Now, about the Black Sox scandal of 1919, in which eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of intentionally throwing that year’s World Series. Yes, it’s a useful reminder that pro sports never quite had the sepia-tinged purity we like to imagine. And yes, baseball’s mess almost a century ago stacks up pretty well, in terms of sheer systematic ugliness, to its problems today. (“Everyone was betting,” says Purdue University sports historian Randy Roberts. “Fixed games were probably rampant at the time. The game was totally sullied.”) But baseball also took immediate steps to clean itself up — by implementing the Commissioner system, suspending eight players for life, and embracing a hard-core gambling stance that’s kept the game relatively clean (at least where gambling is concerned) and Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame.
The 1951 point-shaving debacle in college basketball bears mention here, too. Like the Black Sox, this ugly affair — in which players from 1950 NCAA and NIT champion City College of New York (CCNY), the University of Kentucky, and five other teams were accused of colluding with bookmakers to tailor outcomes to point spreads — called the core credibility of the college game into question. And, as with the Black Sox, the punishment was harsh (32 players arrested, multiple indictments handed down, All American center Bill Spivey barred from the NBA for life). That didn’t fully prevent subsequent point-shaving imbroglios, including one involving the 1978–’79 Boston College men’s basketball team, but college basketball still managed to survive and thrive.
These two examples might seem comforting, since they 1) demonstrate that cheating is nothing new, and 2) suggest that quick, harsh punishments can clean things up. But the hard facts of the Year of the Cheater render both arguments moot. First off, thanks to the continued metastasis of what sportswriter Dave Zirin terms the “athletic industrial complex” — a sprawling, diffuse web that includes everything from ESPN to Nike to the New York Times Co., part-owner of your Boston Red Sox — implementing the kind of tough-love approach baseball embraced post–Black Sox is a lot harder than it used to be. Cycling, for instance, can be harsh on cheaters like Landis because, financially speaking, there’s relatively little to lose. On the other end of the spectrum, however, there’s the National Football League (NFL), which makes nearly $4 billion a year from television contracts alone — a revenue stream that wasn’t even conceivable in the Black Sox era. Maybe it’s mere coincidence that the NFL destroyed the evidence it obtained in the Patriots videotaping scandal rather than telling the public what it found. But given the financial stakes involved, it wouldn’t be surprising if the powers that be decided to sweep things under the rug rather than publicize information that might tarnish the league and its latest lucrative dynasty.
Furthermore, while cheating itself may not be new, the technical sophistication involved certainly is. For all we know, Coroebus (winner of the naked sprint that comprised the entire Olympiad of 776 BC) may have rigged his race — and if he didn’t, he could have. But no early-Olympic cheaters had the option of bulking up with HGH. Neither did the Black Sox. What’s more, the Brave New World of sports cheating is only going to get weirder in the coming years. And if the NFL and Major League Baseball can’t handle steroids, how can they possibly cope with gene doping? Or whatever comes next?
This prospect gives pause even to W. Miller Brown, a philosopher and philosophy-of-sport specialist at Hartford’s Trinity College, who’s long contended that the fuss over steroids is excessive. Among other things, Brown argues that there’s no strong ontological distinction between socially accepted performance enhancers — from caffeine to the complex surgeries used to mend athletes’ broken bodies — and those that are verboten. But he also allows that the prospect of genetic manipulation lends new urgency to the question of what is and isn’t acceptable.
“Lurking behind the understandable anxiety and fear about performance-enhancing drugs in sports is the sense that they’re beginning to show us, in a very public, powerful way, a possibility of self-transformation which we’re not yet quite ready to embark on,” says Brown. “Are we scared? Yes. Should we be scared? Yes. Are we afraid what might happen? Yes. Do we know how to direct and control it? No, we don’t.”
Put differently, today’s edgier cheaters aren’t just conspiring to fix games — they’re re-engineering their bodies and, in the process, making us question the legitimacy of every single athletic feat we witness. And they’re just getting started.
Embracing the scandal
Which brings us back to the possible upside of the Year of the Cheater. For the past three millennia or so — despite ever-mounting evidence that what we’re doing is intellectually indefensible — we’ve insisted on over-idealizing sport, on treating great athletes as moral exemplars, as well as freakishly gifted specimens. They don’t need to lead upstanding private lives, mind you. (Alex “Stray Rod” Rodriguez’s recent marital infidelities are a non-issue for most Yankee fans.) But when the game is on, we want them to embody humanity’s noblest traits. When they do — when the Patriots ran onto the field together before their first Super Bowl win, for example — we lavish them with misty-eyed praise. When they don’t, out comes our self-righteous judgment. (Manny Ramirez isn’t hustling to first?! Children, look away!)