Gamesmanship1

Gamesmanship 213 JOURNAL OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPORT, 2004, XXXI, 212-225 © 2004 by the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport Gamesmanship1 Leslie A. Howe “What are you prepared to do to win?” This is a question that any serious competitor will at one time or another have to consider. The answer that one is inclined to make, I shall argue, is revealing of the deeper character of the individual participant in sport as both physical competitor and moral person. To that end, I examine one of the classic responses to the question, gamesmanship, which can be characterized as an attempt to win one game by playing another. I contend that gamesmanship is a deliberate strategy of competition that has certain paradoxical outcomes; although it might produce an enhanced competitive environment that calls forth superior performances from participants, its more aggravated manifes- tations are, in the long term, athletically self-destructive for those who rely on it as a competitive device. I argue the presence of more profound underlying moral failings, as well. I shall begin by considering what gamesmanship is and what it is not. At this point, the explication of the practice is neutral with respect to its moral value, rather than its efficacy in achieving sport-specific aims. Because gamesmanship is a strategy designed for winning regardless of athletic excellence, I examine the relationship between winning and excellence and how each contributes to the defi- nition of sport. I shall argue that sport is less about results than about the process leading to results and thus that sport is ultimately not about statistics alone but about the athlete who produces those statistics.2 I defend the view that sport is about the athlete as a person who willingly undergoes various kinds of trial—physical, psychological, and ultimately moral—because he or she is always confronted with the possibility of failure and the choice of how to respond to that possibility. Gamesmanship and Fairness Let us suppose that someone responds to our question “What are you prepared to do to win?” by saying “Whatever it takes.” This is, in fact, the sort of thing that many serious competitors are likely to say. It is ambiguous, however. Some, indeed, will mean it literally, but most, perhaps, would take it to mean “everything within the rules.” This would rule out cheating in its many and varied forms. There are at least two things that it does not rule out, however: the “professional foul” and gamesmanship. The professional foul is an odd case—it is an action that is explicitly contrary to the rules of the competition, but it is an infraction commit- ted openly, with the player accepting (albeit perhaps with much protestation) the legal punishment for it. The term comes from soccer, but it is a tactic practiced as Howe <[email protected]> is with the Philosophy Department, University of Sas- katchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Canada. 212 Gamesmanship 213 a matter of routine in hockey, where fighting, obstruction, and stick infractions are all prohibited and yet considered “part of the game.”3 Gamesmanship is harder to pin down in an exact way, but it would seem that the decisive element in gamesmanship is the attempt to gain competitive advantage either by an artful manipulation of the rules that does not actually violate them or by the psychological manipulation or unsettling of the opponent (or sometimes the officials), whether this be by intimidation, nondisclosure of information, outright deception, or the first alternative (instrumental use of the rules). It is important to note that gamesmanship cannot in any straightforward way be prohibited by the rules of competition, for two reasons. First, violation of the rules is already (necessarily) prohibited by the rules; attempting to violate the rules is cheating (which nullifies the game), and gamesmanship (I am supposing) is not identical with cheating, though it might have much the same end, namely, winning with less strictly athletic effort. Second, gamesmanship, in one sense, relies on the rules in order to exist—it is a testing behavior, testing the rules themselves at times in order to test one’s opponent and the officials, but in that case the rules must be in place. Thus, gamesmanship might initially appear at odds with the rules, when it in fact relies on them, as when one appeals to some little-known regulation, takes an unaccustomed but legal time or equipment advantage, delays play in order to obtain a ruling from officials, attempts to catch the opponent off guard by taking an unexpectedly quick restart, or deliberately false-starts a race to pressure the opponent into hurrying and thus misexecuting his or her own start. It is important to stress that the various techniques and strategies employed in gamesmanship are most commonly directed at breaking down or at least interfering with the opponent’s psychological preparation or competitive equilibrium and focus. Thus, it is less about obtaining a direct material advantage than about gaining this indirectly, by inducing an overall or momentary competitive failure in the opponent. The gamer (i.e., one who employs gamesmanship) is attempting to break down the on-field athletic competitive threat posed by the opponent by means other than simply running faster, throwing farther or more accurately, and so on.4 This is not to say that rule violation might not play an important role in a strategy of gamesmanship or in isolated incidents of it. There are many instances of sporting malpractice and general bad behavior that can certainly contribute to such an overall strategy that might or might not constitute strict instances of gamesmanship per se, rather than something else. For example, fakery intended to deceive officials and gain field advantage (e.g., Rivaldo’s mime during Brazil’s game against Turkey at the 2002 World Cup), taking advantage of bad calls that one did not engineer (not admitting that the puck or ball is over the line), ordinary cheating (illegal equipment, doping), attempting to injure an opponent, or over- loading the officials with borderline or even flagrant fouls in the knowledge that not all of them will be called (a tactic employed by the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-1970s). These strategies function best as a variety of gamesmanship if the opposition knows that a violation has taken place but that it has passed without official sanction. These kinds of actions might well be viewed as cheating (and I would not dispute such a description), but they enter into the realm of gamesmanship primarily by virtue of their effect on the opponent’s mental poise. One might choose to compete in this way with the expectation that one’s behavior will unsettle 212 214 HOWE Gamesmanship 215 the opponent’s concentration, to get that opponent thinking about you rather than the play. It is a risky strategy but not infrequently a successful one. Tactics that are more directly performed with the goal of psyching out the opposition and that seem to be more purely examples of gamesmanship would include trash talk and taunting; various forms of intimidation such as throwing inside in baseball, firing slap shots at the goalie’s head, and loading the ice with goons (both common tactics in ice hockey); and elaborate delays of procedure, as well as resorting to obscure rules (one of the more celebrated American examples being the George Brett pine-tar incident in a baseball game between the New York Yankees and Kansas City Royals in 1983). Other variations are basic competitive tactics that might, for example, rely on being unanticipated at a given moment, such as attempting to break your opponent’s will by pressing them at specific points during a race—the opponent might know it’s coming but not when, or how to respond effectively—or attacking known points of weakness (the other cyclists are poor sprinters, or the opponent collapses after giving up a couple of quick points). Given that gamesmanship does not violate the rules of the game or competition, what exactly is wrong with it, if indeed anything? The target of another’s practice of gamesmanship might feel that what has occurred is unfair, but, although this might be a common or understandable reaction, I think it is mistaken. Sup- posing that the gamer has not violated the rules of competition, we cannot say that he or she has taken an unfair advantage. The officials might have failed in some way, but that cannot be laid at the gamer’s door. In fact, it is the target who has (been led into having) failed, by allowing him- or herself to become distracted. The appropriate moral parallel here is with seduction: The opponent who directs a strategy of gamesmanship against a competitor constructs an opportunity for the other to fail, but the decisive move, the failure, belongs to the target. If the gamer’s behavior is within the rules, it cannot be unfair, and the competitive failure of the target is not the result of unfair advantage. It is because the target did not pass one of the fundamental aspects of competition: the test of psychological strength and preparedness. Consider, for example, throwing inside. Given that the rules of baseball do not prohibit doing so, a pitcher is entitled to throw inside, that is, close to the batter. He is not entitled to hit the batter, but a “brush-back pitch,” a pitch meant to move the batter away from the middle of home plate, is just a “ball.” You can’t have a good, that is, broadly competitive, game if the pitcher throws nothing but perfect strikes over the plate.5 The good of competition allows for the tactic and requires that the batter resist the attempt to force him off the plate—because otherwise he will not be able to adequately counter the pitcher’s challenge.

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