Sports Ethics: Why Athletes say "Good Luck"

"Good luck."

I was counting down the carnage of both college and professional football seasons. I lost count at over 120 people lost for the season. UW lost six starters within weeks. The NFL is so riven with injuries that the league mandates weekly reports on injuries. The baseball  season winds down the the grind of 162 games more and more players lands on the disabled list through sheer attrition regression. This endless array of injury and harm reminds us why athletes wish each other good luck.

These few words are central to the morality of sports competition. Athletes exchange these words with competitors and fellow teammates. The common phrase expresses a core relation in competition among athletes. To wish someone luck recognizes them as fellow competitors in a difficult intense endeavor where good athletes prepare in every way possible. That preparation displays their commitment and focus and enables their talent to be pushed to its greatest potential. The words also reveal that the competitors seek to win on the basis of skill and competition, not on the basis of injury and harm to other competitors. Athletic competition is not war nor based upon hatred, but rather a respect, sometimes grudging, that exists across individuals who may not like each other but understand and recognize commitment and excellence in performance.

Preparation, effort and focus matter and prepare athletes for the highest competition against their opponents. But every athlete knows luck enters into the equation.

Many kinds of luck affect them, especially situational luck such as a bad or good bounce or slippery surface or bad call. The "luck of the game" pervades sports and life. Most athletes accept this and understand the arbitrary and conniving nature of such luck.

I want to address a very particular type of luck that involves  staying healthy in competition. Any commentator projecting a career prefaces it with "if he can stay healthy" as the fundamental condition of having any success.  Every athlete knows that their career can be taken from them in a nanosecond. One misstep, one cut, one crash, one accidental block--the causes of athletic injury are endless. But athletic morality relies upon the fact that such injuries are not intentional; they occur from bad luck or as side effects of both athletes intentionally seeking to execute their roles, but not intentionally seeking to maim or end the career of the other athlete. The former involves luck, the latter criminal mayhem.


At its core, good luck extends wishes that a fellow athlete not suffer sudden injury that harms  and ruins their ability to play. A twisted ankle on a cut, a knee giving out, a concussion from a trip, fall or slam, a blown ACL on a cut or sliding tackle. A hundred different ways, all unforeseen, many not yet envisioned, can ruin an athlete's day, year or career. This wish of good luck reaffirms that an athlete would rather win "fair and square" against the best the opponent has to offer rather than win because the other athlete was injured. The injury brings a win and no athlete will reject the win; but the winning athlete knows that it was not a true and complete test because they did not face the best the opponent could offer. Good luck offers a wish for health but also for the ultimate competition, not a wounded one.

The Roman goddess Fortuna carried a cornucopia from which she poured out her largess, but she wore blindfolds so the gifts are distributed with no connection to moral desert. Good as well as bad flowed from her, and behind her the wheel of fortune turned inexorably demonstrating how capricious fortune's "gifts" could be. Athletes know this better than most people.They know despite their intense physical preparation, it can all be taken away in a nanosecond. This awareness lies on the back of their minds, and they do not wish it for themselves or even upon a fellow competitor.

This reflects the athletic code, when it works, that sees opponents as just that, opponents and fellow competitors, not as enemies. An enemy crosses a moral boundary. Facing an enemy is a different moral endeavor than facing a competitor, so acknowledging their mutual vulnerability both respects fellow athletes and respects fortuna who haunts them all. Athletes play hard against each other. In contact sports they play hard, hit hard and everyone hurts. But trying to deliberately injure another athlete and take away their capacity to play, to take away their dream and skill on purpose violates the core of an moral athletic code.

Because athletic excellence depends on the body, athletic achievement remains under considerable control because individuals can devote immense trained effort to build and support their body. But the body remains vulnerable and fragile in so many ways. Repetition, striking, contact, intense pressure from the force of arms, legs knees on surfaces take their toll, and bodies break and fold and strain. Accidental contact with other athletes, it all happens every day in their lives. Athletic life can end in a micro-second. Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman, Joe Thiesman, even Petyon Manning, the list goes on, largely in football, but every athlete stands a second from having their career ripped away.

