down at the age of 66 after a brilliant career. In football Bo Schembechler from Michigan retired at the age of 60 after two Big 10 championships and Tom Osborne retired from Nebraska at the top of his game.

To survive for twenty years at one place in the cutthroat world of college sports requires coaching brilliance and persistence. It means the coach has won time and again and probably had to resurrect himself or herself. To keep passion and interest, they fuse their identity with the consuming activity of coaching. It is excruciatingly hard to step down from what they are great at, let alone what defines them as a person. Only superb self-knowledge or a very good President can deal with this temptation.

The key denominator for all these coaches who ended in embarrassed failure lies in the unwillingness of their Presidents to remove them. In leadership theory we would talk about “mentor them out!” In cases of celebrity coaches, athletic directors stand relatively powerless, and in the case of Olsen, Bowden and Paterno the Presidents refused to act when they should have.  For just as the fool tells King Lear, the coaches need someone wiser to help them:

O, sir! You are old;

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of her confine: you should be rul’d and led

By some discretion that discerns your state

Better than you yourself. (2.4:140-144)

Why do the Presidents fail?

First and foremost, a successful and visible college football or basketball program becomes a lodestar for a university’s identity and brand. Penn State built much of its rise in enrollment and national stature around the signal power of Paterno’s program and his old school charisma. Ohio State’s rise to national prominence followed the same path. A school like Florida State staked its brand and strategy directly upon the success of the football program. From an institutional perspective university administrations and Presidents are very reluctant to remove a coach who has come to represent their university. This is also why coaches must increasingly be pure as the driven snow in their public life because they now stand for the school and its values. The endless drum beating of publicity flaks and the ESPN world augment the college coach’s prominence. As the always thoughtful Don Wetzel argues, the media tends to “goddify” such coaches to everyone’s detriment.

Second, the power base of the coach transcends the power base of the President. The Board of Trustees takes a personal interest in the success of athletic programs. Universities deploy athletics programs as a forum to lobby and wine and dine officials and contributors. This places coaches at the center of the mix of public and private power that sustains modern universities. A coach’s relation with the Board expands to enmesh with rich and heavy weight boosters and contributors. Even if a President believes that the coach should retire for reasons, the Board and boosters may paralyze him or her.

Third, coaches are human despite the publicity around them. Individuals surround and lionize coaches. Fans quasi-worship and deify them. The ESPN media machines amplify this myth making. Everyone around them, their coaches, players, staff, fund raisers and sometimes Presidents have a vested interest in not telling the coach the truth; he or she would protect their legacy by going out on top rather than playing out the denouement of tragedy and mortification.

Coaches are humans. They succumb to the myth of their indispensability just like the political and corporate leaders who cannot give up power, success and repute. No one wants to leave it all behind and  risk that horrible question, “wasn’t he once somebody?” Only the Presidents have the perspective and responsibility to deal with this and for them, “ripeness if everything.”

Paterno disgrace symbolizes the problem; the issue will arise soon at some other prominent programs. I do not blame the coaches, really. I would struggle for the self-awareness and discipline to leave in such a position. But very few who succumb to the temptations that Shakespeare and Aeschylus portrayed will leave in dignity and honor. They will bring down their institutions with them.

Just as these feel like classical tragedies, a classical virtue would have lead the Presidents to act and guard their institution and protect their coach—courage.