Context: This is an essay I wrote at the time when I decided to quit watching sports because watching sports makes me angry. I haven't followed team sports since the 2015 NCAA Basketball finals except for briefly rooting for the Cubs in the post-season of 2016 since I was a Cubs fan as a kid, and I lived in Chicago at the time they finally won the World Series again, and a few of my relatives are rabid Cubs fans who wanted to know how exciting it was to be in Chicago, so I had to make some effort to take advantage of the opportunity to keep them from being too ashamed of me. I did watch a Hilary Hahn concert instead of a Cubs game during the World Series, however. Emptiest concert I ever attended at the CSO. The officiating in the second half of the 2015 Men's College Basketball finals was so bad that it is no longer possible for me to believe that refs are honest. If I feel the need to watch sports, I watch esports now. When I watch esports, my team sometimes wins, and my team sometimes loses, and it either excites or disappoints me. It doesn't make me angry because I never feel like they got cheated. It's strange how that works.
So how 'bout Tom Brady?
Tom Brady might not quite be football's Lance Armstrong, but he's the closest thing that football has to an absolutely dominant winner. And he's one more superstar athlete that has been found guilty of cheating. Baseball had it's whole steroids era. Before that, there was the spitball era when pitchers that kept their game together by hiding Vaseline behind their ears, and rubbing a little on the ball to mess with its spin even after the league official banned the practice. (I mean, it was still cheating before it was officially cheating too, though, right? You shouldn't need a rule to explicitly say that rigging the equipment is not allowed.)
It happens in other sports too.
This seems like the ideal opportunity to comment that after the NCAA tournament in basketball this year, the main question I had in my mind was whether someone in Krzyzewski's program bribed the refs at halftime, or whether that was just a fan who bet on the game. If nobody bribed them, it sure looked to me like somebody must have threatened them. Someone scary. They didn't even attempt to make it look like they were officiating the game honestly the second half. I'm not even a fan of Wisconsin. I was rooting for Wisconsin that game despite their uniform, but mostly because I was watching the game with my dad, and he's a Purdue man who roots for Big Ten teams in tournaments as long as they're not IU. (I didn't actually hate Duke until that game. Now my favorite sports joke is that Krzyzewski is the most arrogant coach in history. Lots of teams have had legendary coaches, but only Duke made him their mascot.)
I'd watched a couple Wisconson games with my dad over the course of the season, and they don't foul. They just don't foul. One of the games was a Purdue game, and my dad insisted that they fouled and his team was getting robbed. It's the only game I've ever watched with my dad where I felt like the replays consistently agreed with me when I said "Uh... I didn't see it" rather than with my dad. He's usually a bit more biased than me, but he knows the game way better, and is better at seeing all the action. But Wisconsin doesn't foul. And they didn't foul any more against Duke than they usually do. And they didn't foul any more in the second half of that game than they did in the first half. And Duke was playing out of control during that period in the second half when Wisconson was called for more fouls that they usually get called for in an entire game. Four years in a row, they were one of the top five teams in college basketball for committing the fewest fouls. Going into the game, they committed the least fouls of any team in college basketball that year. Then all of a sudden, halfway through the second half of the national championship game, they have a double digit lead, and they start fouling at five times their typical rate? When teams tend to foul way less often when they're ahead? And they're doing it at both ends of the court? Without Duke fouling at all? (Duke had an immaculate second half as far as called fouls go, even though they have not been a particularly foul-free team over the year, and there second half looked ugly. Their second half was ugly.) Oh yeah, and if that wasn't bad enough, the refs reviewed a play at the end of the game to decide who hit the ball out of bounds, and they made a call that was so obviously incorrect that the commissioner (or whatever the head official over the whole NCAA is called) had to explain to the press that the refs on the court never saw the angle that most conclusively showed that the ball went out on a Duke player. The call was so completely unambiguously wrong that the head of NCAA basketball felt the need to apologize for it. And that was just the icing.
Apart form ambiguous instances of cheating (Did Tom Brady do what he's accused of? Did somebody actually bribe the refs?), there are unambiguous forms of cheating.