Good athletes know this of themselves and the rigors of their sport. They know their own fragility even as they deny it and train to overcome it. In true competition and fellowship they wish to best the best of their competitors and work with the best of their teammates. That best can be destroyed by the luck of injury; it hobbles their competitors and weakens their team and weakens them since they must not push themselves as hard to achieve success. Bad luck takes away the glory and satisfaction of winning.

True athletes, true competitors wish good luck as a ritual of respect for each other and for the sport they pursue.

Beauty & Violence: The Lure of Football

Football is far and away the most watched American spectator activity. It anchors  large domains of American culture especially for males and proves to be the only reliable way to get males 25-45 to watch television.  Midway through the college football season, my Washington Huskies have lost 14 players for the season, four of their five offensive linemen are out for the count. My fantasy football league is decimated. One of the most important pieces of news each week is how many players are out for the next game--injuries and violence permeate the game and are factored into the very press releases each week.

With this daunting remind of the violence and controlled force that permeate the game, I want to remember why watching football can be more than a celebration of violence and domination. A melding of force and beauty flows through the game that offers a unique and intoxicating American sensibility.


Common academic wisdom faults American violence and worship of militarism as the main cause for football obsession. Histories point out that football's first defenders touted it as a way to train men for war. After World War I whose static and reset battle fields startling resembled football, the defense of football as a way to build character and instill military virtues in men became even more strident and self aware. In the fifties and sixties the academic narrative insists that football became the symbolic and active response to a creeping "momyism" that was undermining the masculinity of American males. It also perpetuated the bipolar view of the endless cold war with Russia. The commentaries around football reeked with cold-war images that merely extended football's natural tendency to promote itself as a surrogate or preparation for war, take your pick.

This all may be somewhat true, and it is certainly entertaining to read left wing diatribes and textbooks. If you can ignore the jargon, however, there  might be more here than covert militarism and sexism. I believe there are more things at stake in watching football and for those who do watch the game, it goes beyond just enjoying team victory, violence and domination.

Lynn Swann is my number one evidence. My sister reminded me that he exemplifies the power and beauty of the sport. Watching him run, weave and catch a ball against opposition reminds me of ballet, a violent, armored ballet. If you think of the Greek ideal of athlete as one who contests and masters skills and deploys them in competition, Swann demonstrates how the mind, character and skill weave together into moments of sheer ferocious beauty amid violence.


Evan after intense tackles, Swann held onto the ball. How a player holds and protects the football itself involves practice, effort and unrelenting focus and technique. At the very moment of triumph, the catch, the other team tries to not just tackle but knock the ball out and take the triumph away. Holding on after the catch can demonstrate courage, focus, strength and technique as well as the catch.

Swann was a fierce competitor who helped lead the Pittsburgh Steelers to three super bowl wins. He played against defenses designed to stop him. Here is another dimension of football. It is a reset sport, which is why it really is not like real war at all. It stops the play, lets everyone go back to the huddle, plan and then execute again. This reset permits strong and smart coaches to watch for tendencies and call plays and try to outthink and outanticipate the other team. The whole game resembles a complex match of move, countermove and counter counter moves.

The other dimension that Swann epitomize is that football is not just about brute force or violence. Within the matrix of physical strength and swirling violence of player on player, individuals possess skill and speed and pattern recognition that permits them to excel amid the organized but chaotic violence of the field. Football is a field of combat, in no other team sport do players violentaly assualt each other so directly and consistently.


In football the strongest and most violent do not always win. Technique, misdirection, pattern recogniztion, speed can all compensate for and usually win over sheer brute physical force. What can be fascinating is how the other team is trying to aggressively disrupt your technique and formations, so that players must exhibit focused attention and physical courage to keep the form from disintegrating under the physical assault of other players. This is where Swann's catches surrounded by chaos capture the tantalizing power of football.


I still remember when Swann appeared on Mr. Rogers and demonstrated to my six year old how a great football player danced ballet and used the focus and beauty of ballet to augment his own technique and achievement. Swann also showed off his uniform and helmet but reminded the children that beneath lay a commitment to form and technique.

