Sport Ethics: Let the Game Come to You

How many coaches have counseled anxious and pressing players, “let the game come to you.” It’s hard advice, even odd advice in a world of sports and professions where aggression and taking control are the preferred strategies. "Getting there first" or "controlling the tempo fly" in the face of this disciplined approach. Yet this sage advice matters profoundly for successful athletic and professional endeavor. Let the game come to you, however, takes strong virtue and character to learn the skills and insight needed to achieve it.

Notice the advice begins with the notion of a “game.” A game presumes a goal; participants know what they want to achieve and do so in a competitive environment. Usually the athletes and professionals work with a team to achieve the end result. An athlete plays imbedded in a game with goals and competition.

That competition means opponents are working to get to the goal first and win. It means that opponents will defend against the team or player. Opponents seek to impose their will or throw the team and players “off their game.” The game unfolds as a competition with plans and plays and counter plays as well as adaptations on the fly.

In competition ebb and flows occur as teams get the upper hand or open a lead. Momentum can switch. Teams can get behind or get ahead; either momentum can pose a danger or opportunity. But imbedded in the flow and texture of the game, each player has a role and has to perform. Individual competitors have strengths and limitations, and he or she will try to maximize the strength and hide or minimize the cost of limitations. Good opponents will go after their limitations and try to nullify their strengths.

This competitive dynamic sets the stage for “let the game come to you.” Inside each game opponents are seeking mismatches where their strength comes up against another's weakness. Opponents may do this by schemes or designs to get a player to commit prematurely or play a known weakness. It may be trying to get into a player’s head and get the athlete to panic or force issues exposing a weakness, an action without full focus or actions that leave holes in the team's scheme.

Good opponents are always seeking to push athletes or professionals to force actions—to take actions that have lower probability of success or play out of a player's or teams’ strength. 

When players force actions, the opponents succeed in undermining a player and team’s performance. They have maneuvered an individual into taking a lower probability high risk action.

Here is where letting the game come to you matters. It unfolds as a form of mindful patience. 

Inside the game athletes compete but also watch and scan the game to see patterns unfold. They scan for openings or possible mismatches. Successful professionals look and anticipate possibilities. They are looking to set up actions down the road, not immediately before them. The example would be a pass that leads to a pass that leads to an assist. Good players and teams wait and display patience as well as commitment. They look for timing or openings and then explode into the opening provided by the flow or rhythm of the competition or game. They seek an emerging pattern that permits their strength to explode against an exposed vulnerability.

Often a team not only runs a play, but must pick the right play that fits the moment or responds to an offense or defense or tendency of the opponents. All this depends upon situational awareness and pattern recognition over the course of a game.

At the elite level teams have scouted each other. They know each other and every player’s tendencies and probabilities and areas of weakness and strength. They know players who tend to overcommit and who react too slowly.They know who shades off on defense or loses attention over time. Often players will disguise their true intent to get teams or players to commit too early. That premature commitment, then opens up a mismatch or window of opportunity to move aggressively and erupt into the actions.

We can see this dynamic any day by watching a pitcher and batter. The batter has to wait upon the right pitch and then pounce on it. Sometimes they have to foul off balls. The pitcher plays the same game seeking to entice the batter to swing at a pitch out of their zone or commit to a disguised pitch. In football quarterbacks need to let the play unfold and count on the system to throw to the space rather than the player. In tennis or volleyball a long volley plays out until someone sees one misstep and can hit the ball right beyond the reach or to the player that forces a bad shot that can then be put away. Every interaction creates this dynamic. If players try to hard, they press and fail in execution.

Good athletes need to be patient, but not passive. Athletes need to be alert but resolute. 

When a play opens up, they strike; this can happen at any moment. This approach encourages players to both keep their emotional tenacity but also be energy efficient so they are not wasting physical or emotional energy they need to husband over the course of a game and season.

The opposite of letting the game come to you is to force it. This happens with batters swing at bad pitches. It happens when frustrated pitchers throw a pitch into a batter's zone. People get anxious and worked up. Especially when behind or when things feel static, they might “press” and push beyond their skill zones. This means they take actions where they have lower probabilities of success. Watching quarterbacks try to force passes into coverage that get intercepted demonstrates this as well as an over swing hitter or a basketball player who keeps driving to the basket when the shots or seams are not there.

Forcing it means an athlete takes an action that given their skill and the opponent, the action has a much higher probability of failure given their skill set and conditions of the competition. Every good opponent wants to incite players to force it.

