You are here today and for the next two days to lis-ten, learn about, and discuss ethical issues in sports. I’mpleased to be a part of this gathering.

Conversations you’ll be having over the next coupleof days will not only play a role in improving sports,but—to the extent that sports is a metaphor for whatgoes on in the real world—these discussions will have arole in improving society.

I left professional football after the 1981 footballseason. Since that time I have been a runner and thefather of a daughter who is soon to be a graduatinginter-collegiate athlete, but I haven’t spent a great dealof time thinking about ethical issues as they relate solelyto sport. I have, however, spent time thinking about,worrying over and working on ethical issues as theyrelate to the law. Thus, when I was asked to speak at thisconference, I wasn’t really quite sure what it was I hadto offer—especially to a group that is made up ofexperts in amateur and professional sports, and expertsin the area of ethics. Ethical concerns arise in virtuallyeverything we do. The issues are so broad, complex andpervasive that it is going to be a challenge to those ofyou attending this conference to begin to scratch the

surface of the issues that you’ll be discussing, let alonefor me to tackle the subject in the time that I have.

One can hardly open a newspaper or turn on theevening news without finding a story about some well-known professional or amateur athlete that implicatesethical issues in sports. All too often, lately it has to dowith the athlete’s misbehavior whether it be in uniformor out of uniform. We hear about misconduct in legalbehavior, including the possession and sale of illicitdrugs, drug and alcohol abuse, and the use of violenceon anyone who gets in the way, whether it’s an oppo-nent—you can almost name any hockey player youwant or you can pick anybody who was in that brawllast night in New York, a coach and of course the nameSprewell comes to mind, a photographer and there’s thename Rodman—or someone unconnected to the game,such as a bar patron, a groupie, a girlfriend or a wife.We hear about promiscuity, sexual assaults, perfor-mance enhancing drugs and the general lack of respectfor both the game’s and society’s rules and values. Andwhat about the importance of sportsmanship? Or shouldI say the rampant poor sportsmanship: the trash talk, thetaunting and that dancing the players do. Has goodsportsmanship lost its meaning altogether?

Now image is everything for today’s athlete and Ishould say athlete-entertainer, especially in front of theunblinking eye of the TV camera. Once players sacri-ficed themselves for the good of the team. Many oftoday’s players are more likely to sacrifice the team forthemselves. The issue of greed cannot be ignored asmulti-millionaire athletes and billionaire ownersbecome the norm and their primary objective seems tobe finding ways to divide up what they hope will contin-ue to be an ever growing golden pie. Just take a look atwhat has happened to the Florida Marlins.

Today’s athlete isn’t simply a member of a team, heor she is sole proprietor of a multi-million dollar enter-tainment industry and it’s interesting that the media justcan’t seem to get enough, no longer even pretending tobe an objective observer. The media does everything in

Justice Alan C. Page

keynote address

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Justice Alan C. Page

its power to make everything bigger than life, as thoughevents in life itself aren’t big enough in their own rightwithout the help of sensationalism. The more sensation-al the story, the better it sells, I suppose. But do I reallyneed to know the amount of a particular athlete’s childsupport payments or do I need to know who he’s sleep-ing with? I don’t think so. Whatever happened to theday when some things were actually private?

There are other issues as well, some that affect theintegrity of academic institutions nationwide. I’m talk-ing about the fact that the NCAA, an organizationwhose role and sole purpose (at least as I understand it)is to regulate college athletics, is for all practical pur-poses setting the academic agenda for students at allgrade levels - from kindergarten through college. Doesanyone else in this room find this to be as bizarre as Ido? I always thought that academic agendas were thecoveted responsibility, particularly at the high schooland elementary school levels, of the local community.

What makes me think about this in particular is therelatively recent controversy regarding college-boundathletes who are denied their athletic scholarships by theNCAA because one or more of their high school coursesdon’t meet the NCAA’s academic requirements.Whether or not these courses—which were apparentlygood enough to get these students into college in thefirst place and good enough for them to graduate—aregood courses or not, is really not the point. Although inthe case of some Minnesota athletes who have beenaffected by this, the courses involved were honor’scourses from some of our state’s best high schools. Thepoint is that when we allow the NCAA to dictate highschool curriculum and make judgments about what chil-dren need to learn, we are abdicating our responsibility.

This is the same NCAA which requires athletes totake a minimum course load each semester or quarterand requires them to make continuing progress towardstheir degree to remain eligible. Yet, why is it that afterspending three to four years as an intercollegiate athleteso many end up no closer to earning a degree than theywere when they first walked in the door? Is it time thatwe consider divorcing the academic enterprise fromthose revenue producing athletic enterprises? How elsecan we save the integrity of our academic institutions?

