Sports

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Show Us The Way

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

“The operation was a success, but the patient died.”

“We had to destroy the village to save it.”

Massada. That worked out well too.

I’m sure the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union approves of these classic oxymoronic statements, because its members are currently patting themselves on the back for standing up to Hostess Brands, Inc and not giving an inch in contentious labor negotiations that had put them on the picket line. “I think we’re the first ones who have stood up and said, ‘We’re not going to let you get away with it,’” was the message the union’s resolve sent according to  Sue Tapley, the strike captain at the Biddeford, Maine Hostess plant. “You can fight them. You can shut them down.” “Unions have been losing power for years,” added  a striking worker outside of the same plant. “This is an exceptional case. If Hostess had been allowed to get away with what they’d been trying to do, other corporations would have lined up to try the same tactics. Hopefully, this will be an example to other companies not to break their unions.” Continue reading →

The Despicable Non-Crime of Briana Augustenborg

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Alexander Jordan, 2002-2012

In US v. Alvarez, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 9th Circuit’s ruling that the Stolen Valor Act, which made it illegal to claim military honors that one has not in fact received, was unconstitutional. There is, the courts say, a Constitutional, First Amendment right to lie. Fraud—using lies for monetary profit, is already a crime, the courts argue, and so is slander. Making up stories about yourself and others may be unwise, annoying, even hurtful. Still, it is protected speech; so sayeth a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is now the law of the land.

This was a bad ruling, and I was surprised at it. Briana Augustenborg shows why.

One day this year she shared a story with a co-worker about a little 10-year-old boy she knew who was terminally ill with leukemia. The boy, Alex, was a big fan, she said, of Eagle Valley (Colorado) High School’s  football team. The colleague, a woman named Holly Sandoval, had a son that played on the team, and she offered to share the story with her son and get the team to sign a football for Alex. Continue reading →

Porn and the NFL: In Search of A Biased Referee

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

With condoms, what, 2.5 X’s?

55% of California voters decided yesterday to make porn stars wear condoms on the job—good for their health, bad for the health of the state’s booming XXX film industry. It is a reasonable guess that injecting condoms into the proceedings will put California’s porn products at a significant competitive disadvantage, and also a reasonable guess that the voters who enacted the measure couldn’t care less. So legal enterprises may go bust, their employees may lose their careers, and consumers may lose a form of entertainment they crave because of the policy priorities of those who hold all three in low regard, and who are unlikely to apply any kind of balancing standard. It’s safer for all concerned to require condoms, that’s all. Porn companies, porn careers, porn lovers—who cares about what they want? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Golfer Blayne Barber

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Aspiring professional golfers can’t just join the PGA tour. They have to qualify by completing and passing PGA school.  Blayne Barber is one such golfer, and his dreams of winning tournaments and cash prizes will have to wait at least another year, if they are realized at all. He washed out this year. The way he washed out, however, is remarkable, and shows that if he does make it into the PGA ranks, Barber will be a credit to his sport.

Indeed, most pro golfers are credits to their sport, because golf has managed to hold the line against the increasing cultural acceptance of poor sportsmanship better than any of our professional pastimes, with tennis a distant second, and third place too far away to see without binoculars. This is a sport where the honor system is mandatory. One reason the tradition of self-regulation has persisted in golf may be because cheating in contests is so easy, and because there are so many ways to do it. Players find their own balls, and write down their own scores. Anyone who has seen James Bond and Auric Goldfinger take turns cheating each other in the famous grudge match from the movie knows that amateur golf can be cutthroat and nasty. The pros have built a culture that requires exemplary conduct.

Few would be this exemplary, however. Continue reading →

Unfairness in the Name of Fairness: Virginia’s Unethical Golf Rules

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Liberty Anderson. Too bad they wouldn’t let her try to win fairly.

Lyberty Anderson, a junior at Manchester High School in Midlothian, Virginia, and undeniably female,  won the Virginia state boys Division AAA golf championship with an eagle on the final hole to capture the 36-hole tournament by one stroke. Lyberty is a terrific golfer, having demonstrated her precocious golf talents by winning women’s tournaments before she was in high school. Nonetheless, the boy’s tournament was outrageously slanted in her favor, and against her male competitors, tainting her victory.

