sportsmanship

Ethics Heroes: The Academy of Classical Christian Studies High School Girls Basketball Team (Oklahoma City)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It’s time for an encouraging ethics tale, and this is one.

(That’s Pandora above, viewing the last, and only benign, occupant of her famous box. Hope!)

The Academy of Classical Christian Studies high school girls basketball team in Oklahoma City won last season’s division championship game. A last second buzzer-beating basket against Apache High School did the job. But something didn’t feel right to Academy head coach Brendan King …perhaps the faint ping of an ethics alarm. He went home that night and watched the game tape.

“As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said, ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not,'” King told reporters. Sure enough, when he checked the tape and tallied up the baskets, he discovered his team had actually lost. The true score should have been 43-42, with Apache High the victors and the winners of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association girls basketball championship. Somehow 2 points had been mistakenly given to King’s team, making it the 43-42 winners.

League rules state that once a game is completed, it is in the books and the records can’t be changed.  King decided to tell his team the bad news anyway. The girls unanimously agreed what the right course was, and it was to appeal their own victory. In an unprecedented reversal, the league agreed, and King surrendered the championship plaque to Apache High.

Apache girls basketball head coach Amy Merriweather said that more than the championship, she and her team were grateful for the ethics lesson. “It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”

Indeed.

There is hope.

_____________________

Pointer: Jon

There’s No Crying In Tennis!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Poland’s No. 8 seed Iga Świątek beat the U.S.’s 13th seed Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 in the Wimbledon women’s final yesterday. That’s a slaughter in tennis, ending Anisimova’s feel good story as an underdog in humilation.

Świątek is one one of the best players in the world; though this is Świątek’s first Wimbledon title it’s her sixth Grand Slam title. She was favored to win, but no one has won the Women’s finals 12 games to none in a Grand Slam tournament since 1988. Anisimova’s wipe-out is being attributed to nerves; if she were a male player, the explanation would be “choking.”

Worse, however, is that after the match Anisimova started weeping, covered her head with a towel and left the court. When she came back to a huge reception from the crowd, she was still sobbing. After receiving the runners-up’s plate at center court, she cried some more as she addressed the crowd.

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Ethics Dunce: PGA Star Rory McIlroy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This one is what the old Ethics Scoreboard (now down again, I think for the count) used to categorize an “Easy Call.”

At Inhurst, North Carolina’s Pinehurst golf course yesterday, Bryson DeChambeau became the PGA U.S. Open champion again after Irish pro Rory McIlroy, to be blunt, choked.

McIlroy blew two short par putts within three holes, the last on the 18th, as DeChambeau nailed a tricky shot to finish 6 under par and a single shot better than McIlroy, who had seemed poised to win his first major tournament in ten years with just three holes to go.

McIlroy disillusioned his fans with his reaction to what ABC Sports used to call “the agony of defeat.” He watched DeChambeau’s winning putt on TV in the scorer’s room, then quickly packed up and sped out the players’ parking lot in a courtesy SUV. He didn’t talk to reporters, who were frantic to hear how he managed to lose. He didn’t even stick around to congratulate DeChambeau on his stunning victory.

Bad.

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Ethics Quiz: The Tanked Free Throw

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Unlike most ethics quizzes, I’ve made up my mind about this incident, but I acknowledge that others may feel differently and have good reasons—maybe—to do so. I hate it, however.

The NBA’s LA. Clippers and Chick-fil-A collaborated on a promotion that if a player on an opposing team misses two consecutive free-throw attempts, fans will win a free Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. And thus it was that when Houston Rockets’ Boban Marjanovic went to the free-throw with 4:44 to play in the fourth and final quarter of the Rockets’ game against the Clippers with his team leading 105-97 (not an insuperable margin), he had a twinkle in his eye. He missed his first shot, and the Clipper fans stared cheering—for chicken. Marjanovic looked around, pointed at himself, and bounced his shot off the basket rim. The fans went wild, and Marjanovic seemed to revel in his failure.

Yecchh.

