The fact that a story is tabloid fodder doesn’t mean it can’t carry ethical wisdom along with its titillation content. As the number of alleged Woods mistresses continues to climb ( fifteen, the last I checked, but that was three hours ago), the Woods saga is casting light on more ethics issues than most. Such as… Continue reading
Sports
The Ethics of Ignorance and Apathy: Gore’s Million Degree Gaffe
I didn’t watch Al Gore when he appeared on the Tonight Show a couple weeks ago. What he said then while hobnobbing with Conan should be old news, but in fact it was no news at all, because virtually no news media gave it more than a passing mention. Then, by purest accident, I heard a talk-radio host ranting about a shocking statement Gore had made on the show, and I checked to see if he could possibly be quoting the former Vice-President correctly.
He was. Here is the exchange: Continue reading
Tiger Woods Ethics, Part II: Yes. It Matters
There are two main strains among the culturally corrosive arguments in support of Tiger Woods. One, discussed in Part I, is the “great athletes don’t need to be great human beings,” a contention that chooses to ignore the inescapable fact that they are paid to behave like great human beings, whether they are or not. While this argument is mostly obtuse, the second strain is the more ethically offensive. Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon embraced it with both arms in his defense of Woods entitled, “Some context on Tiger.” Its thesis: virtually all big-time athletes cheat on their wives, and if you had the opportunities and temptations they do, you’d cheat too. Translation: “It’s no big deal”: Continue reading
Tiger Woods Ethics, Part I: Betrayal’s Not for Heroes
I wasn’t planning on commenting on the Tiger Woods soap opera. Its ethical lessons seemed obvious, and merely xeroxed themes that I have, in the eyes of some, thumped to death. I do feel that the apparent glee with which some in the sports media have attacked Woods for revealing his true character is damning…of them. Golf’s Golden Child finally outed himself as a phony “good guy” and a classic case of the prodigy who won’t or can’t grow up, a man who has been carrying on multiple adulterous affairs while using his bottomless checkbook to cover his tracks. It seems that many reporters have long known that Tiger’s public image was a fraud, and had chafed over the adulation heaped on him as they witnessed the golfer being mean, petty and boorish, often to them. Now these journalists feel it is “safe” to skewer Woods, and are doing so with gusto. Cowards. They were parties to a mass public deception, and their duty was to let us know Tiger was playing us for suckers when they knew it, not when his lies became National Enquirer headlines.
As for Tiger’s own conduct, however, I presumed most could see the ethics issues clearly. Then the apologists and rationalizers started writing their columns. Continue reading
Ethics Dunces: NBC and the Today Show
NBC has announced that the couple that crashed the White House dinner, thus breaching national security as well as basic standards of honesty and manners, will appear on the Today Show. This adds one more reason to detest the two, who by combining the two things the news media can’t resist—the Obamas and reality show wannabes—have inspired the irresponsible news media to once again neglect genuinely important news events in favor of trivia. But the real ethics miscreants are NBC and the Today Show. Given two self-involved, irresponsible fools who break into the White House in order to become celebrities, the network and its morning show decide to make certain that their plan achieves its goal. And if this motivates the next, slightly more unhinged would-be celebrity to do something more harmful to innocent people or the nation? Hey, as long as the ratings are boffo, why should the Peacock Network worry about irrelevant issues like the President’s safety? Continue reading
The Ethics of Bigotry, Part III:Tom Yawkey’s Red Sox Racism, and How Not to Prove It
Tom Yawkey owned the Boston Red Sox for four decades and his wife Jean owned them for one more; it is accurate to say that he was the most influential individual in the storied team’s existence. Yawkey bought the team in the mid-Thirties, after it had suffered through one of the worse stretches of awful play on record, sparked by an earlier owner’s fire sale of its best players, including Babe Ruth. Yawkey ran the Red Sox with an open checkbook and a stated objective of giving the city of Boston the best championship money could buy. Soon the once-pathetic team was fielding all-time greats like Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, and a brash young phenom named Ted Williams. By the time Yawkey died in 1976, the Red Sox had one of the largest, most loyal and fanatic fan bases in sports, and the team was entrenched in New England culture. Boston remains properly grateful, and the re-naming of the street outside Fenway Park “Yawkey Way” is no perfunctory tribute. (The names of Yawkey and his wife Jean are spelled out, vertically, in Morse Code on the famous hand-operated scoreboard on Fenway Park’s left field wall.
The Red Sox came close, but they never won that World Championship under Yawkey. One of the primary reasons was that the Yawkey way was racist. Continue reading
Soccer Ethics, and the Duty to Self-Report in Sports
Back in January, Pope Benedict XVI opined that soccer was the perfect vehicle to teach young people moral lessons, “a tool,” in his words, “for the teaching of life’s ethical and spiritual values.” Since then, soccer players have been going out of their way, it seems, to prove him wrong, led by New Mexico women’s soccer player Elizabeth Lambert. Continue reading
Baseball Ethics Here!
Commercial: The 2010 Hardball Times Baseball Annual is hot off the presses, and it contains an article by me analyzing the standards of character, integrity and sportsmanship that are or should be applied to candidates for the Hall of Fame. Continue reading
Player Dementia and the Fan’s Dilemma: Is Watching N.F.L. Football Unethical?
It is Sunday, and much of America is ready to settle in front of millions of wide-screen, high-definition television sets to watch Sunday’s favorite entertainment: NFL football. The last thing football fans want to think about today is ethics, and today, perhaps, they shouldn’t have to. Although we are not there yet, the time is fast approaching when not only football fans, but the companies that buy commercials, the merchandisers that sell NFL-licensed jerseys and posters, the TV networks, and the nation itself may have to consider a difficult ethics question: is supporting pro-football unethical? Continue reading
Ethics Hero: Joe Girardi
I’m a life-time Boston Red Sox fan, and the New York Yankees winning anything is like a knife to my heart. Nevertheless, fair is fair. Joe Girardi, the Yankee manager, is an Ethics Hero for November.
Driving home from the Stadium after winning the World Series last night, Girardi stopped to help a motorist who had lost control of his car on the Cross Country Parkway and had crashed into a wall.
Girardi could have passed the buck, as most of us do in those situations. Lots of other cars would have an opportunity to help the driver, and Girardi had every reason to think he had done enough that night—a historic victory, a celebration, and now it was time to go home. It would have been easy to drive on. Nobody would know, nobody would criticize.
He did the right thing: Joe Girardi stopped to help a fellow human being in trouble. His choice had nothing to do with his being a New York celebrity, the manager of baseball’s most famous team and recently-crowned champion. It had to do with fulfilling his obligations as a citizen and a human being.
Today you’re my hero, Joe.
Just don’t expect me to be a Yankee fan.
Ethics Alarms 