Читать книгу The Edge - Roger Pielke - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe word sport, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from the Old English word disport, which refers to “anything which affords diversion and entertainment.”1 Writing in the 1600s, Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician, mulled on the nature of happiness and human life. He wrote of the challenges faced by humans and how they wear on us: “We either think on the miseries we have, or on those that threaten us.”2 Yet, Pascal continued, although we may be “filled with a thousand essential causes of weariness, as a game of billiards, suffices to divert [us].”
Sport—playing a game—does indeed divert us. Yet sport is far more than a mere diversion. Sport can be found everywhere and across time. It is no exaggeration to say that sport is fundamental to the human experience.
A few hundred years ago, the word sport was a euphemism for sex. In 1772, the English writer Thomas Bridges observed, “in England, if you trust report, Whether in country, town, or court, The parsons daughters make best sport.”3 Given how much people like competition, it is probably understandable that the modern usage of the word sport shares an etymological history with romps with the parson’s daughter. Apart from sex (or maybe even more than sex), the modern understanding of sport as a competition, typically but not always athletic, offers something close to a universal human value.
This chapter takes a look at what has been called the “spirit of sport”—a phrase that comes from the modern Olympic movement and characterizes the values underlying the rules of sport. Figure 2.1 shows the frequency of the usage of the phrase “spirit of sport” in English-language books. A century ago, the spirit of sport was much discussed as the institutions and games of the modern Olympic, college, and professional sports began to take shape. The phrase fell out of favor in the second half of the twentieth century as the institutions of sport assumed their modern forms, but it has seen a remarkable resurgence in the twenty-first century.
Figure 2.1. Frequency of the Phrase “Spitit of Sport (1860–2008)
Souce: Google Ngrams, https://books.google.com/ngrams.
One reason for this resurgence is the ongoing war for the soul of sport. As we fight that war, we instinctively appeal to the values that we believe underpin sport. That takes us back to the spirit of sport. But what is it? Are its underlying values the same today as they were in the past? Or are there other values that could and should define sport in the twenty-first century?
In this chapter, I argue that the spirit of sport is what we say it is—we hold the power to define the meaning of sport. It is time to use that freedom to open up the spirit of sport to renewed discussion, debate, and change. First, however, let’s get closer to the heart of what we mean by the “spirit of sport.” Is it something with a price tag? Where should we expect to find it? Where might we have lost it?
Money Matters, But Not That Much
A discussion of modern sport often turns to money. Baseball players get $100 million-plus contracts. FIFA has more than $1 billion in the bank. Cities gift the NFL hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for new stadiums. Top golfers and tennis players get tens of millions in endorsement contracts. Nike, Adidas, and Under Armor are rolling in profits. College football coaches and athletics administrators are paid millions of dollars.
But although money is the focus of a lot of discussion, in the big economic picture, sport is just not that big. One popular textbook on sports economics observes, “while sport looms large in people’s minds, in economic terms it is still a small proportion of overall economic activity, at least as measured.”4 We can get a sense of the size of sports in the overall economy by taking a look at some numbers.
Table 2.1. Revenue of US Professional Sports Leagues and the NCAA, 2013
Table 2.1 shows some recent summary statistics for the major US professional sports leagues and the NCAA. The league with the most revenue is the NFL, with more than $12 billion in 2015.5 The NFL wants to see this grow to more than $25 billion by 2027.6 How much is $12 billion? Turkish Airlines, the world’s seventh-largest international airline, has revenue of about $12 billion.7 Another comparison of $12 billion in revenue is the entire US coffee industry.8 To put that number in context, $12 billion was also about how much Apple earned every two weeks in the first quarter of 2016.9 In dollars and cents, the NFL is about 4 percent of the size of Apple. Yet the Super Bowl is the most watched TV program in the United States and, apart from soccer’s World Cup, maybe even the world. Money doesn’t tell the whole story.