…not that I want to influence you, now.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz on this Patriots Day (in Boston) is…

“Was it ethical or unethical for Marjanovic to tank his free throw so the fans could get a free sandwich?”

Just listen to those idiots in the broadcast booth…

I absolutely think it was unethical; in fact, the NBA and his team should fine and suspend Marjanovic. But this is emblematic of why I detest pro basketball only slightly less passionately than I do the NFL. The sport has no integrity. Regular season games are virtually meaningless. Players literally play about 60% harder during the play-offs: you can see it.

This episode was disgusting, and unethical in more ways than one:

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A Chess Ethics Controversy!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

And it’s a chess ethics controversy that I don’t understand, despite a relatively secure knowledge of chess. Here’s what happened:

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen quit the annual, invite-only Sinquefield Cup chess tournament in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, a stop on the Grand Chess Tour, mid-match. His unprecedented exit sparked speculation that he was engaged in a silent protest after losing to Hans Niemann, regarded as an inferior player. Niemann was accused of cheating earlier in his career.

Opined WorldChess.com,  “Carlsen likely walked out because he felt that the organizers could not ensure fair play procedures.” This was the consensus of many chess fans and commentators as well. Chess Grand Master Hikaru Nakamura also theorized that Carlsen withdrew because he suspected Niemann of cheating in their game, saying: “I think that Magnus believes that Hans probably is cheating.”

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A Favorite Personal Ethics Story From The Past, Revived By “The Queen’s Gambit”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

the-queens-gambit-8b97b1d

The Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” isn’t exactly an ethics film. However, it did trigger a memory from high school of an episode in my life that I cherish, when a group of callow teenage chess-players, led by me, repeatedly made the admirable choice, and left the scene as heroes, even though we lost.

It was my junior year, and approximately the same period in which the heroine of “The Queen’s Gambit” finds herself discriminated against for being a rare young woman in the male-dominated world of competitive chess. Arlington High School had a chess club, and I was president of the club and captain of the team. We had a girl on the team: my sister Edith, who was a freshman that year. She was undefeated in our league in ten competitions with other schools, first because she was very good, if ruthless, second because everyone she played under-estimated her, and third because I “stacked” her in our ten board line-up. Edith always played 9th or 10th board, which means she was facing inferior players, giving the AHS team a guaranteed win every time.

That year we decided to enter the Metropolitan Boston High School Team Championship tournament, a five player-team affair routinely won by Sharon (Mass.)High School’s team. It featured the highest ranking junior player in the state, and the state Junior Champion, as well as a third player of similar caliber. I brought Edith as our fifth board, and sure enough, she was the only girl in the tournament. She also did very well, though she lost one game early on: the competition was much stronger than what she was used to.

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The High School Football Slaughter

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The winning team’s players weren’t really that much bigger; they just seemed that way.

The last time I wrote about the topic of high school football routs (I think) was here. In that post from 2013, I discussed a  “vengeful father who watched his son’s hapless football team get the just desserts of all hapless teams—losing badly” who filed a formal complaint accusing the winning team of “bullying.” The Aledo High School  (Fort Worth, Texas) should have “laid up, he claimed, and not doing so was poor sportsmanship.”

This guy apparently moved to Long Island, and bullied legislators there into adopting his concept of sportsmanship. Nassau County has a policy designed to prevent lopsided results in high school football games, decreeing that if a team wins a game by more than 42 points, the winning coach must explain to a special committee why such an outsize margin could not be avoided. If the coach is not sufficiently convincing, woe be unto him.

So when the  Plainedge Red Devils made a fourth-quarter touchdown against the previously unbeaten South Side Cyclones, making the final score 61-13, a 48 point margin, Plainedge coach Robert Shaver was called on the metaphorical carpet. His explanation wasn’t good enough, apparently, so he was given a one-game suspension.

From the Times account: Continue reading →

Monday Evening Ethics Feature, 10/28/2019: Boo! Lyric Woking! Name-Calling! And Much, Much Worse…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Good evening.

