South Coloradan

Character in Sports, or Lack There of

David Mazel

Athletics teaches values. Basketball, for example, in the words of one Eteamz.com, “builds character that reaches far beyond the confines of a basketball court” and “teaches and enforces respect, the importance of a team, dedication, honesty and hard work.”
Nothing could be more commonplace than such pronouncements. But are they true? Sure, sometimes. But not always. According to the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, researchers have tried to determine the extent to which athletics really does improve people’s character, with mixed results. It turns out to be a pretty complicated question, and apparently the jury is still out.
Let’s consider a specific basketball scenario.
The score is tied. Your opponent grabs the outlet pass and takes off on a fast break. He’s got half a step on you. It’s a sure two points, maybe the game. There’s 30 seconds left in the game, and you’ve only committed one personal foul. Everyone on your bench is yelling at you to foul the guy. What do you do?
Foul the guy — duh.
And remember, try to make it look like you were just going for the ball.
That’s what your coach has taught you to do. That’s what your teammates and the fans want you to do. If you don’t do it you’ll get reamed out for your incompetence.
Intentionally and deceptively fouling your opponent in certain situations is definitely good strategy. But in what sense can it be considered right? Since when is it right to obey the rules when they work for you but disobey them when they work against you? (Think of how much we admire Socrates for obeying the law even when it unjustly sentenced him to death.)
How does teaching young people such a selective and self-serving ethic “build character”?
And in what universe does deliberately breaking the rules, while trying to make it look like you’re not, teach “the importance of honesty”? True, such deception is not itself immoral in the artifical universe of a basketball game, but similar deception in the real world would be immoral, and the claim under examination here is that what happens on the court builds character beyond the court.
Ditto, by the way, for football, where players are routinely taught how to get away with breaking the rule against holding.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy basketball and football. And I’m sure there are many ways they do build character and teach values. I just think we shouldn’t assume that they always do so. Things are more complicated than that.
For one thing, there are many sets of rules governing an athlete’s behavior in a sporting event, and sometimes one rule-set conflicts with another.
There are the official rules (and lots of them, with the 2009 edition of the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Rules checking in at 178 pages and 2009-10 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations at 270 pages). There are also the unofficial rules, such as the one that tells us when to intentionally foul someone and when not to. These we might think of as belonging to the culture of the sport. Beyond these there is also the set of rules we know as the law. (Think NHL player Todd Bertuzzi.) And for many of us there is yet another set of rules, a religion or personal moral code.
Athletic conduct is governed by all these sets of rules, which is all well and good until they conflict with one another. The truest test of our character may well come precisely then: when two rules conflict and we must choose between them. If the coach tells you to do something you consider wrong, do you follow the rule that says “Trust the coach” or the one that says “Stand up for your own values”?
The most instructive example here is probably Eric Liddell, the sprinter immortalized in Chariots of Fire, who gave up his dream of Olympic glory by refusing to run in the 100-meter trials when the race was scheduled for a Sunday. The culture of sport told him to obey his coach and support his team and country by running. His religion told him to honor the Sabbath by not running. For Liddell, his Christianity trumped the culture of sport. That sort of clarity about which rules should overrule the others is one of the things we mean when we speak of “strong character.”
Now re-imagine Liddell as a star collegiate linebacker. Most NFL games are played on Sunday. Since our hypothetical linebacker won’t violate the Sabbath, his football career is going to end with his last college game. Unless, of course, the Lord appears in a vision to reassure him that Sunday football does not violate the Sabbath after all, in which case we might suspect that athletics has been bad for his character, not to mention his theology.
Of the many actual professing Christians in the NFL, perhaps some of them sincerely believe Sunday football is okay on the Sabbath. Others — who knows? — at one time didn’t consider it okay, but got to thinking a bit too much about that NFL paycheck and revised their religious beliefs accordingly.
In such instances, athletics has not strengthened values but weakened them. Maybe sports more generally, especially as one moves up the ladder of success and temptation, is just as likely to corrupt character as to build it. More disturbing, perhaps it is also a filter for weeding out those with the very strongest characters. Liddell might not be the only one of his kind. Just as his strong convictions kept him out of the Olympic 100-meters, maybe many other athletes are simply too virtuous to compete in the first place.