In 2014, Bloomberg Business asked how the NFL might compare if it were a “real business” rather than a nonprofit.10 (A nonprofit! Amazing, right?)a Bloomberg suggested that the market capitalization of the NFL would be $46 billion, based on the sum of individual team valuations. Putting together revenue and market capitalization, Bloomberg concluded that “the NFL has one of the smallest revenue bases. It would rank behind seventeen of the companies in terms of the amount of money it brings in.” Hypothetically, it would rank 106th in the S&P 500 in terms of market capitalization and 255th in revenue. Bloomberg also notes that the NFL commissioner made $37 million in 2013 (and more in 2014), which was more than Disney CEO Robert Iger, who made $34 million leading a company with $48 billion in revenue.11
The entire 2013 revenue of the major US sports (including NASCAR and the NCAA) was about $25 billion. That represented about 0.15 percent of the total US gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the size of the nation’s economy.12 The overall sports industry, which in addition to professional sports includes things like health clubs, equipment, and apparel, was estimated to be $485 billion in 2013,13 representing almost 3 percent of GDP. More broadly, the global sports industry was estimated to be about $1.5 trillion in 2013, or about 2 percent of global GDP.14 No matter how you slice the data, whether looking narrowly at the professional sports or broadly at the sports industry, sport is not a very big part of the US or the global economy.
What about sport in Europe? Soccer (or “football” as Europeans call it) is the overwhelmingly dominant sport across the continent.15 Table 2.2 shows some information about the biggest football leagues in Europe. The total annual revenue in 2013 for football is coincidentally quite similar to the $25 billion in revenue of the major US sports. About half of that comes from the “Big Five” domestic leagues in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France.b Even though the mix of games and leagues is very different in Europe compared with the United States, the magnitude and share of the economy of professional sport in Europe is similar to those in the United States.
Table 2.2. Revenue of European Soccer Leagues, 2013
In contrast to the relatively small proportion of the economy that sport occupies, it takes up a large share of our collective attention. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but a 2001 study at Northwestern University found that in the United States, the most commonly reported subject in newspapers of all sizes was sports.16 In 2015, ESPN was the most watched US cable network, having aired eighteen of the top twenty-seven most-watched programs.17 The largest television audience in UK history was for the final of the 1966 World Cup; in the Philippines, a 2006 boxing match between Manny Pacquiao and Erik Morales broke the national record for TV viewers.18
In short, sport has an outsized presence in society when compared to its economic footprint. Money matters a great deal in sport, but sport is not defined by economics. There is something about sport not captured by economics that captivates us, that holds our attention, and doesn’t let us go. What is it? For more than a century, that je ne sais quoi has been called the “spirit of sport.” Let’s see if we can get a sense of it.
Looking for the Spirit of Sport: Track and Field—And a Famous Flop
Track and field is characterized by its utter simplicity. Running, jumping, throwing. Athleticism at its most fundamental. Unlike most team sports, athletics offers the clear objectivity of results. We know that Usain Bolt runs faster than Jesse Owens, even though Owens died six years before Bolt was born, because they ran the same race.c As soon as children can walk, they want to run, and they want to race. How fast can I go? Am I faster than my mom, dad, brother, or sister?
The spirit of sport might be described as competition for the sake of competition, for something pure and untainted. If that is indeed what the spirit of sport is, then the best place to find it is in the most simple of all sports, track and field. But when we take a close look, we find that simplicity and purity are hard to pin down. In reality, sport is characterized by innovations—both human and technological—and by efforts to push the boundaries of the rules. Let’s take a look at the high jump, which is characterized by a century-long quest to see how high humans can soar.
One of the longest-standing athletic world records for both men and women is for the high jump. Like sprinting, the sport is a simple one—athletes try to get their entire body over a horizontal bar without dislodging it. The highest clearance wins.
The world record for men has been held since 1993 by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, who cleared 2.45 meters (just under 8 feet 1 inch). To get a sense of just how mind-blowing this athletic feat is, imagine jumping as high as the crossbar of a standard soccer goal. Think about that the next time you are standing on a soccer field. It seems impossible. For women, the record is 2.09 meters (or a bit over 6 feet 10 inches) and it has been held since 1987 by Stefka Kostadinova of Bulgaria. That is like jumping over the top of Blake Griffin, the Los Angeles Clippers basketball player. Seemingly just as impossible. These records have stood for what is an eternity in sporting terms, by far the longest period since high jump records were first, kept more than a century ago, as shown in figure 2.2.
Will these records ever be broken? Have athletes jumped as high as they ever will? Is there still an edge to be gained? Questions like these drive athletes to compete against each other, and against history. They also help us to the notion of the spirit of sport.
