2016, tennis star Maria Sharapova failed a drug test at the Australian Open for taking a substance called meldonium, which had been added to the list of prohibited substances just a couple of weeks earlier. Sharapova revealed that she had been taking meldonium for a decade, leading former top-ten professional tennis player Jennifer Capriati to label Sharapova a cheater over those ten years: “I didn’t have the high priced team of drs [sic] that found a way for me to cheat and get around the system and wait for science to catch up.”1 In stark contrast, another former professional, John McEnroe, said that Sharapova’s use of the drug before it was added to the prohibited list was fair game: “If a drug is legal? That is like a no-brainer. I mean, are you kidding? People have been looking since the beginning of time for an edge, and you’re constantly looking for these things in any way, shape or form.”2
To productively debate the point of contention between Capriati and McEnroe, we need a clear conception of what it means to cheat in sport, as well as a clear idea of those other activities that might go right up to the edge but don’t quite make it to the other side. In other words, we need a palette of shades of gray rather than black and white. This chapter develops a vocabulary for discussions about the edge. It offers a definition of cheating and related behaviors, and thus it sets the stage for consideration of the five battlegrounds in the next part of this book.
Rules and Norms
In the semifinals of the 2013 Australian Open, Belarusian tennis star Victoria Azarenka’s game was falling apart. Playing against American Sloane Stephens, Azarenka was winning in the final set by five games to three, and she was about to start serving what could have been the final game. She lost five match points and eventually the game.3 She was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Azarenka then caused a stir when she then took a ten-minute injury timeout to regain her composure. Her composure regained, Azarenka returned from the “injury timeout” and promptly won the match.
Afterwards, David Nainkin, Stephens’s coach said, “I thought it was very unfair—cheating within the rules. It was unsportsmanlike. . . . I think there’s a gray area in the rule book that shouldn’t be allowed. End of story.”4 Chris Fowler, a tennis commentator for ESPN, tweeted about the episode: “Ever heard a player basically admit she/he was nervous and thus invented 2 injuries to get a 10 minute timeout? Rule change needed.”5 Cheating or not? McEnroe and Capriati raised the same question about Sharapova and meldonium.
We can start to make some sense of this debate by asking what, if anything, did Azarenka do wrong?
According to the Australian Open tournament director, nothing: “Everything was within the rules of the game.” Azarenka’s behavior provides an opportunity to make an important distinction when it comes to rules. There are rules of the game and rules for the game. This is a fundamental distinction, not just for sport, but also for society as a whole.
For instance, the US Constitution sets forth rules of the political “game” in the United States; the Constitution lays down how the United States is to be governed, including defining the branches of government, their respective powers, how they can use those powers, what rights ordinary citizens have, what rights individual states have, and so forth. With these rules in place, the US Congress, the president, and the court system can make and enforce the rules for the political game; these three branches of government create the rules that govern the nation from day to day, such as how fast you can drive on a federal highway, how much tax you must pay to the federal government, how much pollution power plants can emit, and so forth. Changing laws happens all the time, but changing the US Constitution happens only rarely because it is a big deal to change the rules of the political system.
In more formal terms, the distinction is between constitutive and regulatory rules. Constitutive rules refer to the establishment of fundamental rules of making decisions; they are rules about the rules. This distinction has been around since at least the eighteenth century, when it was explained by the very clever but often hard to understand philosopher Immanuel Kant.6 Mercifully, John Searle, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the concept more clearly: “Constitutive rules do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but, as it were, they create the very possibility of playing such games.”7 Searle continues: “Regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity.” In other words, you can’t apply the rules of tennis until you first figure out what those rules are.
Like most sporting bodies, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) has a constitution, a 138-page document that explains how decisions about tennis, including the rules of the game, are to be made and who is to make them.8 The ITF constitution also explains the rules that tennis is to follow for antidoping and anticorruption, in both of these cases referring to other institutions (and even more constitutive rules). It is often the case that the constitutive rules for a particular sport require far more pages to explain than the rules of that sport.
For instance, under the provisions of the ITF constitution, the regulatory rules of tennis are codified in a comparatively pithy forty-three-page document.9 The regulatory rules include such things as the dimensions of the court, how scoring is to take place, and when to change sides. When players compete together in an annual set of competitions, more regulatory rules are needed, such as how rankings are determined, how seedings are organized, what tournaments players must play, and so on. Constitutive rules set the stage for creating and managing competition; once these rules are in place, regulatory rules created under them define a particular game.
Regulatory rules govern what happens in the playing of a game. When the rules of the game are violated, then there typically is some sanction for the offender or a reward for his or her opponent. For instance, if Azarenka hits the ball out, Stephens gets a point. If players or officials want to change the rules of tennis, such as by allowing instant replay, then they have to follow the guidelines of the ITF constitution, which explains how those rules are to be changed.
In principle, the rules that govern play within a sport are designed to create a closed system, meaning that every possible contingency is expected to be covered by the rules of the game—no one wants referees (or players) making up rules as a game is being played. In practice, this is not always the case; people are clever and the world is complicated, even in sports. Sometimes in sports we find a “rules hole” that needs fixing, just as Congress may find a loophole in the laws that needs plugging.10 We will return to these concepts later in this chapter.
Victoria Azarenka’s injury timeout during the 2013 Australian Open semifinals.
Now back to Azarenka and her injury timeout. According to the Australian Open tournament director, “Everything was within the rules of the game.” Azarenka’s behavior was within the boundaries of the regulatory rules of tennis, but Fowler (and others) suggested that changes to those rules are needed, which requires making changes as allowed under the constitution of tennis. Sometimes, the changes that are deemed necessary go beyond making changes to the rules of the game and involve changing the constitution itself, such as when tennis (like most other international sports) agreed to follow the provisions of the WADA after its creation in 1999.
This brings us to another distinction—that between rules and norms. Regulatory rules are formal guidelines for play. Norms are expectations for what constitutes appropriate behavior in play.11 Rules are written down; norms generally are not. Some norms are specific to a sport, but others involve more general considerations reflecting broader social and cultural factors. As you might guess, because rules are written down, they are easier to reach agreement on than are norms. Making such a distinction helps us understand why people such as Capriati and McEnroe can see the same behavior and come to diametrically opposed views on whether that behavior is cheating. McEnroe and Capriati are reflecting different norms for what constitutes appropriate behavior.
So when Sloane Stephens’s coach accused Azarenka of “cheating within the rules,” he meant that although her behavior