Female Sports Violence

Female Sports Violence: Choosing a Context

The furor over Elizabeth Lambert's rough play in her Mountain West Conference women's soccer semifinal has so far been mostly about gender roles. It offers a chance for a second conversation, one about the ethics of sports--individual sports and sports as a whole. Both conversations also have a bearing on many other professional workplaces. If you haven't seen what Lambert did and would like to have that as background, here is a three-minute clip: newsy.com

Different sports (and other professions) have different cultures. Some but not all of these differences are about violence. Others are about cheating.
In contact sports what levels of roughness are acceptable or even desirable are a matter of continuous debate and adjustment, as in the relatively new rules designed to protect football quarterbacks. When refs may penalize players (and thus teams) for "unnecessary roughness" or "flagrant fouls," they make judgment calls. Where these sports--basketball, soccer, others--include women, conceptions of gender may well be involved. (Conceptions of maleness may be involved even in the absence of women.) That conversation is worthwhile.
But there is a broader conversation that the country generally avoids, a conversation about the idea and not just the rules of sports. In football and baseball, players often seek to deceive referees and umpires about whether they have actually caught a pass just above the ground or a foul ball that the player has chased into the first rows of spectators. Modern television technology provides something of a reality check, but the culture of the sport usually endorses the attempted trickery. Suppose a professional player admitted--on the field, in the moment of decision-- to having only trapped a pass or caught the baseball on a bounce off a seat. Does anyone think he would be celebrated by his teammates for his sportsmanship?
At the other end of the ethical spectrum is golf, where players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in situations where they would be unlikely to be caught or would at least have a plausible defense. These penalties may cost them tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. Golf is usually an individual sport, so the players are not typically up against the potential mockery or anger of teammates. But given the generous way players usually talk about their opponents, and the way they habitually respect the game itself, it seems likely that their behavior would be the same--and would not be faulted--even in a team context. It is a sport whose culture does not change when one shifts from the amateur to the professional level. If anything, its ethics become more formal, more distinct, and more deeply consensual.
Tennis--admittedly, another non-contact sport--is an interesting case of a sport where standards of behavior are visibly up for grabs. After a period in which verbal abuse of umpires was routinely tolerated, there are now fines, though not always significant ones. The New York Times ran an op-ed this summer whose writer, an economist, urged players to exploit the new challenge rules in bad faith for competitive advantage. (He did not urge them to break the rules.) In a televised match a few weeks before, Nowak Djokovic essentially conceded a key point to Andy Roddick because Djokovic knew the call, which had gone against Roddick, had been in error. Roddick won the point, the game, and the match. Was Djokovic a fool, or was he someone who wants to play a game in which victory and money are not the only values? Can you imagine Rafa Nadal cheating, or abusing his opponent?
These two sets of issues--levels of roughness and respect for the meaning and function of rules--are not unrelated. Both involve continuous choices in situations where a player may not be able to simultaneously maximize both the chance of victory and his--or her--loyalty to the sport itself. The people--men and women--now engaged in assessing Elizabeth Lambert's rough play would serve the country well if they broadened the discussion. So would bankers and investment professionals.