Figure 2.2. Men’s and Women’s High Jump World Record Progression
The high jump was not an event in the ancient Greek Olympic Games.19 It emerged out of Germany in the late eighteenth century and, like many demonstrations of physical prowess, evolved into a competitive sport in England in the following century. Athletes first cleared the bar by jumping over it and lifting their legs. Humans are nothing if not innovative, and new techniques quickly followed. The Scissors, Eastern Cutoff, Western Roll, and Straddle were names of new techniques that offered alternative ways for the athlete to get his or her center of mass above the bar while also allowing those pesky legs to also get over the bar cleanly. The 1936 Olympics saw each of these techniques in use, but by the 1950s, athletes had mostly adopted the Straddle, which required them to roll over the bar belly-down and one leg at a time. Each innovation in technique saw greater advantages in performance, and world records were repeatedly set and broken in the first half of the twentieth century.
But it was not just technique that evolved. In 1957, Soviet Yuri Stepanov set a new world record at 2.16 meters. He cleverly used a shoe—what we might call an “elevator shoe”—with a very thick bottom, adding perhaps as much as an inch (~25 millimeters) to his height. This low-tech innovation gave him a slight edge in his leap. Because the International Amateur Athletic Federation had no rules in place for shoe sole thickness, Stepanov’s jump was legal. But it was also viewed as problematic. So, soon thereafter, shoe sole thickness was regulated at a maximum of 13 millimeters, but Stepanov’s thick-soled record was allowed to stand. The thick-soled shoe is an early example of how “technological augmentation” changes competition and forces us to consider and sometimes implement new rules, a subject explored in chapter 7.
The Soviets were not done innovating, however. National coach Vladimir Dyachov studied film to determine what characteristics in form led to the highest jumps. He developed a new approach called the Dive Straddle, in which the jumper cleared the bar one body segment at a time, rather than having the torso in parallel with the bar. Athletes who had mastered earlier styles sometimes faced difficulties in learning new techniques, creating ample opportunity for successful innovators to set new records.
The high jump was originally conducted entirely on a flat surface at ground level. Athletes jumped from and landed on what was typically a dirt track. This put a premium on landing on one’s feet or at least in a way that would not cause injury. Sawdust or dirt piles were later introduced to facilitate landing, which furthered the ability of athletes to innovate. But it was the introduction of foam landing pads around 1960 that led to even greater innovation, because they enabled athletes to land safely upon completing their jump. Innovations that enable athletes to perform better are surely part of the spirit of sport.
In 1968, a twenty-one-year-old athlete from Oregon, Dick Fosbury, followed up his victories in the NCAA indoor and outdoor championships with a gold medal at the 1968 Olympic Games. What made Fosbury’s victory so improbable was that he utilized a radically different technique than that being employed by the sport’s elite. That radical technique bears his name, the Fosbury Flop. More than forty years later, Fosbury recalled that people laughed when he first exhibited the technique, which involves jumping backwards over the bar, leading with one’s head, and landing on one’s back—hence the name. Fosbury wasn’t concerned that his jumping style was called a flop: “I wasn’t offended, any athlete responds to and craves attention. . . . You feed off that attention.”20 The adulation and attention, even fame, that come with doing something no one ever has done before are perhaps also part the spirit of sport.
The Flop was born in no small part because Fosbury’s high school had installed a modern landing pit, replacing the pile of wood chips that had cushioned the falls of previous, presumably bruised, Medford High School jumpers. Fosbury wasn’t the first or only person to flop. A Montana high school jumper named Bruce Quande also used the technique. Quande, however, did not go on to athletic success. Another, more successful, independent invention of what we call the Fosbury Flop came out of Canada, where Debbie Brill was working on what was locally known as the Brill Bend. She went on to set an indoor world record (1.99 meters in 1979), but missed her shot at an Olympic gold medal because of the Canadian boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Debbie Brill competing in Germany in 1972.
Today, the Fosbury Flop is well into middle age. Its use has become almost universal in elite high jumping. The men’s record has stood for more than twenty years and the women’s for almost thirty. Has innovation in the high jump reached a plateau? Is there no more edge to eke out of this sport?
