Morality of cheating

IT’S NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE

Allow me to present you with two scenarios, Dear Reader, after which I’d like you to tell me which one of them you would describe as cheating and which as completely fine morality-wise.

1. A certain pro cyclist dedicates his life to his sport, climbs the ladder of success and then goes onto winning multiple world titles in a row. With his success comes all the glory and fame, he becomes an icon. Time goes by and eventually he retires to enjoy all the fortune earned in his career. A couple of years later he publicly admits that he was taking performance enhancing drugs. His admission of doping makes him being stripped of all of his titles.
2. A certain Miami Heat shooting guard is dribbling the ball with about 15 seconds left in the overtime period. The game is tied at 91. He’s being guarded by Indiana Pacers’ best defender. He’s running up the clock, it’s clear that he wants to take the last shot. If he makes it Miami wins, if not we play another overtime. With about 3 seconds left he grabs the ball and raises it up, makes his defender jump to try to contest the shot. But there is no shot. The ball goes back down, waiting for the Indiana’s defender to fly by him and clear the vision of the hoop – pump fake. He raises the ball again and releases the shot. Makes it. Miami wins 93-91.

Now, unless you’re struggling with a severe case of psychopathy, Dear Reader, you most likely said that what the cyclist did was obviously immoral and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a pump-fake on the basketball court. You probably might have even guessed the names of the athletes in these scenarios: Lance Armstrong and Dwyane Wade. It was very painful for many people to see their beloved idol, their hero, publicly admit cheating. All of Lance’s success now meant absolutely nothing, even though watching his races and battle with cancer brought us plenty of motivation and hope. Having that hope taken away felt like a slap in a face. Meanwhile, Wade’s signature pump-fake brought his fans tons of joy over the span of his Hall of Fame career. Every team he has ever played against had that one piece of information on the scouting report: Wade is going to try to trick you, make you jump, so don’t get baited. But if you are an NBA fan you know that they all did get baited anyway. But even though “pump-fake” has a word “fake” in it, there is no cheating involved whatsoever. It’s a completely legal move within the rules of the game. It’s just a trick of the trade or a skill, simple as that.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dwyane_Wade_Martell_Webster.jpg

So what do these two examples have in common then? Well, they are the extreme opposites on the scale of morality in sports. The first – illegal and immoral – the second – completely legal and would never cast the slightest shadow of doubt on your conscience. But as easy as it might be to point to either end of this scale, it’s a much more problematic to indicate its middle. In other words, where do we draw the line? What is cheating?  What is just exploiting the loopholes of the rules of the game? What is right? What is wrong? Hell, isn’t that something philosophers have been trying to answer for millennia now? Fasten your seatbelt, Dear Reader, we’re going on a ride of morality of cheating.

CHESS, NOT FACE SLAPPING

Have you ever come across these videos of face slapping competitions? Two massive dudes (or chicks!) facing each other, exchanging ferocious blows, one by one. No strategy, no game plan, just cruel violence. I slap the hell out of you, you slap the living daylights out of me. There is a certain beauty in the simplicity of this new “sport”. Since the dawn of humanity, we have always been drawn to brute force and extreme endurance. But after a while, it eventually becomes boring. We don’t watch sports for the obvious results, do we? If we knew which athlete was stronger, faster or more durable and that’s all there ever was to the sport, it would become way too predictable for us to keep getting excited about it. After all, don’t we want David to have a chance at taking down Goliath? If our sports were all about physicality and skills and nothing else, it would make no sense to cheer for the underdog, which is something we all love doing, no? If that were the case all of the sports betting services would go bankrupt within a day.

Most sports – especially of the team variety – require at least some level of strategy. What are my strengths as a team? How do we maximize them? What are my opponents’ weaknesses? How do we exploit them? Even in individual sports – which seemingly are all about physicality – there’s also a certain game plan which athletes have to prepare. Let’s take long distance running or cycling as an example: do I go into my top gear right in the beginning of the race to push my own pace? Do I follow the peloton and save my strength for the late push towards the finish line?

The number of questions like these skyrocket in team sports. Which players should step onto the court today? What are our best matchups? How many minutes should each player play? What are the plays we’re trying to run in our offence? How do we defend each player individually? How many metaphorical curveballs are we willing to throw just to keep our opponent off balance? How do we react to what our rival’s game plan is?