How about those athletes who spend three to fouryears in school but still lack some of the basic skills?During my last year with the Vikings, we had a newdefensive line coach who thought that the best way toteach Jim Marshall, Carl Weller and myself how to bebetter football players—how to be better defensive line-men—was to have us read the play book in our teammeetings at night. There were nine of us in the group.Now I don’t know how many of you have had theopportunity to read an NFL play book, but I suspect oneor two of you probably have. For those of you whohaven’t, the difficult words are offense, defense, block,

tackle, etc. Out of the nine young men in that group,five of them couldn’t read that play book. Each one ofthose young men had spent three to four years in someof this nation’s best academic institutions. Obviouslythey missed out on learning how to read in the first, sec-ond and third grade—long before they became athletes.But they, like thousands of other children before andafter them, slipped through the cracks of an imperfecteducational system. They were fortunate, however, tohave better-than-average athletic skills which allowedthem to reach a certain level of success. But what aboutall those others? While that was twenty years ago, Idon’t have a great deal of confidence that things havechanged all that much.

Maybe it’s time for the sports world to consider acode of conduct or code of ethics. As a lawyer, I wasgoverned by rules on lawyers’ professional responsibili-ty. As a judge, I’m governed by the code of judicial con-duct which sets the floor for ethical conduct. Certainlylawyers are not perfect and clearly there are those whofail to meet our ethical standards, but having minimalstandards with a disciplinary process in place raises theethics of everyone in the profession. Maybe it’s time toat least consider such codes for the world of sport—cov-ering athletes, their agents and those who manage, ownand control athletic teams.

The ethical issues that are going to be grappled withat this conference gained attention because sports andathletics are so big and so important—and that’s good.However, it’s also important to recognize that athletesare only the visible tip of the iceberg. They bring atten-tion to these issues in ways that few others can. Butfrom where I sit, I can tell you that these issues go wellbeyond the athletic arena. I will also say that I believethe solutions to these issues start right here, with peoplelike all of us here in this room—those who are interest-ed in exploring ways to strengthen society’s moral fiber.That task has never been more important.

Our world continues to grow more and more com-plex, more and more complicated. Every day each of usis asked to make choices about who we are and who wewill become. Those choices affect our well-being, aswell as the well-being of others. It is not always easy todo the right thing in the face of powerful economic,social and occupational pressures. Indeed it becomeseven more difficult when a nation’s social values seemto stress winning and the pursuit of self-interest—notjust in sports, but in every level of everyday life. Toooften the focus is on climbing the social and economicladders as quickly as possible without much concern forwho gets stepped on along the way. You know the oldsayings: “it’s a dog eat dog world”; “you need to lookout for number one”; “nice guys finish last”.

Think back to a time when you felt torn betweendoing what you know is right and what was most expe-dient. We find ourselves in those situations all the time.

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How do you respond? How about the situation in whichthe difference between right and wrong was more graythan black and white? How do you respond to those sit-uations? Do you rationalize that since it wasn’t entirelyclear what the right response was, any choice you madewould be okay?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines characteras moral or ethical strength, integrity, fortitude.Wrapped up in some of these ethical situations areissues of character. In a sense, character is who we areat our very core. It’s what determines what we believeand how we choose to respond to any given situation.Character is not something that we are born with. . . .nordoes it develop automatically. It must be consciouslydeveloped. Character is also not something that is static.Whether we are fifty or fifteen, five or seventy-five, wewill be forced to re-evaluate and renew our characteragain and again. It isn’t enough to rely on what we’vedone in the past; that’s old news. It isn’t enough to givelip service to what we believe; actions speak louder thanwords. How we act today and every day for the rest ofour lives defines who we are. That’s true for everybodyin this room; that’s true for athletes. How they act todayand every day for the rest of their lives will define whothey are. Character doesn’t just happen—doesn’t justhappen. People with character take responsibility forwho they are and what they do. They don’t blame othersand they recognize their role as responsible individuals.

To resist the pressures and temptations that seduceus, to make the easy choices rather than the right choic-es, and to be a person of character takes a strong person.I don’t mean strong in the physical sense for, quitefrankly, physical stature has nothing to do with charac-ter. If strong in the physical sense had anything to dowith it, there isn’t an athlete out there who wouldn’t bea person of good character. I mean strong in the sensethat believing that each one of us has an obligation toact in ways that build rather than diminish our characterand the character of those around us. Athletes have aspecial obligation to be people of character. Whether welike it or not, whether we want it or not, whether we’reprepared for it or not, our athletic status makes usheroes to some and role models to many. That’s simplyone of the things that comes along with athletic success.However, just because one is a good athlete doesn’tmean that one is a good person. While being gifted ath-letically makes one worthy of some recognition andmay even make one a hero, it does not make one a rolemodel.