I asked these questions of Jesus Dapena, a professor emeritus of kinesiology at the University of Indiana’s School of Public Health, who is a long-time student of and one of the world’s experts on the high jump. He told me that “Every person who has ever given a limit has had to wipe the egg off his face soon after when someone invariably broke the limits he had proposed!” Still, he ventured some guesses: “Of course, there are limits. Is it possible to jump 2.50 meters [8.2 feet]? I’d say, probably yes. 2.60 meters [8.5 feet]? I don’t know. 3.00 [meters, or 9.8 feet]? I’d say no—and if it ever happens, I’ll be long dead by then, so I’ll be safe from the egg-on-face situation!”21
One factor that may be responsible for the slowdown in high jump record breaking may be the ubiquity of the Fosbury Flop itself. Based on his research, Dapena concludes that “ultimately, the Fosbury-flop is the best technique for some jumpers, and the straddle for others.” Thus, we might expect to see both techniques employed, depending on what works best for a particular athlete. But, Dapena explains, today “only the Fosbury-flop is in use; the straddle has disappeared,” due, he argues, to the fact that the Fosbury Flop is easier to learn.
If Dapena is right, that the Straddle would be better for some athletes, then there are likely elite high jumpers today utilizing the Fosbury Flop who might jump a bit higher using the Straddle. Similarly, there may be jumpers who may have never reached elite levels because they were not suited for the Fosbury Flop. Either way, the net result is to reduce the potential for higher jumps by using a less-than-optimal technique for some jumpers and, perhaps, to reduce the pool of athletes competing in the high jump. Ironically, while the Fosbury Flop once helped athletes break performance boundaries, its ubiquity today could be holding them back.
But the moral of the story of Dick Fosbury—and Yuri Stepanov and Debbie Brill and all the others who have tried to jump higher than anyone else ever has—is not about imposing limits, but about extending them, pushing to the edge and then beyond. This drive to constantly push back the limits of performance, to do what no one else has done, is surely part of the spirit of sport. So, too, is the readiness to innovate in techniques and equipment (shoes, landing areas, etc.) in order to excel in athletic prowess through competition.
So, is trying to do one’s best the spirit of sport? Is it as simple as that? As simple as jumping over a bar? Regrettably, no. The issues can get complicated—very complicated, very fast.
Losing Sight of the Spirit of Sport: Scorching the Track with a Wicked Problem
“Wicked problems” are ones that, in the words of the classic 1973 article that explained the concept, “are ill-defined; and they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution.”22 Such problems are “resolved,” not solved. They are called “wicked” because “they are “malignant” (in contrast to “benign”), or “vicious” (like a circle), or “tricky” (like a leprechaun), or “aggressive” (like a lion, in contrast to the docility of a lamb). By definition, we can never really solve a wicked problem; we can only do better or worse at trying to manage it. And better or worse depends on what we think the problem is in the first place, or whether we think that there even is a problem requiring action. Wicked problems can be addressed only through negotiation, and negotiation can only make the problem better or worse; negotiation can’t solve the problem. An oft-cited example of a problem of this sort is crime, which is never solved completely; we just do better or worse at tackling it, depending on the responses that we put into place through our political and social systems.
Many of the controversies facing sport today are wicked problems. Let’s continue with the beauty and simplicity of track and field to illustrate how a situation can turn from simple to wicked in very short order.
Leo Tolstoy, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist, once said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” The story of Justin Gatlin, the American sprinter and for most of 2015 the fastest man in the world, offers a bit of both stories. Out of track and field for four years during his athletic prime (a man on a journey), he returned to the sport (a stranger comes to town) at an advanced age—in terms of athletics—to achieve track and field successes that had never been witnessed before.
It would be a feel-good story of achievement following adversity but for the fact that Gatlin’s four years away from track and field competition were the result of a ban that he served for doping. His return and rise to prominence thus raise thorny questions about the possible long-term benefits of banned substances, the appropriateness of bans, and what it means to excel at the highest levels of track and field. In short, Gatlin’s story has tension, drama, and conflict. It also illustrates why doping in sport is a wicked problem—there are no absolute solutions, just imperfect rules and regulations (the result of negotiations) that leave many loose ends, which many people view as unsatisfactory.