Forcing actions not only lower probability of success for the player, but it can dissolve the intricate structure of team defense or offense. If one member on defense breaks coverage to shade and help another, it leaves open layers that others can exploit.

Forcing leads teammates to compensate and move from their domain and assigned roles. This offset cascades into breakdowns and openings for the opponents. In a different vein, when players free lance and force it such as forcing passes in football, soccer or basketball or breaking to score when no reasonable probability exists, these actions undermine everyone’s trust in everyone else. 

These free lancing actions subvert the system and confidence in the plays people have practiced and committed to. This lack of trust leads to overcompensation. People end up out of place and don't trust the coverage or system. They may give up in anger on the one forcing it. Teams hesitate or get angry at each other. The entire rhythm of the team can break down by a player forcing the game. It can also break the player’s skill when they over throw or over swing, or over kick. This upsets the accuracy and consistency of their execution.

Elite professionals including athletes develop the capacity to be calm and see and recognize patterns in unfolding play even when it looks chaotic.

They understand how the plan works and execute it; they invite and elicit trust from teammates who can rely upon them. They also understand that mistakes or slumps occur and that they and everyone can get anxious and overcommit and over anticipate and literally try to hard in a way. This trying too hard  destroys the rhythm and prepared consciousness they bring to expert judgment under conditions of stress and uncertainty.

Preparation—patience—perception reinforce each other in letting the game come to you Notice this is not about “waiting” for the game which is passive.

Let is a subjunctive verb with an active scanning component to it. But it becomes one of the dangers of such as approach that the "let" can sink into wait and take the edge off an aggressive player.

As is often the case, the success of this approach requires character and self-discipline. Athletes like any good professional acquires trained integrated perception and skill that can be unleashed at the proper moment. Letting the game come to you means an athlete or professional plays smart and maximizes their skill and energy to act when the options of success are highest.

In his book Eleven Rings  Phil Jackson describes one of the differences between coaching basketball superstars Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan as centering upon how Jordan would let the game come to him. Bryant would shoot and shoot and push, even when he was not on or the defense had him. This could lead  to losses as well as wins. Jordan possessed a deeper confidence in himself but in the flow of the game knowing that chances would open up for higher probability actions. Both are superb players, maybe the finest of their generation, but one never lead to collapsed teams, the other did.

Letting the game come to you, like the capacity to let go, and carry on, depend upon a refined and trained virtue and skill that good athletes and good professionals live by.

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.

NCAA Enforcement & Dilemmas of Self-Regulation

The recent mistakes the NCAA made in its Miami investigation called forth a predictable firestorm from the media mavens who make a career out of attacking the NCAA. I think it is overblown and think we should examine the Miami case in a wider context of the issues facing any self-governing professional association. This means we can admit the mistakes but also see why they occur, how they can be corrected. This approach does not require NCAA conspiracy or corruption. The report that NCAA commissioned from an outside law firm does a good job assessing the legal and institutional issues. The report reveals the NCAA as a reasonably competent, harried and generally effective self-governing group.

The wedding of sports and universities occurred as a philosophical plan and historical accident. 19^th century universities saw athletics as a natural extension of a classical education. Student athletes ran the early college teams. Very quickly teams took on outsize importance for alumni and school identity. By the 1870s teams were hiring ringers and nonstudents to play. Football ended up such a violent and important sport that when 13 athletes died in one year, President Roosevelt threatened national intervention. Colleges resorted to the classic American solution of a self-governing association to oversee sports. The NCAA grew slowly and awkwardly into a membership association with 1066 members trying to control the unwieldy and volatile world they inherited, spend money on, benefit from and barely control.

Self-regulating membership associations like the NCAA establish jurisdictional control over standards, membership and accreditation. Engineering, social work, medicine, law, construction and thousands of American enterprises depend upon professionals setting standards for membership and enforcing their existence.

The irony is that the media seldom worries about when doctors kill patients or or engineers design flawed buildings. The stakes in these self-governing professions are far higher than sports but largely ignored. These associations have elaborate systems of self-governance to ensure competent performance and reasonable competition. Professional associations police their own and have investigative and adjudicative procedures for sanctions.

American self-governing professionalism developed as a counterpoint to government control. Education remains no different with colleges subject to review by certifying professional organizations. When professional regulation fails, decisions may end up in the courts or before legislatures.

My point is the NCAA successes and failures are not unusual and reflect normal American practice with voluntary associations setting and enforcing standards.

Successful self-regulation requires member organizations internalize regulated standards. Most professional institutions will have inside compliance staff to help avoid pitfalls and keep standards. In major cases, the organizations might call in outside counsel or compliance experts.

