When Sports Figures Go Rogue
Jim Tressel, the mega-successful Ohio State football coach long admired for his religiously inspired ethical values, recently resigned his coaching position after admitting prior knowledge of NCAA violations by his Buckeye program.
According to Sports Illustrated, violations known and not reported by Tressel go back decades -- not only at Ohio State, but during his previous coaching jobs as well.
Another figure in the sports world has been in the news for questionable behavior of a different sort: the Marlins’ Scott Cousins, who ran over the Giants Buster Posey at home plate, probably ending the star catcher’s season. Some insist it was a dirty play, as Cousins could have slid around Posey and found a corner of the plate rather than taking the more direct and dangerous route to the dish.
I believe Cousins did nothing wrong given Posey’s position and the rule governing such situations, but the rule should be changed -- allowing large men with a head of steam to run over exposed catchers is begging for disaster.
But let’s put that aside. The Posey/Cousins collision naturally inspired recollections of the famous incident in the 1970 all-star game when Pete Rose scored the winning run by demolishing Ray Fosse, who suffered a separated shoulder and was never the same. That was deplorable, because it came in an exhibition game.
Rose’s impersonation of a runaway train took place long before MLB decided to award home field advantage in the World Series to the team from the league which won the all-star game. Nothing was at stake, and the teams did not play to win (the managers played virtually everyone, with some of the stronger players receiving just one at-bat and a few innings in the field.) Yet Pete Rose barreled over Ray Fosse as if it were the seventh game of the World Series.
Rose never expressed contrition.
To the contrary, he declared that he had little choice but to run over Fosse: his father would have accepted nothing less. If that’s the case, so much the worse for Harry Rose. He raised a ballplayer famous for his boundless hustle but incapable of even the most basic cost-benefit analysis, such as the idea that it’s not worth endangering an opponent’s career to win an exhibition game.
To be clear, we shouldn’t condemn players for actions in the heat of the moment, and few moments are more heated than rounding third and charging to a base blocked by an opponent. Steamrolling Fosse was understandable. But Rose’s failure to question his actions after the fact warrant condemnation. It’s a slippery slope from an attitude of “Winning is everything (even in a meaningless game)” to the self-destructive gambling that led to Rose’s banishment from baseball.
He was so addicted to competition that he reflexively treated every game as life and death, and trying to win ballgames as manager of the Reds wasn’t enough: Rose’s pathology required him to find a personal stake in other games as well.
There’s a compelling connection between Rose’s behavior and the misdeeds of his fellow tainted Ohio legend, Jim Tressel. Consider the closing sentence of the recent Sports Illustrated’s cover story on Tressel, which referred to “an axiom of big-time college football, one that Jim Tressel has heeded for years: You do whatever it takes to win.”
The Tressel story feels sadder than similar escapades involving ethically challenged coaches (say Jerry Tarkanian or Bruce Pearl), who didn’t preach goodness or try to conceal their willingness to push the ethical envelope.
But those who call the devout Tressel a hypocrite may miss the larger point.
I have no doubt that his religious convictions are sincere and that he is fundamentally the very decent men his friends and colleagues describe. Think what that tells us about the obsession with victory that mars the world of professional and collegiate sports.