The five fastest times in the 100 meters in 2015 belonged to Gatlin.23 In the most prominent 100-meter race of 2015, at the World Championships in Beijing, Gatlin was edged out by 0.01 of a second by Usain Bolt, the photogenic Jamaican sprinter. The media had built up the race as one between good and evil—Bolt, the athlete who had achieved his successes the right way, and Gatlin, the cheater. As Bolt edged Gatlin at the finish line, a BBC commentator gushed, “He’s saved his title, he’s saved his reputation—he may have even saved his sport.”24
Despite the soaring rhetoric, no one accused Gatlin outright of achieving his current success by breaking the rules. But questions remain. Ross Tucker, a South African scientist and an expert in athletic performance, explains that “Gatlin is the problem that will not go away. . . . He is a former doper, dominating a historically doped event, while running faster than his previously doped self.”25 For his part, Gatlin is aware of the talk: “There’s nothing I can do,” he has said, “except go out there and keep running and pushing the envelope.”26
Justin Gatlin en route to gold in the 100 meters at a Doha Diamond League meet in 2015.
Figure 2.3. Best Annual 100-Meter Times by Age for Ten Top Male Sprinters
I was curious about how unusual Gatlin’s performance is as a thirty-three-year-old man in 2015. Data can help us understand how Gatlin’s performances stand up in historical context, but data cannot adjudicate between good and evil.
To better understand Gatlin’s performance, the first thing I did was to gather data for the top sprinters ever at the 100 meters, and compare how their times progressed as they aged.27 That data is shown in figure 2.3. As you look at the figure, bear in mind that lower on the chart means faster on the track.
That chart is a bit noisy, but what it shows is how exceptional Gatlin’s improvement was from ages twenty-eight to thirty-three, achieving successive personal bests. Gatlin explains that his doping suspension may be the cause of his late form: “I’ve been away from the sport for four years—I literally didn’t run for four years, so my body’s been rested.”28 He does have a point, because moving his times four years to the left would make his curve much less unusual.
But Gatlin was not placed in a time capsule for four years. He aged like everyone else. If taking four years off from competition in the prime of a sprinter’s career is thought to lead to record-shattering times, then we’d probably see more athletes taking long breaks. But that seems doubtful, given that the best sprint times occurred between ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven for this set of athletes. Father time is unforgiving.
Figure 2.4 presents a cleaned-up version of the data, which shows a moving three-year average of times of the fastest nine athletes other than Gatlin, plus boundaries that most times of the other runners fall within (technically called the “standard deviation”).d
Figure 2.4. Best Annual 100-Meter Times by Age for Ton Ten Male Sprinters
The top ten fastest male sprinters in the world stopped improving as a group by about age twenty-five. Gatlin’s times and improvement are, it is safe to say, unprecedented among this group of runners.
The longer Gatlin scorches the track, the more his incredible feats and the questions that they raise will be discussed. The data clearly show that Gatlin has been doing something remarkable, maybe even incredible. Whether those achievements would have occurred without doping is another question altogether, and one that can’t be answered by looking at the numbers. In truth, the role of doping in sport can never be seen in performance numbers alone, no matter how remarkable they may seem. It is a sign of the times that incredible performances often evoke feelings of not just awe and appreciation but also doubt and cynicism.
Here is why Gatlin—and the issue of doping more generally—presents sport with a wicked problem. Seen from one perspective, Gatlin has achieved incredible sports performance and deserves to be recognized as an unprecedented champion, because of both his age and his performance. What he is accomplishing might, under different circumstances, be an example of the spirit of sport such as described in the discussion of high jumping: the exceeding of limits, the attention that results. Yet his history of doping means that he (and indeed everyone) is cheated from celebrating those successes.
Seen from another perspective, Gatlin’s successes have been achieved improperly; they are the consequence of him breaking the rules, serving his punishment, and then returning to benefit from his transgressions. From this point of view, Gatlin’s competitors (and indeed everyone) are being cheated. There are no easy answers here—in fact, as we will see in chapter 6, on doping, there are no solutions at all, only different ways to manage the challenge.
For instance, some people propose lifetime bans for athletes who dope, thus removing them from the equation in future competition. In this scenario, there would be no Justin Gatlins to worry about. However, the inherently imprecise nature of the science of antidoping and the rights of athletes to due process mean that lifetime bans of this sort have been ruled impermissible.29 There is a movement afoot to criminalize doping violations—perhaps even to throw athletes into jail.30 Sports bodies have strongly objected to such laws, as they would create an uneven amalgam of laws around the world, which was the reason for the establishment of harmonized rules in the first place under WADA. Some people have proposed that former dopers should be able to race but not be able to hold records or win medals. This too is problematic—why have them race at all then?
