Morality in Sports: Everybody's Problem

I really haven't spent very much time worrying about the moral ins-and-outs of athletics in general—perhaps because using so much "body English" to reverse the W & L fortunes of the Cardinals has used up most of my energy.

But the request to address this represents a challenge—and I will give it my best shot, so here goes:

Let's Start at the Beginning

Starting from when we are very young, why do we play games (including sports)?

Short answer—"Sports are 'pretend life.'" Youngsters can learn life's lessons from day-to-day involvement in games of various types without losing their jobs or risking their lives or futures. (For example, be a poor teammate and see how long it takes for you to be picked in choose-ups).

Leave it to Adults to Screw Things Up

Don't get me wrong—there are terrific people involved in coaching who have helped kids.

But too many parents (often wanting to reverse mistakes they made in their earlier lives) live vicariously through the athletic exploits of their children. So they send their Little Precious to gymnastics or ballet class in the hope she'll turn out to be the next Margot Fonteyne or Nadia Komenich.

Or they'll encourage their 10-year-old strikeout artist to throw a splitter (regardless of the risk to his young arm).

When I was a kid, our youth sports leagues were tied to our nearby elementary school. Every baseball player got a T-shirt and cap. If we were short a right fielder, we'd congregate under Richie's window and beg his Mom to let him play in that morning's game.

That was it. Now we have "tag days."

Every time a parent is forced to invest time and effort to hang around shopping mall entrances with canister in hand, it somehow gives them a sense of "ownership" in the team. It entitles them to scream at the refs or demand that the coach play his kid, or encourage a coach to act like Vince Lombardi.

Add to this, the incentive—especially in low income homes—to turn an athletic kid into a future "cash cow" and you've got a million individual disasters waiting to happen.

Bad Habits Move Upward

Values in the home when kids are young move right up the food chain into junior high and high school.

I live in an affluent high-tech community where you'd think athletics would be kept in proper perspective. Instead, we recently had a top-to-bottom change in school administration—from the Supe all the way down—as the direct result of a coach-to-player incident.

How could that happen?

Well...a coach felt that one of his players bucked team policy so he suspended him from the football team. The parents bitched through political channels to the school administration, and the player was reinstated.

The coach and his entire staff resigned in protest. The teacher-coach and other school staffers who supported the coach were demoted or reassigned to marginal educational positions.

Political infighting among school administration and staff became the norm. Things got so fouled up that the school board finally stepped in, reinstated the demoted staffers and cleaned house from the top down.

So, at the HS level, you wind up with meddling parents, coddled athletes, "win at all costs," the student-athlete as future meal ticket and the over-deification of star athletes—not an easy challenge for the "good guys" who merely view athletics as one of many mechanisms for teaching life's lessons and building character.

Although this may not fit perfectly here, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "life in the 'hood" as an influence on young athletes.

How ironic that varsity sports can save many youngsters from the hard knocks and bad influences of the streets; while at the same time, long-time relationships and almost tribal loyalties can come back to bite a college or professional athlete in the butt.

Think of Professional Sports as a Giant "Catcher's Glove"

Pro teams catch all the unfavorable baggage that rookie athletes bring with them from HS, college and off the field. (This applies as much to spoiled rich hee-roes as it does ghetto kids hanging around in bad company).

And each professional sport must deal with these problems for both moral and selfish reasons.

There's:

(a) the integrity and marketability of each sport as a business.

(b) The financial and human investment each team makes in its young players.

(c) The need to preserve fair competition among member teams (and not allowing teams and players to gain unfair advantages—through chemical means or otherwise).

(d) The responsibility of any business organization, sports or otherwise, for the health and safety of its employees.

And (e) the moral influence of each sport on society (especially young people within the context of "learning life's lessons").

The "easy money" doesn't help any, but I believe that if a kid has his head screwed on properly from the git-go, he probably won't let all that new-found gelt go to his head.

That said—one policy implication for the NFL should be to change the way it pays its rookies so that high draft picks don't get rewarded "before they've proved anything on the field." (When money is "earned", it's more likely to be respected more and used wisely by the player whose blood, sweat and tears earned it).

What to Do, What Not to Do

From within this context, I think Roger Goodell and the leaders of other professional sports leagues are doing the best they can.

I don't think various branches of the federal government should interfere with the internal operations of these organizations because, to do so, would be to elevate their false sense of importance within our society to a point even higher than it already is.

The last thing we need is for professional sports to be politicized. Example: Arlen Spector had a sit-down yesterday with Mr. Walsh about alleged transgressions by coach Belichick and the Patriots.

Doesn't Sen. Spector have better things to occupy his time (like soaring gasoline prices)?

Seems puzzling until you consider that Sen. Spector and Comcast Cable are closely aligned, and Comcast has a major squabble with NFL Network. (Ah hah!)

But that doesn't mean that other parts of our society should ignore the issue of morality in sports. We are talking about a huge, comprehensive set of problems involving families, youth leagues, schools and society, and it is at these levels where these problems must be addressed.

Through government regulations? Probably not.

Through public pressure (on how youth leagues are operated or varsity athletic policies are established and implemented)? You bet.

And definitely through better education:

Maybe they do it now, but I don't remember ever—from kindergarten forward— ever being taught a course in "Lifesmanship" (i.e. "the way it is really is out there in the world and how to deal with life's problems and get what you want without hurting yourself or others").

And forgive me for being unduly idealistic but—under the right set of political circumstances, it would be refreshing (even cool) for our next "First Family" to use the bully pulpit to challenge our families to better understand the dynamics of how sports can positively or negatively influence their kids, straighten out their priorities, do the right thing, and raise their kids right.

Bottom Line

Let's keep our collective eyes on the ball as a society starting with the very beginning, and things will sort themselves out by the time our young athletes grow to become pros.

Ciao.

Jeff Gollin
Cardinal Guy