An outfielder dives for a ball, but it hits the ground and he traps it. Still, he holds up his glove to make it look like he caught it and the umpire calls an out.
A soccer player, barely brushed by the other team’s star, flops onto the pitch as if shot, rolls on the pitch and holds his head, thereby fooling the referee into issuing a second yellow card to the “offender” and ejecting the team’s best player.
A basketball defender, nudged by an opponent dribbling the ball, screams and flies backward onto his wallet. The official calls an offensive foul.
Followers of the FIFA World Cup have railed against the outbreak of yellow and red cards, often pointing out that the “offenses” have been embellished so obviously and badly that it crosses the line from gamesmanship to cheating.
Hockey fans in particular are having a good laugh at the Oscar-winning flopping performances at World Cup. A hockey player takes a dive and he likely receives a penalty, along with a hockey stick swung into his grille – often from his own coach.
Diving is to hockey as adultery is to the Catholic church.
It’s important that we include the use of steroids, amphetamines and human-growth hormones into this discussion. Steroids are an extreme example of the lengths some will go to enhance performance. They also are health issues, well beyond the realm of corked bats, smack talk and pulled soccer jerseys.
The point: with few exceptions, sport is rife with cheating. And we’d better get used to it because it’s not going away soon.
Should we care? Will our sense of justice eventually be so violated with constant, blatant cheating that we stop attending sporting events? And why does it seem that cheating has escalated?
David Callahan offers a theory about the last question in his book “The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead”.
Callahan explores reasons why many of us cheat to get ahead, not just those in the athletic arena. Why do we pirate cable television? Why do we make up deductions when we unexpectedly owe the IRS an unexpected hundreds of dollars? Why the increasingly instances of corporate scandal?
As Callahan points out, even ministers have been busted lifting sermons off the Internet.
In explaining the escalation, Callahan argues that the rewards are greater than ever to the winners, while the losers suffer from even less security. More than ever, we will do anything to succeed, starting at a young age. The motivation to succeed (and, by the same token, to avoid failure) has never been so powerful.
At the same time, he says, government regulators don’t have the resources to crack down on cheating. Applied to sports: Even three NBA referees, human as they are, can’t catch every foul committed by today’s faster, stronger and smarter players.
Since the 1970s, Callahan writes, our values have changed. We’ve become more selfish, more focused on money and more cutthroat.
That certainly explains some of the more heinous cheating events in sports history: the whacking of Nancy Kerrigan’s shin, planned by thugs in the Tonya Harding camp; the steroid use of thousands of East German Olympic athletes in the 1970s and ’80s; Ben Johnson; and the figure-skating judging scandal in the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Cheating has seeped into areas formerly considered sacred. Remember Danny Almonte, who guided his Bronx, N.Y., baseball team to a third-place showing at the 2001 Little League World Series? He was later found to be 14 years old, two years older than the allowed maximum.
The Spanish intellectually-disabled basketball team won the gold medal in the 2000 Sydney Paralympics, but was stripped when the Spanish Paralympic Committee later discovered that 10 of the 12 team members had no mental deficiency.
The perception that everyone’s doing it only perpetuates the cheating, Callahan writes, and it’s become a disadvantage not to.
It’s not overly savory, this situation in which we find ourselves.
The question is this: Does it bother us enough for a values overhaul?
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