Sprinting, a simple sport, becomes wickedly complex with the introduction of rules that regulate the use of performance-enhancing substances. As chapter 6 explains, there are no general solutions in response to the challenge of doping in sport. We (athletes, governments, sponsors, fans, etc.) negotiate rules to govern sport and then we must live with the consequences. If the rules are deemed unsatisfactory, we can change them. We can do better or worse, and the evidence suggests that, today, we are doing worse.
When Justin Gatlin became the personification of evil in sport in 2015, while achieving unprecedented success on the track, one thing he left in his wake was the spirit of sport. Some people complained that it was still there—with Gatlin performing remarkable athletic feats—but that it was being obscured, even suffocated, by rules and regulations. But the urge to define the spirit of sport as something apart from the rules of competition fails to recognize that sport is made possible by rules. The spirit of sport is not obscured by rules; the spirit of sport is found in the rules that govern competition.
Finding the Spirit of Sport: It’s in the Rules We Make
Ultimately, our collective agreement to respect and abide by rules traces its modern history to Pierre de Coubertin and the movement he founded, the Olympic movement. Modern sport—including college sports in the United States and professional sports leagues around the world—has been deeply influenced by the philosophy of “Olympism . . . a philosophy of life which places sport at the service of humanity”31 and that demands that athletes swear “an oath of fidelity to the rules and unselfishness.” The Olympic oath of fidelity became formalized as the Olympic Oath, written by Coubertin, in the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium. The oath reads: “In the name of all competitors, I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules that govern them, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.”32 Other sports typically have their own version of an oath of fidelity. For instance, the NFL has what it calls an “Integrity of the Game Certification,” which emphasizes adherence to the rules.33
Does this mean that the spirit of sport is to be found in the rules that govern sport and without which there would be no sport? Maybe. But looking for the spirit in the rules is problematic, because the rules are often—perhaps usually—open to interpretation. And the scope for interpretation can be so wide that the people and institutions whose job it is to enforce those rules—from referees and umpires to sports bodies and governments—find it all but impossible to do their jobs.
Moreover, the rules that govern sport are not purely technical or legalistic lists of dos and don’ts. At their core, the rules are the practical reflections of the abstract values that we and all sport-loving individuals and societies hold dear.
Over the past century, the phrase “spirit of sport” has been subject to as much textual exegesis as any biblical passage.34 The notion of the spirit of sport goes as far back as the Old Testament, which declares that “if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules.”35 It is thus no surprise that the many symbols and rites of the Olympic Games evoke the trappings of a formal religion.
Religion deals with very big questions (such as “Why are we here?”). The questions that sport presents aren’t that big, but they aren’t trivial either: How should we behave? What should the rules be? Who gets to decide? Sport has long upheld a value structure that provides justifications for answering questions like these. The core values in this structure have been amateurism, purity, autonomy, and uncertainty. Unfortunately, no matter how appealing these values may be in their abstract, idealized forms, they no longer serve sport particularly well in the twenty-first century. Exactly why and how they are outmoded is something that will become clearer as this book progresses, but let’s take a quick look at each of these values and the battles being fought to save them or to change them.
Amateurism
The battle over amateurism has been going on for a while. The words amateur and professional came into their modern usage in the first decade of the nineteenth century.36 The ancient Greeks are often held up as the model of amateurism in sport, but the reality is that the Greeks had no such concept, and the original Olympians were well rewarded for their sporting accomplishments. Early Olympians organized into the equivalent of modern-day trade unions to negotiate their pay, the structure of the game, and even their pension plans. The modern version of the Olympics was based on a mythological concept of amateurism. The American athlete Jim Thorpe, of Native American ancestry, was stripped of his 1912 Olympic gold medal in the decathlon because he had played minor league professional baseball in 1911, earning $60 per month.37 It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the notion of “amateurism” in the Olympic Games was replaced by an ethos of professionalism. Today, a major battleground over amateurism focuses on college athletics in the United States, where amateurism has broken down but has yet to be fully replaced.
Purity
The notion of “purity” in sport comes up in several of the battlefields discussed in this book. Amateurism reflects a kind of purity in the sense of the love of competition untainted by the supposedly crass desire for material gain. As one scholar has written, “such commercialization debases the nobility and purity of sport as an activity and opens the road to corruption, gambling, fixing and exploitation.”38 The puritanical ideal in sport is found in the tales of nude Greek athletes. There, too, the reality is less pure than the mythology we have created.39 Not everyone today has abandoned “a fanciful notion of purity in sport,”40 but many of us—probably most of us—have embraced a more realistic view. Our healthy cynicism, however, is not shared (not publicly, anyway) by many sports bodies, which continue to invoke purity as the basis for policies related to doping, technological augmentation, sex testing, and even match fixing.
