journal 8 15 09 -- tennis ethics

Yesterday I saw two emblematic moments on sports TV. First Novak Djokovic practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
To me the no-brainer commitment to victory over the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. It's one reason why (after growing up as a baseball, football, and basketball fan) I now watch only tennis, golf, and track. Duping officials is the sports equivalent of plagiarism.
In golf players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in cases where the infraction was so marginal that they would probably have gotten away with it. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament. But yesterday's second moment, which was in a golf program, was of a more philosophical sort. Padraig Harrington was playing a round with a reporter who was also quite a good golfer. As they went around the course, Harrington explained how he saw his various options for how to play each shot. At one point he had missed a fairway, and there two quite different kinds of rough very close together in the area where his ball had come to rest. Before he hit his next shot, he explained the difference, not just in terms of its consequence for shot selection but as an instance of how chance plays such a powerful role in golf, since one kind of rough posed a much more difficult challenge than the other. "Golf isn't about being just," he said. He observed that most modern course design and course preparation and maintenance are calculated to make things as fair as possible. His point was that such efforts, while well intentioned, contradict the nature of the game. One player may hit a great shot that ends up in a divot; his opponent of the moment may flub a shot and watch it bounce off a tree into the heart of the green. Harrington said that for him one of the central aspects of golf as an experience was that it required you to accept and deal with whatever chance, no matter how seemingly malevolent, sends your way. While he felt some pride that his success owes a lot to his ability to maintain his equilibrium, and to sustain his pleasure in the game, no matter how the day's breaks are going, there was also a deep humility in his recognition that important things were not in his--or anyone else's--control. It's true that he saw such acceptance as a competitive advantage, just as confidence is. Each sport has a psychology as well as an objective discipline. But he also seemed to be saying that it was a pleasure and privilege to accept golf on its own terms and that those terms were the context within which he played.
These are things that are hard to talk about without sounding moralistic. To make matters worse, I will quote Thoreau, who was something of an absolutist (single quotes because this isn't verbatim): 'If you are in deep water after a shipwreck and have wrested a floating plank from another survivor, you must return it to him though you drown yourself.' The stakes in sports cheating (or its repudiation) aren't so dire, but such choices are shaped prior to the game itself, and they define it, and the player.