other position on Deflategate has been voiced by, among others, Charles Haley, another NFL Hall of Famer and the only player to earn five Super Bowl rings (two with San Francisco and three with Dallas). Haley, who played linebacker and defensive end, positions that often require chasing after quarterbacks (perhaps protected by linemen with silicon on their shirts!), called Brady a cheater: “I’ve lost all respect [for Brady]. When your integrity is challenged in the game of football, to me, all his Super Bowls are tainted.”14 Similar comments were made by Jerry Rice, the Hall of Fame receiver who caught a lot of Joe Montana’s passes, in siding with Haley: “I’m going to be point blank, I feel like it’s cheating.”15
Edge Battles
We all think we know what it means to cheat, right? It means to take something unfairly or act dishonestly or unfairly to get an advantage—to cheat is to gain an edge improperly. Right?
Defining what it means in practice to cheat in sports can be fiendishly difficult. Consider these cases:
Before a race, a sprinter takes three caffeine pills, prepared specifically by sport scientists to give her a notable performance boost.
A soccer player bets on the timing of a game’s first throw-in and kicks the ball out of bounds at exactly that time (and then he scores one of his team’s two goals and his team goes on to win).
A popular college athlete accepts money for his signature.
A woman with elevated but natural testosterone level competes against women whose testosterone level is more common.
A soccer player (who is not the goalie) intentionally uses his hands to stop the ball from entering his goal in a tied game near the end of the match (and he gets a red card from the referee, meaning he is kicked out of the match). The opposing team misses the subsequent penalty kick and then ultimately loses the game in a penalty shootout.
A tennis player is losing a match—and her composure. She takes an allowed ten-minute medical timeout even though she is uninjured. She regains her composure, returns to the court, and promptly wins the match.
A bicyclist takes a prohibited performance-enhancing substance, knowing that virtually everyone else in the peloton is taking the same stuff. He receives a lifetime ban from the sport, while other riders who took the same drug are given much shorter bans.
A man born without lower legs uses prosthetic blades to compete in the Olympics against athletes who have no such technological aids.
A young boy is given human growth hormone by a famous soccer club to aid his physical development. He goes on to stardom.
A badminton doubles team purposely loses a match early in the tournament in order to get a better seeding in the later knock-out phase of the competition.
A basketball player “flops”; a soccer player “dives”; a baseball catcher “frames” a pitch.
Each of these examples is taken from a real-world situation. And each is discussed in the following chapters. Whether or not each case reflects cheating, going over the edge, or not, is hotly contested. For example, a top official of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the international body that oversees doping regulations in Olympic sport, has suggested that caffeine ingested as a triple espresso is allowable, but the exact equal amount of the drug in pill form should not be allowed. The tennis player who abused injury rules was accused of gamesmanship and cheating by some, while others applauded her cleverness. A soccer team that plays for tournament positioning in group play is usually characterized as being sensibly “strategic”; but the badminton players engaging in exactly the same behavior were sent home from the Olympics.
Where is the ethical edge that separates effective tactics from cheating? Sometimes it’s literally impossible to tell, because there is no written or unwritten rule stating where that edge lies. That is why institutions of sports governance are so important—it is their job to define where that edge lies and to hold athletes, officials, and administrators to account.
The sporting world today is overwhelmed by what might be called “edge battles.” Edge battles are to be expected in sport, because sport is all about securing an edge—over history, over an opponent, over what has been done before. Pushing limits and exceeding them is a defining characteristic of sport and even a fulfillment of what it means to be human. Such battles might not be so problematic except for the fact that ample evidence suggests that more than a few institutions of sports governance are either not doing their jobs or doing their jobs extremely poorly. Consequently, it is no overstatement to say that today’s edge battles are part of a larger war for the soul of modern sport.
Part II of this book zeroes in on five edge battles—probably the top five in terms of their current impact on sport and on what we think sport is or should be. The chapters in part II look in turn at battles over amateurism, match fixing, doping, technology, and sex testing. The chapters also offer some constructive and pragmatic ideas about how these battles might be won in a way that makes sports no less exciting and competitive (no less edgy) but more ethical and pragmatic (more in keeping with the spirit of sport).
Amateurs: Who Is Being Cheated?
College sports in the United States are governed by an organization called the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or the NCAA. The NCAA asserts that “amateurism” is the “bedrock principle” of college athletics.16 Under the NCAA, amateurism means that “young men and women competing on the field or court are students first, athletes second.”
But what amateurism means in practice is increasingly complicated. In the 1950s, the NCAA introduced the athletic scholarship, which in recent years has been augmented by many other perks and benefits that are provided to athletes in exchange for playing. Athletes are not paid salaries, but they are certainly compensated. In 2013, the American Institutes for Research, a Washington, DC–based nonprofit organization, estimated that major universities spent an average of about $14,000 per enrolled student per year in support of their education. For scholarship athletes, however, they spent an additional $95,000 per student per year.17 University spending on college athletes is increasing faster than spending on students generally, mainly because athletics departments are able to secure external funding support well beyond that provided by tuition alone.
As more and more money has poured into college athletics, due largely to men’s basketball and football, athletes and their representatives have demanded a greater share. Some have even called for salaries to be paid to scholarship athletes. The NCAA has responded by increasing athletes’ food allowances and implementing a stipend system (called “cost of attendance”), which USA Today estimated to resulted in $160 million in additional benefits in 2015–16.18
As we shall see, the efforts by the NCAA to maintain a façade of amateurism while college sports becomes increasingly professionalized has created tensions that threaten the very existence of college athletics. It may be time for the NCAA, like the Olympics before it, to move beyond the ideal of amateurism and embrace professionalism in a way that makes practical sense but preserves the unique identity of college sports. If the NCAA does not change, then change will be forced upon it. I make some pragmatic, common-sense suggestions that might help preserve what is so beloved about college sports while recognizing the professional characteristics of elite programs.
Match Fixing: Cheating to Lose
Match fixing, the manipulation of game results often associated with organized crime and gambling, poses threats to the integrity of what we see in sport, threatening in some cases to turn it from unscripted competition to staged performance. The start of 2016 saw the tennis world thrown into upheaval with remarkable claims of widespread match fixing at the highest levels.19 The specter of match fixing has on occasion blighted the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the NCAA. Soccer and cricket have for years been embroiled in controversies over contrived results. As Simon Kuper relates in the preface, even the World Cup has not been immune to such claims.