Uncertainty
What is sport anyway? A leading school of thought is that sports, as contrasted with other forms of entertainment, are defined by what is called “uncertainty of outcome.” Ryan Rodenberg, a professor of sport management at Florida State University, explains that “uncertainty of outcome” is “what differentiates spectator sports as a form of entertainment from other (scripted) options such as books, films, musicals, and professional wrestling.”43 Uncertainty of outcome has come into focus because of heightened concerns about “match fixing”—the prearrangement of sporting outcomes, which might be wins or losses or discrete actions within a game. Usually, match fixing is associated with gambling and an effort to secure an improper edge in betting markets; sport is just a means of securing that edge. Using the notion of “uncertainty of outcome” to define sport is deeply problematic, however. Consider that competition is nothing more than efforts by opposing parties to remove uncertainty of outcome, because competition, by definition, involves different parties trying to assure themselves (and not their opponents) of victory. The fuzziness of “uncertainty of outcome” makes defining match fixing difficult, and trying to regulate it almost impossible. Sport, I argue, is more than uncertainty of outcome.
Autonomy
The notion that sports bodies should be free to govern themselves without interference from governments has a long history. The notion of “autonomy” in sports governance originates in Europe, where, “for most of the 20th century, the majority of European states allowed sports organisations to develop as bodies fully independent of the public authorities.”41 In 1955, the Olympic charter stated that “National Olympic Committees must be completely independent and autonomous and entirely removed from political, religious or commercial influence.”42 In today’s era of big money sponsorships and vast governmental influence over sport, the notion of autonomy of governance may seem quaint. But even today, sports bodies, especially international ones, expect to have autonomy over decision making. In practice, autonomy has led to a lack of accountability and numerous governance failures. At the same time, many professional sports organizations, such as the NFL and the NBA, are deeply interwoven with public authorities—some would say far too tightly intertwined. Finding the right balance of self-governance and public involvement in sports bodies is a defining challenge of the contemporary sport landscape.
Throughout this book, I argue that the values of amateurism, purity, autonomy, and uncertainty no longer serve sport well and should be replaced. Traditionalists may object, protesting that we can’t just cast values aside, that values aren’t fashion accessories; they are enduring, even timeless, touchstones. But that’s just not true. Values do change, all the time, in sports as in other aspects of life. I argue that the values underpinning sport have already changed; in most cases, we just have to realize it and deal with the consequences.
One episode in the history of US college football helps to illustrate how we tailor rules to our values, and how both values and rules can change over time. The 1960s and 1970s saw periods of racial tension in US society, and, as often occurs, societal tensions were reflected in sport. The spirit of sport meant one thing for a long time, but then values changed, and with it, so too did the spirit of sport. In the episode described below, the change to the spirit of sport was motivated by no less an authority than God himself.
In 1969, fourteen African-American football players in the highly successful program at the University of Wyoming wanted to protest the treatment of blacks in the United States.44 The Brigham Young University (BYU) football team was coming to Laramie that week, providing Wyoming students with an opportunity to protest the policy of the Mormon Church (BYU is a bastion of Mormonism) to exclude blacks from the Mormon clergy. Such protests involving athletes were not uncommon; the year before, two American sprinters had famously raised black-gloved fists on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympic Games. The Wyoming football coach’s reaction to the protest by his fourteen players was quick—he kicked them off the team before the game.
At the BYU football game, some Wyoming students displayed a Confederate flag, perhaps to emphasize their belief that African Americans needed to be careful about kicking up a fuss. Sports Illustrated weighed in, perhaps a bit tongue in cheek: “Good riddance, and never mind a lot of talk about civil rights, because this is Wyoming, and out here we do things our way. Like Coach [Lloyd] Eaton told those athletes: Boys, if you don’t like the way we run things around here then you better go play at Grambling or Morgan State.”e The issue quickly rose to national prominence. A lawsuit was filed by some of the athletes.