1. World Series ethics observations:

  • It was little noticed, but Houston Astros pitcher Gerrit Cole did something admirable and unusual last night on the way to dominating Washington Nationals hitters and leading his team to a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series. At one point in the game, Nationals first-baseman Ryan Zimmerman laid off a tantalizing pitch just off the plate with two strikes on him. Cole could be seen saluting the batter and saying “Good take!” It is rare to see a baseball player acknowledge an adversary’s skill on the field.

I wouldn’t mind seeing such gestures more often.

  • The President not only attended the game last night, but stayed unusually long for a dignitary, who usually go to baseball games to be seen more than to watch. Trump stayed until the 8th inning, when much of the discouraged Nats fandom was streaming to the exits. I wrote last week that I hoped he would subject himself to the fans’ ugliness, and they responded as we knew they would, loudly jeering and chanting “Lock him up!” It was a black eye for Washington, D.C., not President Trump.

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Ethics Hero: The Baltimore Orioles’ Trey Mancini

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I just saw this. It defines  sportsmanship. In the bottom of the 11th inning in tonight’s Red Sox-Baltimore Orioles game at Camden Yards, in a 1-1 tie,  The Orioles’ Trey Mancini slugged what appeared to be game-winning home run to Camden Yards’ left center field.  But Boston centerfielder Jackie Bradley, Jr., the 2018 Gold Glove winner at the position, raced over to the wall, leaped, draped himself over the top, and  somehow, caught the ball to save the game for the Red Sox, at least temporarily.

Uusally when this kind of play occurs, the batter winces, or hold his head, or kicks a base.  Mancini, however, lifted his helmet high off his head as looked out to centerfield, saluting the man who took his homer away.

I’m sure it’s happened before, but I’ve seen thousands of baseball games, and I’ve never seen it, certainly not on a foiled game-winning hit.

I am now a Trey Mancini fan.

(The Red Sox won in the 12th, 2-1)

Monday Morning Ethics, 4/8/19: Is Ethics Really As Hard As These People Make It Seem?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Good morning!

(That’s Jimmy’s old vaudeville partner Eddie Jackson singing with Jimmy. Eddie was a one-trick pony and never destined for stardom, though he did appear in the Zigfield Follies. After Jimmy became a big star, he still kept Eddie on his payroll, well into Eddie’s old age. Introduced by Durante as his “partner,” Jackson would come strutting out midway through the live or TV show, singing “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey?” in his unremarkable voice. Sometimes Jimmy joined in, sometimes Eddie just strutted off stage to end the number. This courtesy went on for decades, until Eddie was too feeble to perform.)

1. Baseball ethics: showboating. This happened yesterday…

Why? Well, Chris Archer, the Pirates pitcher, was peeved because the Cincinnati Reds’ Derek Dietrich hit a home run, dropped the bat, and stood stock still and stared at it as it left the field. This is known as showboating and showing up the pitcher; it’s a fuck you move. Archer retaliated in Dietrich’s next at bat by throwing a fastball behind Dietrich near his head, widely considered to be taboo as unacceptably dangerous. The fight ensued.

The episode raised questions about MLB’s controversial PR campaign with the slogan “Let the Kids Play!”, endorsing the flamboyant on-field celebrating and styling brought to the game by Latin players,  Archer is one of the prime “playing” players, famous (or infamous) for dancing off the mound after a strikeout, kissing his arms, and other displays of self-admiration. Since that is his act, many, including me, feel that it is the height of hypocrisy for this pitcher to take offense when a batter treats him the same way he treats batters when he wins their duels.

On the other hand, what Dietrich did was the equivalent of taunting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrcITczNX90

Exuberance is one thing, bad sportsmanship is another, and that’s what this was. The “kids”can play as long as they remember that real kids are watching and learning. I don’t think Roy Hobbs’ pennant-winning home run in “The Natural” was any less dramatic because he didn’t flip his bat, watch the ball go and pump his fist going around the bases.

