Cheating and Taking Steroids in Sports

Cheating and Taking Steroids in Sports INTRODUCTION â€Å"Sports will either be a school of virtue or a school of vice, and that’s why the epidemic of cheating in professional sports is, and ought to be, a huge cultural concern. Sports, at every level, is supposed to be a training ground for virtue, to mould the character of athletes, coaches and supporters so that they may learn lessons that may help them to achieve off-the-field as much as on. In few other venues are people able to learn as effectively the good habits of perseverance through difficulties, teamwork, striving to overcome obstacles, the importance of preparation and practice, and the courtesy and class we call good sportsmanship. But the field, court, track, diamond, rink, pool and roadway can also cultivate vice, when results become more important than virtue, when winning becomes more important than winning fairly. It has been hard to open a sports page recently without reading something to do with cheating and its consequences. Recently encount ered readings include Bill Belichick and the clear contravention of the NFL’s videotaping policy; Patriots’ Safety Rodney Harrison and his suspension for taking an illegal substances; NBA referee Tim Donaghy and his expulsion for betting on games he was officiating; Barry Bonds and his tainted home run record, along with former heroes turned synthetic pseudo-supermen Jason Giambi, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro; Floyd Landis’ suspect yellow jersey and the expulsion of what seemed to be half this year’s Tour de France participants for blood doping and other violations; WWE icon Chris Benoit and his steroid-induced murderous-suicidal rage; various college recruiting violations, Olympic scandals and much more. Professional boxing almost looks clean and honest by comparison. WHY DO THEY CHEAT Sports are a microcosm and stylization of life: goal-setting, preparation, effort, character, the integration of mind and body, competition, success and failu re. It’s all there in sports, distilled and intensified into a few hours’ experience. The usual answer is that cheaters have so strong a desire to win that they will strive to do so at all costs. Cheaters do have a desire to win, but by the time we are adults we know that a cheated victory is hollow. An adult cheater knows that he has not won through skill and effort, and he knows he will not experience the pride that comes from a genuine win. The only thing the cheater is left with is that he knows that other people will believe that he won and he will reap the value of their enhanced esteem. So here’s a hypothesis about the psychology of cheaters: Cheating is not motivated by a desire to win, but by wanting to be thought of by others as having won. Cheating is a kind of social metaphysics-what others believe is true is more important than what is actually true. Another possibility is that the cheater knows the above-that a cheated win is hollow-but in the shor t run his intense desire to win crowds out his knowledge. So cheating is a failure to hold the context of why one is playing sports: strong desire overwhelms the cheater’s knowledge, or through weakness of will the cheater ignores his knowledge to indulge the desire.