Over time, tensions subsided. Many of the fourteen players transferred to other institutions, the lawsuit fizzled out, and Eaton allowed three of the players to return to play football for him the following year. Several went on to play in the NFL, with one, Joe Williams, winning a Super Bowl with the Dallas Cowboys. Eaton was “promoted” into administration, and later left to take a minor position in the NFL.45 The controversy had lasting effects, however. Wyoming “was marked as a racist institution” and suffered consequences in recruiting, securing only one winning season in the 1970s and losing twenty-six of thirty-eight games following the dismissal of the players.46 The more lasting consequence, however, was to draw national attention to the discriminatory policies of the Mormon Church.
In the years that followed, pressure built. The University of Arizona opened an investigation of BYU to determine if it was a racist institution.47 Upon arriving in Tucson for a college football game, the BYU squad faced protesters. Not long after, Stanford and San Jose State decide to boycott BYU in every sport. Pressure on BYU had been amplified by the “Wyoming Fourteen” and had reached a crisis point for BYU. Tom Hudspeth, BYU head football coach in 1969, “was ‘made aware’ that [Mormon] Church leadership wanted him to add African-Americans to his team, and fast.”48 And he did, but it wasn’t enough.
That is when God stepped in. In June 1978, the president of the Mormon Church revealed that God had “heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come [in which] all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.”49 In the ten years prior to the revelation from God, BYU had won 57 out of 110 football games; in the ten years after, 103 out of 127.50 Changing perceptions of the values espoused by BYU enabled it to draw from a larger pool of athletes, helping to improve the team on the field. BYU was at the center of changing social values, which in turn helped to change the fortunes of BYU football. As Michael Oriard writes, “fourteen young black football players at the University of Wyoming helped change Mormon theology.”51 In 2002, the University of Wyoming erected a statue to the Wyoming Fourteen.
This episode shows that values shape sport and that sport, in turn, shapes values. There was a time when racism and segregation were part of the spirit of sport in the United States. As values and practices changed, sport had to change also. As in the case of the Wyoming Fourteen, sport played a role in ushering along changes in both sport and society.
The central conclusion of this book is that sport and those charged with developing and enforcing the rules that govern it need to recognize a new set of values as the basis for its governance in the twenty-first century. These new values are professionalism, pragmatism, accountability, and transparency.
Professionalism is not actually a new value; it has been emerging within sport for decades, if not longer. Accountability and transparency have become more important in sport with each new revelation of a failure in sports governance—and those revelations are growing more numerous and more shocking. Pragmatism has always been a defining feature of how we govern sport, and it’s time to recognize and embrace that reality more fully.
We can change and improve the rules that define sport because sport is what we make it. If values have changed, or need to change, then sport should change accordingly. Defining the spirit of sport in the twenty-first century does not require an act of God. It does, however, require that we openly discuss and debate sport, what it is, why we value it, and how we wish it to be governed. Such discussions will benefit from a vocabulary that permits nuance and differences of opinions to be clearly identified. And a vocabulary for talking about the edge is where we turn next.
a In 2015, the NFL gave up its nonprofit status, which it was granted in 1942; Drew Harwell and Will Hobson, “The NFL Is Dropping Its Tax-Exempt Status. Why That Ends Up Helping Them Out,” Washington Post, April 28, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/04/28/the-nfl-is-dropping-its-tax-exempt-status-why-that-ends-up-helping-them-out/. The NBA and NASCAR are not nonprofits. The PGA and the NHL are nonprofits.
b The English second division, the Championship, had 2013 revenue of about US $560 million, making it larger in economic terms than the US Major League Soccer (MLS); Deloitte Sports Business Group Articles, “Annual Review of Football Finance 2015-Revolution,” http://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/sports-business-group/articles/annual-review-of-football-finance.html.
c Ah, but it is more complicated than this. They ran on different surfaces, used different equipment, and were timed with different technology. Even in the simplest of competitions, the 100-meter race, things are not as simple as they might appear.
d The pattern is much the same for the 200 meters, which is not shown here but can be seen here: The Least Thing, “More on Justin Gatlin’s Age-Defying Times,” July 8, 2015, http://leastthing.blogspot.com/2015/07/more-on-justin-gatlins-age-defying-times.html.
e It is not clear to me whether Sports Illustrated was mocking the folks in Wyoming or agreeing with them. The writing is inscrutable enough to permit both interpretations: Pat Putnam, “No Defeats, Loads of Trouble,” Sports Illustrated, November 3, 1969, http://www.si.com/vault/1969/11/03/611044/no-defeats-loads-of-trouble.
