Last week’s “Spillgate 2013” provides a great springboard for the follow-up to Part I of this blog. Here’s the brief recap: NBA coach Jason Kidd instructed a player to bump into him so that he could “accidentally” spill his drink on the court, causing the referee to award a much-needed timeout.1 Commentary ensued throughout the sporting world regarding the virtue of this move. The most amazing, in that disheartening sort of way, coming from ex-NBA coach, Kevin Loughery. He applauded the tactic though did express some concern, primarily regarding Kidd’s execution of the move, as though he’d performed a fundamental basketball maneuver poorly: Don’t let your elbow flare out when shooting a jump shot and don’t “over-act” when you’re spilling liquid on the court for a timeout.2
It should be of no surprise that this sort of deception occurs from the top down. Watch any competitive basketball game and you’re bound to see the following incident on repeated occasions: the ball goes out of bounds and two opposing players nearest the ball point fervently in opposite directions signaling that it’s their respective team’s ball. One player is guilty of deceiving the referee (and, additionally, deceiving his opponent). And many find no ethical concern with it: deceiving the referee, they argue, is just part of the game.
To simplify, imagine two people playing 1-on-1 basketball. The ball goes off the fingertips of one player unbeknown to the other. Clearly, that player should admit to the transgression and award the other player the ball; the player should not behave as though it didn’t touch his hand. What an odd moment it would be for the two of them if he did. Ethicists and sporting enthusiasts alike agree on the ethics of this simplistic case. It just seems fair. Given this obvious truth, then, the addition of a referee should make the game more fair and not less. To argue that a referee should make the game less fair is to fail to understand the role of the referee in the first place.
At this point, we can promote two possible prescriptions for action. At the least, when the ball goes out of bounds off the hand of a player, she should not actively advocate as if it didn’t in attempt to deceive the referee. In a stronger version, the athlete would actually motion that the ball had, in fact, gone off her hand.
The same general class of incidents occur in numerous sports, though likely none more prominent than on the soccer field. Television viewers often have the advantage of slow-motion replay during which they watch a player, closely guarded, violently dive to the ground (typically after the defender has stolen the ball), writhing on the grass grasping his ankle as if in severe pain, even to the point that the trainer comes to the field with the first aid kit—and all the while, we realize he literally wasn’t touched.
The argument supporting such a move goes something like this:
- Getting the referee to award penalties in your favor gives your team a better chance of scoring.
- The more chances you create to score the better player you are.
- Therefore, the more you can deceive a referee into awarding you penalties, the better player you are.
While we might applaud the creativity of such thinking, it lacks the critical component required in a proper evaluation.
Part of the problem lies in what it means to deserve something. Deceiving the referee into giving you something that you don’t deserve is similar to doing so on an exam—if a student copies his classmate’s answers, while he may have fooled the teacher into awarding him the corresponding points, he didn’t deserve the ensuing rewards. To think he does removes any meaning from the verb, to deserve. In the fake-trip example (and also the above out-of-bounds example) the athlete does just that: he claims a right to something he doesn’t deserve.
Additionally, our exam-copier takes something from his classmate that his classmate does deserve—and to take a thing from someone deserving of that thing, in any other walk of life, we refer to as stealing. This is the case even if he does so in a clever manner, so as to avoid the teacher accurately refereeing the exam.3 Likewise with our fake-tripper. Clearly not sportsmanlike, to say the least.
And on a more practical—even comical—note: how odd it would be to consider these acts as virtuous actions within sport and, thus, to have teams hire acting coaches to work with athletes on tripping themselves: moaning and grabbing certain parts of their bodies to make it more believable. Some may even argue that, at this point, one wouldn’t even be practicing soccer—though this is an epistemological question for another time. Certainly, though, we can agree that they’re not playing the game in a sportsmanlike manner.
1 Immediately following the game, Kidd claimed that the spillage was truly accidental, due to sweaty palms. Yet following clear video footage and the league’s $50,000 fine, he admitted to intending the spill.
2 Loughery commented, “I think it’s a great move…[I]n all honesty, there were no rules against it. I don’t think Kidd deserved to get fined at all.” This illustrates the importance of following the spirit of the rules versus the letter: Imagine being on the Rules Committee and suggesting, “Should we make a rule against a coach spilling liquid all over the court in order to receive an additional time out?” With no rule specifically forbidding coaches from tossing a banana peel out onto the court, we might imagine this a “great” move as well.
3 This case is made even more apt when the exam is graded on a curve, thus making the situation more of a zero-sum example in that the cheater’s undeserved answers directly affect the final grade of the non-cheater’s final.