At its best the game demonstrates how force can be melded with technique governed by thought in competition against other trained and thinking opponents. The substructure may be controlled violence, but the superstructure can embody form, beauty and mind.

Pay to Maim--Making Football Players Felons

Football is a violent game; the violence powers its structure and attraction. I have written at length about how this violence requires greater moral discipline from players and coaches than any other athletic endeavors. The game grows from the disciplined application of force against other human beings. In its normal practice within rules, the sport almost guarantees elite college and professional players will have shorter life spans, physically disabled futures and, worse, more than a few will lose their personhood to the depredations of brain injury.

Grown physically large men unleash focused aggression upon each other to block, tackle, run, pass, and catch. The level of force they inflict with this aggression would destroy most of us physically if we were not wearing weaponized armor and superbly trained. Only the tightest self and peer discipline among players and coaches keeps the game intact. Its intensity, ferocity and energy resembles a fusion reaction barely contained by internal forces. It can easily destabilize and explode into something worse, where the game becomes criminal assault.

The key here as with uniformed services lies in intention. The infliction of violent force upon another human being must serve a distinct and limited purpose to be defensible. If I tackle someone to stop the run, that fits with the norms and defensible approach to the game. If I a ball or cause a fumble, that fits. If I block someone hard within the rules, that fits. All this skilled and fierce force hurts, but if serious injury occurs, it is not intended but flows from another action—to block tackle, run, strip within the context of the game. These rules and intentions keep the game from being criminal assault.

Criminal assault occurs when a person  physically attacks or asserts force against another human being with the intent of maiming or injuring them so they cannot go on in their life role. It lies in the intent to injure and harm. Criminal assault that occurs because a person is paid to hurt someone involves a more heinous crime than one that involves passion or loss of control. So intentional maiming or injurying for money involves moral and criminal assault.

Now we know the New Orleans’ Saints turned football into criminal assault.

"The league’s investigation determined that this improper “Pay for Performance” program included “bounty” payments to players for inflicting injuries on opposing players that would result in them being removed from a game," NFL said in a statement. “Commissioner Goodell will determine punishment." "The players regularly contributed cash into a pool and received improper cash payments of two kinds from the pool based on their play in the previous week’s game," NFL said

Now we learn that a largely player financed fund provided bounties to players on the NFL New Orleans Saints over the last three years. $1,000 for a knock out and $1,500 for a cart off. 25 players over three years earned their reward.  A coach administered the fund, the head coach sanctioned it by his silence.

The sheer physical dangers of modern football are well known, and now the deeper dangers of later life crippling or loss of personhood from brain injury.  Football regimes from peewee through high school, college and professional are developing regulations that try to reduce the inevitable damage. The NFL union finally gained significant medical attention in the latest NFL.

Let's not romanticize football. It is hard, harsh and can be physically ugly. Long ago it lost any pretense to sportsmanship and coaches from Vince Lombardi to Bill Belichick mock the notion of football sportsmanship.

What scares me the most, the players did this to themselves. The players contributed the money and egged each other on. As mentioned, the “inmates are running the asylum.” It lets us know the reason why you need outside regulation rather than relying upon 24-28 year old aggressive males caught upon a culture to make rules. As Gregg Williams the coach who arranged it admits "It was a terrible mistake, and we knew it was wrong while we were doing it.”

They knew it was wrong! They knew they were maiming their compatriots, this is insane. The money is actually a pittance given the modern salaries but taken seriously for its symbolic importance. They were doing this at the same time retired football players are committing suicide as their brains disintegrate from damage sustained in the game.

Pay to maim moves a very violent sport from controlled violence with intent to win under the rules to rewarded felonious assault. It makes football players criminals.

Now football culture and media attention thrive on the big play and big hit. College players wear stickers on their helmets celebrating big plays. Replays go over it and controlled executed aggression can take on its own fearsome beauty. Even now old defensive players grumble about taking the football out of football, and Mike Golic talks on the ESPN about how this is blown out of proportion.

I am sorry, it is not. You do not violate the basic code of the sport, even one as elastic of footballs, by paying people to purposely injure, damage or maim other players.

