As I bring my boys to school in the morning, Jake (age 3) often sprints ahead and, as his younger brother Knox and I arrive at the door, he announces, “I won!” To this, I recently responded, “Not quite, Jake. You can’t win a race no one else is running.” This didn’t change Jake’s epistemological position, which he maintained dogmatically in the form of this bit of rhetoric, “No, Dada, I won. I’m here first.”
Clearly, competition requires a willing, consenting competitor. Only three-year old thinking could deny this. The verb, to compete, actually derives from Latin, to strive together. It is from this starting point that we can even begin to ask the counter-cultural question, “What do I owe my competitor?”
A pioneer in the world of Philosophy of Sport, Warren Fraleigh makes a point that helps us to frame this and many ethical issues within the sporting realm:
In agreeing to play badminton, the players don’t ask, “Should we follow the rules of badminton?”
By voluntarily participating in the contest, the athletes implicitly consent to certain actions and manners in which they will strive together. Imagine the badminton player who catches the birdie with his hand, throws it over the net, and when challenged by his competitor, responds, “Well, I never agreed to that.”
It may help to look at an institution similar in a way to sport, yet also starkly different: war. Even in war, a set of rules exist. Just War Theory dates back to St. Augustine and then Thomas Aquinas after him. It sets out criteria that must be met in order to justify going to war. More relevant here, once engaged in a just war, rules guide conduct during wartime including prohibitions of certain weapons and specified treatment of civilians and prisoners of war.
The recent blockbuster film, Lone Survivor, recounts the story of a team of Navy SEALs who experiences a dilemma based on just this. While on a covert mission, they encounter three shepherds. If allowed to return to their village they will certainly spoil the operation and likely put the SEALs’ lives in danger. But, because the rules of war prohibit killing non-combatants, the SEALs are caught in a moral dilemma. As one comments at the time, “The rules of engagement says [sic] we cannot touch them.”
From here, we return to the realm of sport where no one is being killed and no lives are on the line. In opposition to the “competition” in war in which losing often results in being killed, competition in sport can be a true striving together—the competitors seek the common goal of a “good game” and this sort of competition provides a chance for each competitor to bring out the best in the other.
Acting under these auspices can favorably change the way we view competitors. It alleviates the adversarial nature of competition and frames one’s competitor as not only necessary, but valued. We realize we do owe them something: not to demean them, to avoid cheating, to give our best effort. A mutual striving together occurs in which the one competitor implicitly agrees to put forth her best effort in accord with the rules and the other agrees to do the same.
Think of the respect often given within the tennis culture. Following a well-made shot by the opponent, many of the world’s top players will offer a “tennis clap”—a few bounces of the racket against the palm of the hand. And a colleague of mine routinely applauds good play at soccer games by players from our school’s competitors (he tells me he’s been chastised for it).
And from what I know of the rugby culture, it most closely emulates this ethos of striving together. The sport is explicitly rough and demands physical rigor to play it well. And while the referee cannot possibly detect all potential “cheap shots”—especially during the mêlée they call the scrum—participants typically refrain from any such activity. Traditionally, following a match, the players from both teams join to celebrate the match—they celebrate their striving together.
I have borrowed from this culture with my own water polo team. In the summer we travel and live with players from another team, training together for a week. Then, during our season, we compete against them in an official match, followed by a communal dinner. The feel of that game is often quite unique, from the respect given and how they treat each other—they apologize for errant elbows!—to their genuine salutations following the game. This is all not to say that the game lacks any of that competitive ferocity. As our respective programs are often two of the best in the state, the games are fiercely intense, with our head-to-head records about even, and the games often won by just a goal. But the event emulates a true striving together and both teams are better for it by the game’s culmination.
From this place, the aforementioned actions fit within a framework of respect and set the stage for more of what we want from such a profoundly human venture as sport. We are not at war against our competitor—far from it. We need our competitor just as they need us. Without them, we’d have no race to run. So we’ll do it fairly, with all our heart, and respect them in the process. We owe them at least that.