The Edge. Roger Pielke

      Source: Reuben Fischer-Baum. Infographic: Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably). http://deadspin.com/Infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-employee-a-co-489635228, May 9, 2013.

      Within most professional sports, differences in compensation are dramatic. Figure 1.2 shows the distribution of all player salaries for five major US professional sports leagues in 2014. The top earners in each of these leagues far exceed those in the middle, who (with the exception of Major League Soccer) are all extremely well rewarded compared to most people. Moving just a little bit from left to right on this scale means a dramatic increase in earnings potential. Even within the boundaries of elite sport, a little edge goes a long way. And in sport, by its very nature, there is always a little more edge to achieve.

      On-the-field success often translates into off-the-field earnings power. Table 1.1 presents estimates of what the world’s top earning athletes made from endorsements in 2015, as well as the estimated commercial value of a single tweet.⁸ Roger Federer is at the top, with an estimated $58 million in endorsements, followed by plenty of familiar names, all of whom are characterized by extraordinary athletic success. Cristiano Ronaldo, the superstar striker for Real Madrid, can earn more than $250,000 just by sending out a product endorsement via Twitter to his 38 million followers.^c Not a bad return on typing 140 characters or less.

Figure 1.2. Players’ Salaries in the Top Five US Leagues, 2014

      Source: National Basketball Association, National Football League, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer.

       Old Rules, New Values

      Here is another pop quiz. What do Ben Johnson, Marion Jones, and Alex Rodriguez have in common?

      That one is easy. Each was penalized for taking prohibited performance-enhancing drugs—otherwise known as “doping.”

      Their efforts to become champions went over the edge. They violated the “spirit of sport” as codified in the rules that they agreed to follow within their respective sports. As you will discover in chapter 2, the spirit of sport is an important but fuzzy concept, the imprecision of which sometimes leads to inconsistencies and even irrationality in the rules of sport. What is OK in the National Football League is not necessarily OK in the Olympics. The severity of sanctions differs across sports. For instance, get caught taking human growth hormone in the Olympics and you can be suspended for four years, but in the NFL, the penalty is four weeks.^d

Table 1.1. Endorsements by Top-Earning Athletes

      Sport is characterized by frequent appeals to admirable aspirations, such as purity of motive and self-regulation. However, such aspirations have proven problematic when they morph from fuzzy, overarching values into concrete rules and regulations. The sports values that we have inherited have a long history. The founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, explained in 1927 that “our object in reviving an institution twenty-five centuries old was that you should become new adepts of the religion of sports, as our great ancestors conceived it.” Athletes became members of that religion by “the swearing of an oath of fidelity to the rules and unselfishness, and above all in compelling themselves to strict adherence thereto.”⁹

       Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games.

      Without rules, our society would be impossible. Think about driving. In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road and agree to follow numerous rules that govern how we drive. Red means stop, green means go. If people chose to make up whatever rules they wanted, not only would our safety be imperiled, but our ability to move about would be compromised. Rules—and following them—help make the world go round. They also make sport possible.

      Not everyone follows the rules, however, so there are traffic cops and traffic courts, speed cameras, and parking tickets. A vast array of institutions is in place to govern the rules of driving. Sport is no different. The sports world has many institutions, ranging from referees and umpires to players organizations, leagues, associations, federations, and even scholarly groups and fan clubs. Sport is surrounded by an ecosystem of business and commercial interests that, as we will see, is not particularly large in comparative economic terms but that has outsized influence in culture and the media. Also involved in overseeing sport are governments and at least one international treaty. Sometimes these institutions break down or fail to do their job. Indeed, as we are often reminded, sports officials are occasionally complicit in helping athletes avoid the rules, and at other times they break the rules when athletes want them followed.

      This chapter introduces the struggle that lies at the heart of this book: the battle between a performance edge and an ethical edge. The battle takes place in the language and practice of rules. And the rules, in turn, reflect a battle to preserve certain values. The trouble is, today the values that underpin sport are outdated, which places rules on a shaky foundation.

      The aspirational values that underlie modern sport can be distilled down to four: amateurism, purity, uncertainty, and autonomy. Unfortunately, all four are either out of step with modern society or have always been mythological. As I argue in chapter 2 (and throughout the book), sport needs to be governed based on a new quartet of values: professionalism, pragmatism, accountability, and transparency.

      Rapid developments in the twenty-first century and outdated sports governance have revealed the tension between sports’ outdated values and the demands of the new era. This tension has left sport in a state of crisis. Increasingly, athletes, teams, and administrators seek a competitive edge in the cutthroat world of elite sport—and sometimes they go over the edge in their pursuit of one. Sustaining what we love most about sport requires that how we think about sport keep pace with the changes in sport in the twenty-first century.

       Squidgy Balls, Fuzzy Edges, and Hazy Rules

      The travails of Tom Brady and his (allegedly) deflated footballs illustrate what happens when old principles and new attitudes collide: the rules get broken or blurred, the institutions supposed to enforce the rules do a bad job and get a bad rap, and no one can agree what it means to “cheat.”

      Tom Brady is among the most successful athletes in American history. As of this writing, he has led the NFL’s New England Patriots to four Super Bowl victories, earning the award for most valuable player in three of them. By the end of the 2015–16 NFL season, only four other NFL quarterbacks had ever passed for more yards and no one had ever passed for more in the playoffs.¹⁰ His magnetic smile and movie star good looks befit the leader of his generation’s winningest team in America’s favorite sport.

      Yet, when Brady came out of college at the University of Michigan, he seemed highly unlikely to make it in the NFL, much less assemble one of the most remarkable careers in league history. Skinny for a professional football player and lacking much in the way of obvious muscle tone, young Tom Brady did not look the part of a future sports hero.

      The numbers bear out that perception. Each year, before NFL teams draft eligible players from the college ranks, they evaluate the players’ athleticism at what is called the NFL Combine. Consider these remarkable statistics: Of the 327 quarterbacks who participated in the NFL Combine from 1999 to 2014, Brady recorded the 325^th fastest time in the forty-yard dash, at