Every football player has been injured, often many times. Every football player knows their career can end in a nano-second. A critical unwritten code permits players to play hard but not play to injure or maim,

Pay to maim violates the moral code and justification for football as a game or sport in at least three different ways.

1. 1)   It disrespects the moral core of the game. The players intend to injure individuals for pay. They unleash their controlled violence not to pursue a designed play. The players act to injure or end the careers of other players,
2. 2)   It destroys mutual respect among players. It turns fellow players into enemies rather than opponents. The moral structure of sport depends upon that distinction. While football spawns Rex Ryans of the world who think you have to hate your enemies to be effective players, athletic competition requires this distinction. This is even more important in a league where players move contantly and often end up playing with their opponents the next year.
3. 3)   It violates the contract players make with themselves. No one expects deep rationality from 22-27 year old males embarked on football careers. They all claim to “know” the risks, but no one that age can understand the risk to their future selves and personhood posed by physical disability. They enter the game expecting to risk unintentional injury. They do not expect other players to play or be encouraged by coaches and rewarded to wound them so that they cannot play the game.

Everything about this stinks. Too bad the NFL does not have the power of the NCAA to vacate victories or take away championships because this deserves that treatment. Remember the Saints got to the Super Bowl by injuring Curt Warner and Brett Favre, now we  know why and how.

Careers should end for doing this. The fines should be immense. Suspensions should be long term. Football has to keep pushing on its culture. Even as players push back against Commissioner Goodell, this represents a classic case of needed regulation to protect players from themselves and protect the culture from its worst tendencies. 

Sports Ethics: The Problem with "It is What It Is."

I hear it is what it is all the time from my students and children. It ends discussions and often ends effort to change something or revisit a screw-up or mistake (depending upon how nice you want to be). The phrase has migrated into business use and even sports now. Coaches will shrug after a loss or commenting on a bad bad call, “it is what it is.” I think coaches and players are trying to be profound as are business leaders when they use it.  In 2004 it was voted the cliche of the year.  I am struck by the phrase can be so problematic in sport life.

If you think about it, “it is what it is” sounds remarkably fatalistic. The expression reeks of giving up and accepting a condition that somehow cannot be changed. Giving up and accepting unchangeable conditions makes a great counsel of resignation and fatalism, but does not really belong in the world of sports or high performing teams or organizations. So how did so many athletes and coaches end up spouting its pseudo-wisdom.

I think the saying can help athletes and teams “let go” of an action over which they have not control. How many times do we simmer and stay angry over our own mistake or a mistake made by a referee or even our boss/coach.

Successful action entails intense focus on what we are doing. It requires situational awarenss of the relevant variables and people in motion around us. If we are still angry or ticked off over a call, if out minds are chewing out a referee or teammate, if we are chiding ourselves or fighting with our coach, even if only in our minds, we distort our alertness. We miss vital nuances around us because our mind and focus is divided between the emotion we are carrying with us and the raging changing context around us.

In theory it could mean. I can't change it and I am moving on. Or it can mean, "just F'it." But at its best is seems to exhort the user to himself or others to just say:

“Let Go Of It.” This is good sound advice for any athlete/coach/professional when they harbor mixed attention diffused by lingering emotions anchored to a past action.

Letting go involves action and decision. A player becomes conscious of their divided attention and actively changes focus. They redirect their concentration on issues at hand, immediately at hand. A good athlete and professional attend to what matters and learn from the mistake; they don’t hold tight to their anger and distorted focus.

“It is what it is.’ Carries a very different implications.

First, it suggest that what occurred may be opaque and cannot be understood, sort of a mystery. This urges the player to let it go. 

Second, it alludes to what happened cannot be changed. Period. It is over, done, kaput. No space time paradoxes will enable a person to go back and rectify the mistake. Again, it implies that the person let go of their embrace of the event’s emotional import.

Third, both the opaque and definitive done/gone approach mean it does not good to ruminate and torture oneself about what happened. This again directs the player/coach to let go of it.

The opacity and historicity behind the phrase undercuts the most important lesson people gain from mistakes—how can we learn from them.

James Collins in his great work on leadership argues that one crucial aspect of being high performing teams is the necessity to face the “brutal facts.”