In every high school or college movie you’ve ever watched you have the stereotypical dumb jock character. The reality is, most athletes are way smarter than the casual viewer would ever give them credit for. Critical thinking under a lot of pressure, making decisions in split seconds, studying film, learning everything possible about their sport are the absolute necessities for every successful sportsman or sportswoman nowadays.

How do we come up with the best strategy for every game? As I mentioned before, we have to think about our biggest strengths and our rival’s biggest weaknesses. But there is one more, very basic, yet crucial thing here – we have to know all the rules of our sport. We might think we know it all, we’ve been playing or coaching for years, but there are certain situations, where even after all these years we find out there’s a loophole in the rulebook that we’d never think of. Perhaps we find a certain rule and exploit it to its absolute limits for our advantage. That’s where the battle of wits champions the pure physicality of the game. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

EXPLOITING LOOPHOLES

It’s 24:19 for Serbia playing a home game in the VNL (Volleyball Nations League). Their opponent – Team Italy – is serving. Serbia has a perfect reception, we see three attackers starting their approach towards the ball. As the ball is landing in the hands of the setter, Italian middle blocker – Simone Anzani – decides to jump to prevent his direct rival – Marko Podraščanin – from scoring, if he were to get the ball. The Serbian setter notices the fully committed block in the middle, so he wisely sends the ball out to the left wing. But the airborne Podraščanin sees the hands of Anzani reaching over the net, grabs one of them and pulls it down, making him touch the net. The referee whistles a net violation on Italy – point for Serbia. After a heated discussion with the players, the referees go to the monitor to review the play. The call stands – volleyball was invented as a non-contact sport, so there are no rules regarding forcing an opponent’s hand into the net. Serbia gets the point for Italy’s net violation and wins the set.

It’s the beginning of the 3rd quarter of a preseason game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors. The Lakers are running a simple dribble hand-off play through their center – JaVale McGee. McGee gives up the ball to his teammate and starts rolling towards the basket, but in doing so, he trips a little bit over the Warrior’s defender who’s trying to run towards the ball. McGee runs out of bounds, stumbling with an apparent injury. Draymond Green – another Golden State’s defender who was assigned with guarding McGee – sees that he is out of the baseline so he goes to double team the Lakers’ ball handler. As soon as that happens McGee goes back onto the court and gets the ball for the easiest dunk of his career. The whole L.A. team starts laughing as the Warriors look at each other with disbelief.

We want our favorite athletes to not only outduel their opponents with their physicality, but also their wits. We want to see the tricks of the trade, the fakes, the strategy and game plan being implemented in real-time. But how would you feel if the team you cheer for had done nothing but exploit the rules or use ploys and ruses? If a volleyball player makes his opponent touch the net one time during the game it makes it for an interesting play that shows off his knowledge of the rules. But what if he did that 75 times in a row and try to win an entire game this way? Faking an injury during a preseason match makes for a funny moment, but what if that was a last-second play for the title? How valid would that championship be? Where do we draw the line? Does exploiting loopholes and tricking your opponent count as fair play? Should it?

The official rulebook written and released by the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) might help us find an answer to these questions. There is a very interesting phrasing used in an excerpt from the “Philosophy of Rules and Refereeing”:

Volleyball is both recreational and competitive. Recreational sport taps into the human spirit and promotes “fun” and healthy life. Competition allows people to exhibit the best of ability, creativity,
freedom of expression and fighting spirit. The rules are designed and structured to allow all of these facets to flourish.

FIVB OFFICIAL VOLLEYBALL RULES 2021-2024

Why would the FIVB specifically name “fun” as part of the recreational sport, but then that same “fun” was nowhere to be found in the competitive version of it? Instead, they decided that in competitive volleyball it is much more important to focus on creativity, freedom of expression and fighting spirit. It seems to me that they want all of us to play the game the way we want to play it, the way we think would give us the biggest advantage. Certainly, there are a few rules which we cannot break, but the Federation wants to give as much freedom as they can for us to operate however we please within these wide boundaries. Of course, if you keep abusing a specific rule you’re risking the possibility that the game will have to change its rules (aside from potentially pissing off your opponent). But as long as you’re aware of that, even the international organization is inviting you to be as creative as you want to express yourself however you want. The only question you have to answer yourself is this: are bending rules and exploiting loopholes parts of your self-expression on the court?