Lyberty won, but she didn’t play the same course as her male opponents. She was allowed to tee her drives up on the shorter women’s tee, meaning that while the boys had to play a 6,653-yard course, hers was more than 1,000 yards shorter, almost 20%.  As Washington Post sportswriter Fred Bowen pointed out, Lyberty can’t be blamed for this: she played by the rules, and played as well as anyone could ask. She now says if she competes in the boys tournament again next year, she’ll tee of from the same spot as her competitors. That shows she understands fairness. Continue reading →

Lance Armstrong As The Status Quo: An Unethical Essay From An Ethics Expert

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Don’t worry, Lance. Braden Allenby understands you. You were just ahead of your time, that’s all.

There are many things to learn from Prof. Braden Allenby’s Washington Post essay, “Lance Armstrong’s fall: A case for allowing performance enhancement,” none of which have anything to do with Lance Armstrong. Among the lessons:

  • “Everybody does it “really is the most seductive and sinister rationalization for unethical conduct.
  • Someone really shouldn’t write about sports ethics when they know nothing about sports.
  • If you only understand an author’s bias after reading the short biographical sketch at the end of the article, then he wasn’t responsibly correcting for his bias in his article.
  • When someone uses the worst of all rationalizations, the deplorable, “It’s not the worst thing,” neither their judgment nor their argument can be trusted.
  • Some ethics experts have appalling judgment in regarding ethics.

Allenby’s essay takes the position that all sports should allow athletes to take whatever performance enhancing drugs that become available, beginning with the tragedy of Lance Armstrong’s final disgrace as a cheater and corrupter of his sport. Seldom do you see an argument clothesline itself so quickly: here is Allenby’s opening sally:

“In the past month, cyclist Lance Armstrong has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. His commercial sponsors, including Nike, have fled. He has resigned as chairman of Livestrong, the anti-cancer charity he founded. Why? Because the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the International Cycling Union say he artificially enhanced his performance in ways not approved by his sport and helped others on his team do the same. This may seem like justice, but that’s an illusion. Whether Armstrong cheated is not the core consideration. Rather, his case shows that enhancement is here to stay. If everyone’s enhancing, it’s a reality that we should embrace.” Continue reading →

Forget Balancing: Lance Armstrong Is a Villain

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

A constant conundrum faced by every culture is how it should categorize significant individuals whose positive contributions to society and civilization are marred by other acts that range from the unethical to the despicable. How much bad can a great man do and still be called “great”? How much wrong can a good woman engage in and still fairly be remembered as “good”? Can one wonderful act erase a lifetime of bad conduct? Are some bad acts so terrible that nothing can compensate for them? Every real human being is going to yield to some temptations, make some bad choices, be selfish, be cruel, lie, or worse. If we insist that all our heroes have an unblemished record in every aspect of their lives, we simply forfeit our heroes.

One reaction to this persistent dilemma is that we tend to be reluctant to look under the rock of a heroes accomplishments for fear that we will be disillusioned, or once the rock is lifted, we will attempt to rationalize into invisibility the ugly things we find there, or insist that they don’t matter. Of course they matter. It matters that Thomas Jefferson, who gave this nation its beating heart, didn’t pay his debts, cheated his friends and refused to live up to his own ideals. It matters that Clarence Darrow, who saved over a hundred men from execution, was a terrible father and husband and an unethical lawyer. It matters that Arthur Miller, whose plays dramatized the plight of the aging worker and the dangers of political persecution, rejected his mentally-challenged son, leaving him institutionalized and without contact from his father, though he knew who his father was. Charles Lindbergh, Jackie Kennedy, Diane Fossey, Thomas Edison, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Ted Kennedy, Pete Rose, Lillian Hellman, Walter Cronkite, Hillary Clinton—the list of the great, near-great, lionized and admired who behaved less than admirably or worse in significant ways can circle the globe. In assessing their character, as well as whether their lives deserve to be regarded as positive or negative influences on their society, fellow citizens and civilization, all we can do is apply a complex balancing formula, with factors in their lives weighted according to ethical principles, experience and our own priorities.

