held expectations of the tennis community for what constitutes appropriate behavior. Azarenka, he claimed, had violated the tennis community’s norms.
If the tennis community feels strongly enough, as indicated by Fowler’s tweet, then it can engage the constitutive rule-making process to change the rules of play to address violations of what are held as norms. Alternatively, it can hope that the social pressure associated with violating a community norm is sufficient to compel the desired behavior. Think about the practice of “flopping” in the NBA—the simulation of contact between players in order to sway the referee into calling a foul. Once upon a time, social pressure was strong enough to encourage players not to flop—or at least not often and not flagrantly. Times change, however, and when social pressure was deemed insufficient to stop players from trying to trick referees by simulating fouls, the rules of basketball were changed to try to reduce the incidence of such simulation through postgame video review and the levying of sanctions on players who were judged to have broken the new rule.12
Rules can be enforced by governing bodies using penalties for on-the-field violations and sanctions for breaking constitutive rules beyond the field of play.13 If a National Football League (NFL) player is caught illegally holding another player in a game, the referee will throw a yellow flag and enforce a ten-yard penalty. But if an NFL player is taking human growth hormone—which is prohibited—he will not be caught by a referee in a striped shirt. Officials who govern what happens off the field of play determine whether a constitutive rule has been violated. Norms are typically enforced by player conduct or in the court of public opinion. If a baseball pitcher hits a batter with a pitch, you can expect the pitcher from the hit batter’s team to throw some inside pitches in retaliation. That is norm enforcement in action. There is a fine line between a pitcher throwing some “chin music” designed to secure tactical advantage in the encounter with a batter, and a pitcher throwing at the batter with intent to cause bodily harm. A “brush back” pitch is well within the rules and norms of Major League Baseball (MLB), but throwing at a batter violates the rules and can be cause for the pitcher to be ejected from the game by the umpire. Throwing at a batter is a fine edge between following an accepted norm and violating formal rules.
Norms can be turned into formal rules. Consider a 2012 suspension that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA, soccer’s governing body in Europe) gave to Luiz Adriano of the Ukrainian soccer team Shakhtar Donetsk.14 In soccer, the game clock runs continuously. There are no timeouts, no injury stoppages, and (thankfully) no commercial breaks. But play does occasionally stop, such as when a player is down on the field and the referee decides that the player may need some medical attention. The referee has discretion to add on a bit of time at the end of each half to compensate for such stoppages.
When a player is down on the soccer field, a team customarily kicks the ball out of bounds or the referee stops play.a There is no rule saying that this is so, but that is how the game is played. After the injured player recovers or hobbles off the field, play is restarted by returning the ball to the team that had the ball when play was stopped. This usually occurs in the form of a kick back to the goalie, so that play can restart without either team gaining any advantage from the stoppage.
This exact situation developed midway through the first half of Shakhtar’s 2012 European Champions League match with Danish club Nordsjaelland. A Nordsjaelland player was injured and play was halted so that he could be tended to by a trainer. He quickly recovered and the referee restarted play with a drop ball in Shakhtar’s end of the field. As is customary, Nordsjaelland did not contest the drop ball, and allowed the Shakhtar player to kick it toward the Nordsjaelland goalie, where play would restart from a neutral position.
Then things took a strange turn. Luiz Adriano sprinted after the back pass from his position at forward, easily catching up to the ball. He was uncontested—everyone expected the ball to make its way to the Nordsjaelland goalie for play to restart. Adriano easily went around the baffled goalie and put the ball into the net for a goal to tie the match. The Fox Sports announcers were flabbergasted: “That is not in the spirit of the game . . . Shame on you Luiz Adriano . . . You do not do that!”15
But he did. And the goal stood. Of course it did; there is no rule in soccer about playing the ball back to an opponent after a stoppage of play. Once the referee conducted the uncontested drop kick, the game was on.
In this instance, although no formal rule was broken, a strongly held norm was violated. UEFA sanctioned Adriano, under the organization’s general conduct policy, suspending him for one game and requiring that he perform one day of football-related community service.16 In doing so, UEFA created a new rule from a norm. It established a precedent under which future violators of the pass-back-to-restart norm would be expected to be sanctioned in exactly the same way.
Norm violations need not become formal rules. A violation of a norm might be responded to with another norm. In 1999, a similar pass-back-to-the-goalie situation occurred in the English FA Cup when Arsenal, accidently it seems, scored off a back pass in a match against Sheffield United, which ultimately helped Arsenal to a 2–1 victory. The Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger, realized the error and offered to replay the match ten days later. This gentleman’s agreement, well outside any formal rules, was allowed by the English Football Association. Wenger’s offer helped to solidify the norm, but it did not elevate it to a formal rule.b
The relationship between rules and norms is highly contextual, varying according to sport, league, and even nation, and developing an appreciation for the subtleties of behavior in different contexts can be challenging. The degree of enforcement of rules can be shaped by norms; some rules will be strongly enforced (e.g., offside in soccer), others less so (e.g., traveling in the NBA). That makes understanding the application of rules in sport a complicated, nuanced, and contextual affair. No one will get a sophisticated understanding of baseball or cricket solely by reading rule books.
Rules for sports can also interact with norms from outside sport, as in the case of Wyoming and BYU football. Here is a more recent example: In 2012, the Miami Marlin’s baseball manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for five games. What was his offense? He publicly expressed admiration for Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The Marlin’s organization explained the suspension: “The pain and suffering caused by Fidel Castro cannot be minimized, especially in a community filled with victims of the dictatorship.”17
What does baseball have to do with Fidel Castro? In South Florida, apparently a lot. Of course, similar questions could be asked about the relationship of domestic violence and players in the NFL, about the relationship between tax fraud by FC Barcelona’s superstar Lionel Messi and Spanish soccer, and about the arrest of USA goalie Hope Solo on charges (later dismissed) of assault and US women’s soccer. Although rules can be created to oversee what happens in competition, sport and the world outside sport tend to intermix when it comes to the enforcement of broadly held social norms.
These examples highlight why it is so important to establish some intellectual and linguistic order when we discuss cheating in sport. As sport becomes more complex, so too must our ability to discuss and debate what happens at the edge. We are free to shape sports rules however we’d like, but to reach agreement on satisfactory rules, we need a language suitable to the task.
Let’s find a language we can use.
What Is Cheating?
The concepts of rules and norms give us tools with which to create a framework for discussing what happens in sporting competition. To put it in fewer words, let’s use rules and norms to create a simple taxonomy of cheating. Figure 3.1 depicts some things that can happen during a game or match—three of which involve combinations of rules and norm violations:
Ordinary play occurs when no rules and no norms are violated. Ordinary play is what happens most of the time during a match or game.
A penalty occurs when a rule is broken and a sanction is imposed, but no norm is violated. Penalties for rule breaking are part of the essential fabric of games. The offender pays some sort of cost when a rule is broken. For instance, a tennis player