SILENCE = LIE?

Let’s talk about the one part of any sport that everyone loves to death: referees. Boy, oh boy, where do I begin. Our beloved arbiters, judges, zebras, however you want to call them. They are a necessary part of the game: when two teams are willing to do absolutely anything to win, we need someone to keep score, make sure the rules are being followed and to make the decisions that one team is almost always going to hate. But what do the referees have to do with the morality of cheating? Well, that’s the thing – their primary job is to make sure that no one is cheating.

They are still human, though. For better or worse we are not being judged by robots (yet). Despite the recent introduction of TV replays to many sports, it is still a homo sapiens that makes the final call. And as evolved as we are as a species, we are still limited. There’s only so much we can see, especially with team sports, where there’s so much happening on the court. While the refs are paying attention to the point guard attacking the basket, looking for a potential foul on the driving player, they may not notice that the center is hitting his rival with an elbow to the ribs, trying to free himself and get a better position for a potential rebound. Even if the ref is really trying to see whether the ball landed inside of the volleyball court, his or her field of view might be obstructed by a player. Referees make mistakes, it’s unavoidable. It’s a part of the game and there’s not much we can do about it.

What can we do with that knowledge as players or coaches? The first option is this: we can try to help the refs make as few errors as possible by admitting to each mistake we might’ve made. If the ball went out of bounds off of our hand, we could simply confess to it, even if the arbiter was ready to give you back the possession or point. If you’re reading through this idea with a smirk on your face thinking “yeah, to hell with that”, you might be interested in another option: we can let the refs do their job without admitting absolutely anything. If they get it right, so be it. But if they make a mistake that profits you, why wouldn’t we just take that point? Do we have a moral obligation to admit to a wrongly called play? 99.9% of players and/or teams would never do that, so why should we? If we take a point or a possession away from our opponent and we know we did not deserve it, are we playing unfair? Does our silence equal lying? What if we take it even a step further and instead of simply not admitting to our fault in a certain play, what if we actively argue or lie that we should’ve gotten a point we know we didn’t earn? What if we see that our attack lands just outside of the volleyball court, but we try to convince the ref that it touched the line? What if we score a basket through a completely legal defense, yet we fight with the ref for a foul call?

Let’s go back to reading through the rulebook of your sport for a second. Kobe Bryant – one of the greatest basketball players to ever live shared his thoughts on that matter in his own book:

I made a point of reading the referee’s handbook. One of the rules I gleaned from it was that each referee has a designated slot where he is supposed to be on the floor. If the ball, for instance, is in place W, referees X, Y, and Z each have an area on the court assigned to them. When they do that, it creates dead zones, areas on the floor where they can’t see certain things. I learned where those zones were, and I took advantage of them. I would get away with holds, travels, and all sorts of minor violations simply because I took the time to understand the officials’ limitations.

The Mamba Mentality, 2018

We are not Kobe. He was being called “a psychopath”, “a maniac” and “a killer” by his peers and media. He not only wanted to win, he wanted to embarrass you. He was looking for the every single thing that could give him even the slightest advantage in the game. Kobe’s competitiveness was beyond legendary. He would not give a crap about the “unwritten rules” or fair play. He’s coming at you with an arsenal of trash talk. He knows more about your own game than you do. You can’t stop him. You can only pray you can try to slow him down.

YOU’RE THE ONE DRAWING THE LINE

Where do you draw the line on what’s fair and what’s not? To what lengths are you going to go to to gain a competitive edge? How do you express yourself on the court? These kinds of questions you have to answer yourself. The answers will vary, they will depend on how we see the world, what is our sense of morality, how we were raised, what was our environment like when we first started playing.

Let me give you a couple more questions to end today’s reflection: have you ever had a situation on the court after which you felt like you’ve crossed the line? Have you ever been on the receiving end of such a play? Has that changed the way you compete? What was the best “outsmart your opponent” moment you’ve ever witnessed?