The official rules of NFL say how much the football should be inflated and they also say what the consequences should be for using an improperly inflated ball. (A slap in the wrist: $25k as a fine, I think, with the option to declare the game a forfeiture if the use of the improperly weighted balls is deemed to be the cause of the victory of the team that used them, but no option to declare it fofeited if they would have won otherwise. Goodall has decided that what happened with New England was a much more serious offense than what people had in mind with that particular rule.)
The rules of basketball give the refs the power to call fouls, and no power to force anybody to review them, and some people exploit these rules. [Edit: I believe this has changed this. But by the time it happened, my interest in the game was completely dead.]
When I was in high school, a former-professional soccer player came to teach at my school. Naturally, he also became an assistant coach on the varsity soccer team. The head coach never played soccer professionally. He turned down an opportunity to do so (in Europe), because he decided he would rather move across the Atlantic to marry his wife who didn't want to move to Europe than become a professional athlete. So he became a French and Spanish teacher and a soccer coach. At least, that was the story I heard when I asked why the former pro wasn't automatically going to become the head coach. I also heard that former pro had about two games of experience in the American professional soccer scene. This was still before 2010, so Americans still didn't care about professional soccer at all at the time (he started coaching at my high school in 2005, I don't know how much time had elapsed since he'd stopped playing pro soccer), so getting cut a few games after going pro in American soccer was about as impressive to everyone as being part of a high school volleyball team that made it to states but lost in the finals. Impressive, but meh, if that's all you've got for bragging rights.
This was my sophomore year, so as you might expect if you have read my previous descriptions of how well I did in sports as a child, I was still a bench warmer for the Freshman team. Actually, it's not quite as bad as I make it sound. I swam as a kid and was usually the guy who came in second or third out of six to twelve kids my age -- but I hated swimming. Then I switched to tennis in middle school, and was mediocre enough at that. Then I switched to soccer in high school and was so far behind that my mediocre-at-best natural ability in sports never had the chance to be fully realized in my brief attempts to learn soccer. Again, this was way in the past, so the most embarrassing thing at the time was that I played soccer instead of a real sport like baseball. (Ha!) So maybe being a freshman team bench warmer as a sophomore playing soccer is every bit as bad as it sounds. I was never any good at the sports that kids who can't play sports are good at, but I couldn't even begin to play the sports that people who are good at sports play at all.
Anyways, I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that I never won in sports so you don't have to suspect me of cheating, and any time somebody does win in sports we should all assume they cheated until they prove otherwise because I'm still a sore loser whose upset about being awful at sports as a kid. :) Actually, the point I was going to make was that this former pro believed the soccer coaching at my school was lacking one critical part of the game: how to mislead the refs. I'm serious. His main job was to train the goalies (at normal goalie stuff, not cheating), but a few practices the one year I still played when he coached (and I assume the subsequent years), he would take the whole team through sessions on how to get away with doing things that were supposed to result in penalties if a ref saw them and how to draw calls against your opponent without them doing anything when a ref wasn't looking straight at you. This was stuff like, "When you're not in a position to make a play and you're in the refs peripheral vision (far enough away from the main action that he won't look directly at you), pick a running trajectory that brings you right past an opposing player and trip yourself over your own feet right as you run past him." And then you practice doing it. Or when to be excessively aggressive to try to trigger your opponent to retaliate against you right after you drew the refs attention without doing anything that looked too suspicious. I'm not sure which of the other coaches knew that he was teaching these techniques. I'm pretty sure the head coach would not have approved. He didn't bother much with the freshman team. Neither of these coaches did much with the JV team, but the only time I learned any of this guys techniques was a day when JV and the freshman team practiced together because a couple of the other coaches were absent. So the head coach coached the varsity team, and this guy taught everyone on the JV team that day.
The one person I've ever talked to about sports after he was a professional athlete decided that the primary thing missing from training kids to play sports well at my high school was that nobody was teaching them how to cheat. (I've also talked to a few athletes about sports before they became professional athletes. All of them still played with integrity so far as I was aware.)
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