The question of how this balance should be applied has been raised in recent weeks in the wake of the final verdict on Lance Armstrong’s cycling career, which was decisively removed from the categories of “alleged misconduct,” “controversies,”and definitely “witch hunts” for all time as mountains of documentation, lab tests, and testimony moved it squarely into the categories of “outrageous cheating’, “criminal activity”, “corruption” and “fraud.” Continue reading →

Don’t Listen To John Feinstein, Nats Fans: He’s Wrong, And He’s Bad For You

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I know how you feel, Nats fans. BOY do I know.

For me, as a Boston Red Sox fan, what befell the Washington Nationals last week stirred unpleasant memories of having my own hopes dashed by the cruel bounces and turns of that little white ball, as it turned my team from sure winners to embarrassed losers faster than you could say”Bucky Dent.” Luckily, as I have explained here, my temporary abandonment of the beloved Hose did not turn me into a Nationals devotee, so I could watch the horrors of the Nats’ ninth inning, decisive game catastrophe, which occurred when they were one strike away from victory and a step closer to their first World Series in 79 years, with analytical detachment. I have consoled my heart-broken friends, and am prepared to help them through the long, hard winter, when visions of “what ifs?”will dance through their heads instead of sugarplums. John Feinstein, the acclaimed sports writer, isn’t helping, however. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Atlanta Braves Fans

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Atlanta Braves lost the first ever National league Wild Card play-off game, 6-3, to the St. Louis Cardinals, thanks primarily to their own atrocious fielding (the Braves made three costly errors.) Nonetheless, many fans felt they “wuz robbed” because of a bizarre play in the 8th inning, when the Cardinals were rescued from a bases loaded, one out situation after the game’s left field umpire, Sam Holbrook, apparently feeling that he had to do something to justify being on the field (regular season games don’t have left field umpires), called the infield fly rule on a pop-up that landed safely in the outfield. The infield fly rule is designed to prevent sneaky double plays, and is called when an easy pop-up might be intentionally dropped by an infielder. Thus the ball is an out whether it is caught or not.

There were three problems with the call. First, it was called very late in the play, after it was evident that the Cardinals fielders might not catch it. Second, given its placement, letting the ball drop to try to get a double play really wasn’t an option. And, third, as I noted, the ball landed in the outfield, which an infield fly is not supposed to do. The Braves argued the call, to no avail.

Then the Braves fans at Turner Field, perhaps primed by left-over anger at the NFL’s departed replacement refs, proceeded to act like total jackasses by throwing every piece of junk and debris they could get their hands on down onto the field. Continue reading →

Indians, Pirates, Greeks, Intellectual Property, and Political Correctness

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The always understated Robert Newton as Long John Silver. You owe his estate a quarter every time you say “Arg!”

Here I am banging my forehead with the palm of my hand for not realizing that all of the rhetoric flying around about how horrible it is that people in the U.S. can get away with denigrating religions would spark yet another round of political correctness applied to team names and mascots. Perhaps this was inevitable when a vestige of an earlier controversy along these lines invaded the Elizabeth Warren-Sen. Scott Brown race: some of Brown’s staff were seen doing the old Atlanta Braves “tomahawk chop” to mock Professor Warren’s beneficial delusion that she is a bona fide Native American. The political correctness police were all over this one, though the logic, as in a lot of political correctness, was strained: doing a famous fake Indian gesture to mock a fake Indian political candidate is an insult to…real American Indians? Even after the real Cherokees have announced that Warren’s pretensions of affirmative-action worthy Native American status is offensive to them? I’m afraid  those who are empowered by being offended are just too creative for me—I don’t get it.

Nor do I get an earnest essay by  Paul Lukas on the ESPN website, titled “Time to Re-think Native American Imagery.” I am on record as believing that the assault on Native American symbols and imagery for school and team names is just more cynical power-mongering by convenient victims, with the exception of the Washington Redskins, the one team with an undeniably racist name that ought to offend everybody. Still, it is obvious that the political correctness thugs will keep chipping away, counting on their persistence and the eventual bureaucratic shrug (“Oh, what the hell—it’s only a name. Let’s just give them what they want!”) to give them a victory–whereupon they will find something else to be offended about.  Continue reading →