2. Who’s the most unethical New York Times op-ed columnist? There are so many to choose from, but Michelle Goldberg is climbing fast. I highlighted her indefensible op-ed on the Mueller report recently, but I just stumbled an older column that was worse. In this one, Goldberg bemoans that Freedom House only give the United States an “86” score in ranking how democratic a nation is, dropping the US behind such places you wouldn’t want to live in like Croatia, Latvia, and Greece (Sorry, Yaya), and it’s all Trump’s fault. The score is down from 94 in 2009, when every international organization was hailing anyone and anything connected to Barack Obama, and using numerical scoring to measure something like democracy is obviously nonsense, unless the score furthers your agenda. This is similar to journalists calling organizations “hate groups” because the Southern Poverty Law center say so. It’s pure appeal to authority with an authority that has no credibility: a  logical fallacy.

Does Goldberg persuasively explain why the U.S. is suddenly less democratic? Oddly, she doesn’t mention the collapse of a responsible, trustworthy press—sure that’s worth subtracting at least 12.38 points. She also doesn’t mention how the American Left has been trying for three years to undermine elections and the elected President , or as Victor Davis Hanson writes,

“Are such efforts in the future to be institutionalized? Will the Left nod and keep still, if Republicans attempt to remove an elected Democratic President before his tenure is up? Are appeals to impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, and a Special Counsel the now normal cargo of political opposition to any future elected president? Is it now permissible in 2020 for Trump’s FBI director to insert an informant into the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee?”

What do you think, another—let’s see—18.47 points down? Goldberg doesn’t think so: she focuses on such things as Russiagate, though she nods that there have been some positive developments on that front: “Several of the criminals who helped Trump get elected either have gone to prison or soon will.”

Love it. Later Goldberg says that Trump’s attack on fake news somehow made other nations start censoring the news media there. That statement above is an outright lie. None of the individuals Mueller indicted had any role in “helping Trump get elected,” as we now know. But she writes that the report gives us two reasons to worry:

“The first is that it usually takes more than two years for a democracy to collapse. “Elsewhere in the world, in places like Hungary, Venezuela or Turkey, Freedom House has watched as democratic institutions gradually succumbed to sustained pressure from an antidemocratic leadership, often after a halting start,” the report said— an increase in corruption and a decrease in transparency — both hallmarks of this administration — are “often early warning indicators of problems in a democracy,” undermining public faith in the legitimacy of the system.”

What corruption is she talking about? The Secretary of State selling influence to foreign power through her fake non-profit? No, it can’t be that. An administration using its Justice Department to illegally try to sabotage an opposing party’s Presidential candidate? What about transparency? Even many liberal commentators say that Trump’s administration is more transparent than Obama’s. And who is undermining faith in the legitimacy of the system more than people like Goldberg, who support baseless Democratic conspiracy theories about a traitorous President and a stolen election?

And reason #2:

“Second, if Americans increasingly ignore Trump’s words, foreign leaders don’t. Authoritarianism is on the rise all over the globe — according to the Freedom House report, this is the 13th consecutive year that global freedom has declined. Trump’s presidency is a consequence of this trend, but it’s also become an accelerant of it.”

It’s the 13th consecutive year according to Goldberg’s dubious source, but Trump’s tweets the past two and a half years are really at fault.

Why is this “fit to print”?

3. If our democracy is failing, here’s one of the real reasons:

In Long Island,  11-year-old Bella Moscato said that she was going to choose the President for a sixth-grade assignment at Samoset Middle School to write about a personal hero. The teacher told her that President Trump was not an appropriate choice, and suggested–guess who!—Barack Obama instead.

Bella’s mother, Valerie Moscato says what the teacher did amounts to intimidation and censorship. Yes, and also indoctrination.

Sachem Central School District Superintendent Dr. Kenneth Graham issued a denial, saying,

It is not accurate that this student was told that they were not allowed to conduct research or report on any individual for a school assignment, including President Trump. To the best of our knowledge, by choice the student is still conducting their project of President Trump.

The school board is supposedly looking into the matter. The Moscatos want an apology, and if he is smart, the Superintendent will grab the chance to get off easy.  That teacher, however, should be fired.