"If you have to cheat to win, you’ve already lost.”

– Bo Schembechler, former University of Michigan football coach

A sad story came out last week having to do with cheating in Little League baseball. The Jackie Robinson West team from Chicago was the inspirational winner of the Little League World Series last summer. They were the toast of the town in Chicago and were even hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House after their accomplishment. But Little League International officials said last week that their coaches knowingly fielded ineligible players and tried to cover this up by submitting falsified boundary maps. After the ruling was announced, the head coach of the team appeared to have no remorse, saying that he is a very proud coach and still considers his players champions.

This story might be more jarring to our sensibilities than it already is if we hadn’t also been reminded last week about Alex Rodriguez’s performance enhancing drug use and his repeated lies about it when he penned a letter of apology to Yankee fans. Or if we hadn’t heard last week that an arbitration panel in Texas ruled that Lance Armstrong has to pay a $10 million penalty to SCA, a Dallas sports insurance company, for lying in 2005 about whether he used performance enhancing drugs.

What is the underlying dynamic in these stories and others like them? One of the most important things to pay attention to is that, in our context, sport has become connected (for men, in particular) to significant amounts of money and fame. (It is true that claims to amateurism in sport in earlier periods have been exaggerated by scholars. Even Greek Olympic athletes in the ancient world received not insignificant perks for winning. But the scale of external rewards connected to sport has increased dramatically in our own context and many more people think – incorrectly in the vast majority of cases – that they are available to them.) In our context, many people view sport as a means to the end of money and fame. Of course, it is by winning that one becomes wealthy and famous. If sport is only a means to an end, however, then it is less important to take sport itself seriously – including its rules.

The constitutive rules of a sport make it what it is. They make the goals we are trying to reach more difficult than they need to be. While one of the goals in baseball is to score runs, players have to run within the base lines, touch each base, stay on a base until a fly ball is caught, etc. By ruling out the most efficient ways to reach our goals, the rules of a sport make it different from the rest of life. They provide the ‘play frame’, if you will.

Also, we are the ones who create sports and build stadiums and arenas even though they aren’t strictly speaking necessary for the functioning of a city or of educational institutions. We do so because we like participating in them. They are fun. In this sense, sport is a reminder of our freedom. When there becomes an epidemic of cheating in sports, as there is in the United States today, then we know something has gone very wrong, that we are losing touch with the very meaning of sport. Pope Francis put it well in an address to the members of the European Olympic Committee:

When sports is considered only within economic parameters or for the sake of victory at any cost, one runs the risk of reducing athletes to mere merchandise for the increasing of profit. These same athletes enter into a system that sweeps them away, they lose the true meaning of their activity, the joy of playing that attracted them as children and that inspired them to make many real sacrifices and become champions. Sport is harmony, but if the excessive quest for money and success prevails, that harmony is broken.

At the Sport and Values conference to be held at Neumann this April 16-18, we will be attempting to understand the human significance and meaning of sport – its internal goods or intrinsic rewards.  There is a great need for this kind of reflection in our culture today.  After all, if we don’t know what the human significance of sport is, it becomes even more vulnerable to being regarded merely as a means to the ends of money and fame. We are seeing quite clearly that this approach only leads to ruin and shame.