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KRIEGER: Ethics have fallen off map

By Dave Krieger, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 23, 2008 at 12:45 a.m.

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Kelvin Sampson, coach of the No. 15 men's college basketball team in the country, negotiated a midseason exit from the storied program at Indiana University on Friday amid charges he broke the same rules he broke earlier at Oklahoma.

A photograph taken by an 11-year-old boy may prove that Roger Clemens, No. 8 on baseball's list of career wins, "misremembered" under oath before Congress whether he attended a party at Jose Canseco's house, as his former personal trainer claimed.

Barry Bonds, No. 1 on baseball's list of career home runs, cannot get an offer to play for any team, perhaps in part because he is under federal indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Ted Johnson, former CU and Patriots linebacker, told ESPN that while with the Patriots, he sometimes received lists of opponents' audible calls at the line of scrimmage during the week before a game.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania wondered whether the NFL really wants to talk to Matt Walsh, the former Patriots video assistant, about the team's program of videotaping opponents' defensive signals, also known as Spygate.

These are headlines from a single day, Friday, Feb. 22, in the world of sports. Taken together, they raise at least this question:

Where have all the ethics gone?

We have been over this territory repeatedly with regard to baseball's steroids era, and you've heard the list of rationalizations from baseball's apologists. But what appears to be a growing compulsion to game the system, to cheat, is far from limited to baseball.

There have always been people willing to seek an advantage outside the rules, but the revelations were occasional and notorious. These days, what used to be years' worth of allegations come compressed into a single 24-hour news cycle.

Sampson's case is perhaps the most inexplicable of the recent trove. Not quite six years ago, he was the most inspirational story in college sports, becoming the first coach of Native American ancestry to take a college basketball team to the NCAA Final Four.

Sampson's father, Ned, was an American Indian basketball coach in segregated 1950s North Carolina. He was one of hundreds of members of the Lumbee Nation to disrupt a Ku Klux Klan rally and cross burning in a field near Maxton, N.C., an event the Lumbees celebrate annually to this day.

"My father had four jobs every summer," Sampson said at the 2002 Final Four in Atlanta. "He taught driver's ed. He sold World Book Encyclopedias. He sold life insurance. He worked in the tobacco market. . . . All those tobacco markets, warehouses, had tin roofs. I just remember how hot it was and how thick the dust was. You better do a good job or somebody's getting ready to holler at you."

The younger Sampson followed his father into the coaching profession, but in a new era in which ability mattered more than skin color or ancestry. He climbed the ladder quickly, moving from Montana Tech to Washington State to Oklahoma, his teams earning a reputation for relentless defense and rebounding.

At Oklahoma, the NCAA said he and his staff made more than 550 recruiting phone calls that were impermissible under the rules. He was barred from making recruiting calls for a year. This did not prevent Indiana, where basketball is pretty close to a religion, from hiring Sampson not quite two years ago. According to the NCAA, he proceeded to continue making impermissible recruiting calls at Indiana and then lied about it to investigators.

Why? Reports after the first violations at Oklahoma suggested Sampson viewed impermissible phone calls as a relatively minor violation, even though he was president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches when it formed its Ethics Committee and held an ethics summit to impress upon coaches a respect for the rules.

At 52, Sampson had a dream job. He threw it away to make some extra phone calls to recruits.

Clemens continues to deny using performance-enhancing drugs, despite contradictory testimony from Andy Pettitte and former trainer Brian McNamee.

Bonds wants to play another season and get a chance to add to his 762 career home runs, but nobody seems inclined to sign him as he awaits trial, accused of lying about his use of performance-enhancing drugs to a grand jury.

The Patriots, the NFL's best team in this decade, are now alleged to have purloined opponents' signals on both sides of the ball. Walsh, their former video assistant, won't say what he knows without indemnification from legal action.

Sampson, Clemens and Bonds, supremely successful at their crafts, all stand accused of cheating and then lying about it. The Patriots stand accused of merely cheating so far.

Rosie Ruiz cheating to win the Boston Marathon is one thing. She wasn't contending any other way. Elite athletes and coaches doing the same is something else. They can have success, fame, glory and money without cheating, but it's not good enough.

Either the stakes are too high or the ethical standards are too low. Maybe both. A number of sports now offer rookie orientation seminars on the dangers of drugs, unprotected sex and duplicitous financial advisers. Maybe ethics need to be added to the curricula.

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

Comments

  • February 23, 2008

    11:52 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    R8R_H8R writes:

    Where have Ethics gone? Please. Give me a break. I've heard Pittsburgh Steelers Steel Curtain Defensemen talk about steroids in their locker room in the 70's all over, everywhere. Priests have been raping boys for CENTURIES, but were afraid to speak out. Politicians have always been crooks. I get tired of people pretending that people used to be better 'Back in the Day'. There is now, and always has been, a crowd of people that severely lack ethics. They dont care. And it's nothing new.

  • February 23, 2008

    3:50 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    r8rh8r writes:

    To begin, I emphatically agree with the first poster that none of this is new. In the era of 24-hour, tabloid news coverage, we are often too aware of every lunatic (e.g. Clemens and Bonds), every minute of the day. Had Petite or Knoblach told the foolish lies that Bonds and Clemens told, we'd all be nauseated by nonstop news coverage of them as well.

    Second, this problem is a consequence of greed. Chief among the greedy are the business owners underlying these sports. There is not enough attention paid to the fact that the Bud Seligs and Roger Goodells of the world were all too aware of the cheating that was going on in their sports. If cheating is occurring and no one is enforcing the rules, how does this impact the sport?

    Imagine a competition in which 30,000 people are competing for 2,000 jobs. Of these people, 10% of them do steroids while the other 90% don't. Hypothetically, lets say that 1 in 6 people who do steroids get a job. Of those that remain, less than slightly more than 1 in 20 will get a job. Thus, at the end of the game, while only 10% used steroids, 25% of those who got jobs were steroid users.

    Suppose you decide to enter the multi-million dollar job competition. Faced with this question of 'should I do steroids,' what will be your choice? If there is no consequence for doing steroids, you'd be a fool not to use them.

    This is the problem in baseball today: the owners have looked the other way so long, that those who don't cheat are either out of the league by know or they are suckers. This media dance we are engaged in--destroying the lives of hall of fame players--is simply a witch hunt.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not condemning the proceedings. I think the cheaters deserve it (mostly because guys like Clemens and Bonds should have yielded a roster slot to a twenty-something rookie long ago). In fact, these witch hunts specifically function to define the ethical position of society with respect to these behaviors.

    Thus, I disagree with the assertion that 'Ethics have fallen.' In fact, I'd argue the opposite: sanity and ethics are returning to our sports. Sadly, this return to ethics is happening for the same reason that we lost it to begin with; namely, steroid abuse added to the bottom line, and therefore it was accepted. Public outrage will certainly subtract from the bottom line if nothing is done. So the greedy owners are scrambling to protect their profits by 'cleaning up' their sport.