Let’s be honest, professional sports have always been about cheating.
We constantly hear about how professional athletes try to either find the most obscure loopholes in rules, or how they steamroll right past the “gray area” of infringement and enter the realm of blatant cheating.
Think about it-athletes have used corked bats in baseball for better results, illegal fuels in NASCAR (not that I consider car racing a sport) to get better mileage and the most popular form of cheating (made famous by Barry Bonds): steroids.
At this point, though, I am unconcerned with the reason why he allegedly doped, the outcome of the home run record he broke or the way this debacle will affect how he is perceived in the future.
What I want to know is WHY NOW?
Obviously, Barry Bonds is not the first athlete that has doped, considering other well-known baseball players have admitted to steroid usage, such as Jason Giambi.
What continues to blow my mind is the seemingly overnight witch hunt that everyone subscribed to when they found out what Bonds did, or did not do. Out of thin air, everyone in the nation decided to band together in radical protest against Barry Bonds as if he were supporting the torture of innocent animals.Oh wait, that was another professional athete, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I was having a chat with my Sport Communication professor, Robert Krizek, the other day about the Bonds issue, and he takes a rather practical appraoch. He said that if we are going to legitimately question Bonds’ record, then we are going to have to go back and look at every record that was acheived in the history of sports (many of which were probably done by breaking the rules). Look at Ricky Henderson, for example. He earned the stolen base record, 130 bases, while he was hyped up on speed in 1982.
Accoring to Krizek, however, using steroids is not cheating, it’s “bad cheating.” It is cheating that people protest about, as opposed to the cheating that goes on all the time in which people ‘turn a blind eye’ or simply ‘frown upon it.’
Unfortunately, in many cases, a professional athlete’s job hinges upon how well they can cheat. Now that’s not to say that all professional athletes cheat, but these days, you’re more likely to hear about an athlete breaking the rules than and athlete who made it to the top by hard work.
Of course, cheating is not limited to just the athletes. Perhaps even more sad than a athlete cheating would be a referee that cheats. Such is the case for former referee Tim Donaghy, who has allegations against him for shaving points in games that he was betting on.
But this instance of cheating, which is just as grave as doping as far as I’m concerned, was overshadowed by the other major scandals that were ruining the face of professional sports at the same time. The fact that Tim Donaghy was accused of shaving points was just another log on the giant cheating bonfire that blazed out of control this summer.
But if you thought that the scandal ended there, then you were sadly mistaken. Michael Vick, quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, takes the cake for the most ridiculous and unethical form of rule infringement that took place recently.
He ran a kennel from his Atlanta home at which dogs were forced to fight to their deaths, and poor-performing animals were strangled or drowned.
Why would you want to drown a dog? I mean, there are plenty of alternatives to killing an animal that don’t involve unwarranted torture.
But his actions did not go without punishment. Any kind of ridiculous amount of money that the Falcons were paying, or planning to pay, Vick will undoubtedly be paid back after the impending lawsuit. The National Football League is prepared to ban Vick, if found guilty, from playing anymore. And P.E.T.A. activists are in full voice protesting against the awful treatment the dogs were subjected to.
The uniting factor between all these scandals, ethical or not, is that they brought into question, probably for the first time, the validity of sports. All this controversy has shaken our perception of what is real and true about the nature of sports, to the point where the phrase “practice makes perfect” is no longer a legitimate belief.
At the same time, can we really chastise these athletes for cheating? Drawing upon the chat I had with my professor, it’s becoming more and more clear that our society has certain cultural norms that athletes should adhere to, such as fairness and honesty. But in actuality, professional sports have always been, and will continue to be, about gaining the advantage and making more money than is necessary.
But where do we draw the line as far as cheating? How do we know what was acheived fairly and what was acheived unfairly? This was undoubtedly a sinful summer in the sports world, but until there is a way to put everyone on the same playing field, then we need to deal with the fact that cheating is a part of professional sports.