The NCAA reflects this practice where local college compliance staffs work daily with central NCAA enforcement staff. As a professional association NCAA members have strong “affirmative obligations” to internally police and self-report violations.

 The reality of NCAA compliance, then, occurs in hundreds of weekly interactions between colleges and the NCAA staff. College compliance staff self-report, discuss and negotiate over thousands of major and minor issues to prevent, anticipate or creatively solve rules’ challenges. This quotidian reality of compliance and consultation works reasonable well.

The NCAA makes its fair of mistakes. I have direct experience of how UW and NCAA lost a major case against Rick Neuheisel when the NCAA forgot to follow new protocols. They are not perfect, but not fundamentally different from most self-regulating associations hampered by lack of subpoena power and facing incentives to hide information.

The report by Cadwalader Taft report on the NCAA performance in the Miami case exposes a reasonably competent and committed professionals. The report highlights the tensions between field investigation and internal legal accountability. The mistakes reflect the strain between the push to get the information and the legal constraints upon any investigation.

The NCAA faces the same problem all nongovernmental self-regulating groups face—not having subpoena power. Its members legislate rules, and members accept an affirmative obligation to report violations and cooperate with investigations. The vast majority of schools honor this obligation. Affirmative obligation and mutual trust are fundamental to self-governing professional associations such as the NCAA.

However, people lie.

Let me repeat, people lie, withhold information and misdirect.

People with high career stakes have incentives to lie. Miami coaches lied, mislead or withheld. Ohio State lied. North Carolina lied. Florida State lied. Michigan mislead. USC withheld and mislead. Head coaches claim convenient ignorance of the activities of their assistant coaches. New NCAA laws impose absolute accountability on head coaches so they could not slough off responsibility on assistants while benefitting from cheating.

The Miami report reveals that the NCAA investigators often piggy-back on other investigations to maximize capacity to get information. The NCAA investigators have limited budgets and need standard bureaucratic approval. Doubling up extends budgets and helps the NCAA get information they cannot find for lack of subpoena power.

All professional associations double up with formal investigations if they can. The Miami report explained that the NCAA had strong internal limitations upon how it can acquire information. Investigators are prohibited from sting operations or lying to elicit testimony. These are court-sanctioned activities but report makes clear that the NCAA takes limits seriously.

The NCAA internal process worked to a point. The investigator Mr. Ameen Najeer found third parties would not talk with him and hit upon what he regarded as an ingenious solution. He could double up on depositions taken by Mr. Shapiro’s defense lawyer over bankruptcy.

Mr. Najeer reported the idea to his superiors. They discussed it with the Executive Vice President Jim Isch to get authorization for budgets. The need for budgetary approval flows through the report emphasizing the NCAA like everyone else has resource limits and accountability issues. The compliance leaders also sought legal clearance.

This request for a legal opinion should reinforce confidence in the internal process and integrity. The head lawyer mentioned two basic issues. First, the use of outside counsel required approval and reporting to legal office. Second, the legal counsel argued that Najeer’s approach violated internal rules. Counsel opinion nixed the approach. The investigator’s superiors supported this and refused the request.

Up to this point the organization functioned on point. Najeer, however, developed a “work around,” but did not inform his superiors nor get budget authorization. This meant that Perez did conduct depositions for bankruptcy that she shared with the Najeer. This information helped shaped the NCAA bill of charges.

The report correctly faults the internal leadership for not following up on the investigator’s actions and not monitoring more tightly. When the NCAA discovered what Najeer had done, it eliminated the “tainted” information, notified Miami and revised the charges.

The report illuminates how hard investigations are without subpoena and when people with affirmative obligations choose to lie and withhold. We should not forget, that Miami President Shalala’s protestations aside, Miami has created a failed athletic culture with three major implosions in 15 years. The report makes clear how vital confidentiality remains during an investigation.

Good self-regulation requires internal legitimacy, affirmative obligations to cooperate, a responsible rule making process, and strong compliance and consulting programs. These need to be reinforced by a system of investigation and adjudication that is both professional, legally accountable and adjudicators that possess peer legitimacy and expertise but also have some claim to impartiality and fairness.

I think the NCAA process is basically intact and responsible especially in its daily work. It’s major investigations reveal the need for a more professionalized and accountable investigative arm. Moreover, the NCAA faces serious issues with excessive rule making as well as issues of how to ensure consistency across decisions made by the compliance committees. This is not conspiracy or corruption, it is the reality of self-regulation.

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.