Brutal facts is a hard phrase, but an accurate one. When we or others screw up, we need to look at the tape, check with others and learn what went wrong. Post mortems teach us to grow whether we want to or not.

Maybe we made no mistake Maybe our opponents just played better or had a better game plan. Maybe the referees blew a call. Maybe our team imploded.  Maybe the lesson becomes not to blowup over a miscue. A mess, loss, surprise, mistake demands that we face it and learn from it. High performers, athletes and professionals, live by that rubric.

Often coaches and athletes deploy this recent truism to address an injury. “It is what it is” is supposed to calm or reassure and athlete. It should move them to let go of their anger, fear and resentment about the loss. The fatalism hypothetically motivates the athlete.

What the athlete really needs is realism, not fatalism. They need to know the brutal facts and straight realities. From this  knowledge emerges a plan designed with doctors and trainers to treat and rehab the injury. Athletes and teams don’t need fatalism; they need realism, hope and prudent plans. “It is what it is” does neither for a wounded player.

Good teams, good athletes, good professionals learn.

Athletics like life  throws mistakes, implosions, surprises and luck at them to challenge them. I cannot think of a worse approach then “it is what it is.”

Sean Payton's Injury--Never Forget the Violence in Football

It can all look so clean and strategic on TV. The TV overlays emphasize the patterns and schemas of the football teams. The dangerous combination of beauty and force enamors football fans. But all this distanced and technologically enhanced viewing can distance and hide the reality from us, one I have mentioned before—force and violence rule football.

This week Sean Payton, the coach of the New Orleans’ Saints sat in the box calling plays, he could not be on the sideline. He is recovering from surgery last Monday to repair a torn meniscus and a broken left tibia. One Sunday ago  an NFL player ran out of the sidelines and collided with him and Payton's leg fell under the player.  Payton went down. His quarterback later joined him on the disabled list with a shattered collarbone.

Payton is not a small guy and full of the intensity and intelligence common to good football coaches. Yet the collision when he fell under a player fractured his tibia, tore his meniscus and left him with massive contusions.

You can look at the weekly list of broken and battered players who are out for the season in football, college and professional to remember that sheer collective force impacted on the human body by weaponized football players. We can follow the funeral track of premature dementia for men whose brains are battered to insensibility by the game or crippled forty five year olds. We have long lists and codes and forgotten faded once players to remind us.

What happened to Payton really should make clear to us fans on the side of the sheer energy and might unleashed on the football field.

When you stand on the sideline during an elite football game, the sheer vital force on the field overwhelms your senses. The players move so fast; they loom so big and the hits are so fierce you flinch when you feel the concussive power. You can see the players hold their bodies taught to hold the pain or bay or adjust a gait to protect a sprain, hit or bruise. The sheer sound and shaped force can be overwhelming. It feels nothing like the more sterile sense you get watching television. The graph below demonstrates where football hits rank compared to the G force impacts of flying jet airplanes!

 

Much of that power and ferocity is blunted by technique or the armor that players wear. But in Payton’s case we see the sheer violence unleashed upon an unprotected human being by a weaponized football player in full armor. An 200 plus pound football player impacts with  1600 pounds of force when he hits another player. If both players are moving that combined force grows to multiple G levels of force. In the professional league almost 300 players weigh over three hundred pounds and multiple that force impact even more.

The unprotected human body does not stand a chance. It breaks under the impact.

This reminds us that football employs mass+speed=force=impact to achieve its goals. This collision involves immense force and when it is inflicted upon a human body, it transmogrifies into violence. Beneath football's controlled force lurks ever present violence that impacts and hurts the human body.

Violence is force that inflicts pain and disruption to the human system. Every single football player imposes violence on every player on the field for every play. We should never forget this. Technique and armor diffuse some of this, but each player from grade school to professional ball endures this violence. It requires courage and strength and commitment and perhaps a little bid of madness.

As Payton’s experience reminds us, football would shatter normal humans. It would bruise and rupture our tissues; break or splinter our bones; rattle and disable our brains.

When we watch and take pleasure in the game and the beauty and power of the game, we should never forget the foundation of violence upon which it is build..