What does it mean to be a person of character? Itmeans being honest and trustworthy, saying what wemean and meaning what we say, not saying somethingwhen we don’t mean it. It means keeping our promises,playing fairly, making decisions with others in mind,and treating people with respect and respecting our-selves. It means working to figure out the difference

between right and wrong and then acting accordingly,including taking responsibility for our own actions.

Have you noticed that while everyone clamors to berecognized for success, nobody wants to take responsi-bility for failures—especially on the athletic field? Ofcourse, given the pedestal that we place our athletesupon, it’s reasonably understandable why nobody wantsto be responsible for being vanquished. More and morethere seems to be a tendency to view ourselves as isolat-ed individuals competing for the big prize.

We seem to distrust each other more and cooperateless. There is more and more evidence of the risingintolerance that we seem to have for one another, insports, as well as society generally. But the fact is thatalthough I was once considered to be a great footballplayer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a man ofgood character. The fact of the color of my skin doesn’tmean that I’m NOT a man of good character. The factthat your language or religion or gender is differentfrom mine doesn’t make either one of our charactersbetter or worse. The outward differences which identifyus as individuals does not change the content of ourcharacter.

I mentioned intolerance briefly, and I guess I wouldbe remiss if I didn’t digress just for a moment to com-ment on what seems to me to be an unacceptable rise inintolerance. In some circles it has become fashionable topreach the politics of separation and hate. While I per-sonally don’t believe separation brings progress ormakes things better, it is at least an option to consider.The politics of hate, however, are destructive and unac-ceptable. Whether that hate comes from a group that iswhite, a group that is black, a group of religious zealots,or any other group makes no difference. When it is com-bined with separation and followed to its logical conclu-sion, that hate leads to what we see or what we saw overthe last four or five years in Rwanda, what we’ve seen inYugoslavia, and what we’ve seen in our riots here athome in the central cities—which leads me to the topicand the issue of race and the role it plays in sport andlife.

I’m sure you’re all very familiar with PresidentClinton’s town hall meeting on the role of race in sport.Having identified sports as being one arena where racialharmony exists, the President and a panel, includingamong others, John Thompson, Jackie Joyner-Kerseyand Jim Brown, hoped to explore the successes andstereotypes of the playing fields and what lessons theymight hold for the rest of the country. I must admit that Ididn’t actually see the town hall meeting, cable TV hav-ing not yet made its way to the Page household. But Ihave had some first hand experience with issues of race,both inside and outside the arena of sports. Indeed as anAfrican-American, that experience never goes away. Mysense of the town hall meeting, based on the news arti-cles and TV spots that I saw, was that it was probably a

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good thing as far as it went. My fear is that it didn’t gofar enough.

Certainly, they talked about the increased opportuni-ty for African-Americans as players at amateur and pro-fessional levels, and they noted that the opportunity forpeople of color still lagged behind when it comes tocoaching, front office management and leadershipopportunities. But, quite frankly, there’s really nothingnew in that. We didn’t need a town hall meeting to tell usthose things. The real question is, what does it all mean?More important, what do we do? Increased opportunityon the playing field is good, but having a few additionalyoung black millionaires in the grand scheme of thingsdoesn’t mean very much - especially when one of theresults is that it perpetuates the myth for young blackboys that perfecting their athletic skills to the exclusionof their intellectual abilities will allow them to grasp thatgolden ring that will pull them up and out of poverty andaway from discrimination. The reality is, that for all butthe exceptional few, that simply isn’t going to happen.After all, on any given day, any given afternoon, all thejobs in professional athletics are taken. I don’t knowhow much time the panelists spent discussing the needfor children of color to perfect their minds before theyperfect their bodies. But however much time they spentdoing that, it couldn’t have been enough.

One specific part of the panel’s discussion that Ifound curious was the exchange between Jim Brownand the other panelists about black athletes using blackattorneys and agents. I found it curious because underly-ing the discussion was the notion or at least the assump-tion that all black athletes should be using the servicesof black agents or attorneys. Why weren’t they askingwhy white players aren’t using black agents and attor-neys? Why aren’t team owners and team managersusing black attorneys? Did anyone stop to ask why thereare so few black agents or attorneys in the first instance?The problems of race are not the problems of the racialminority. The problems of race belong to all of us, nomatter where our ancestors came from, no matter whatthe color of our skin.

To some degree, there is an underlying assumptiontoday that equal opportunity has in fact been achieved,that we live in a color-blind society, that in our nationtoday all people are treated as equals. The truth is we’renot close. We’re not close! The phrase “living in a colorblind society” should not mean living in a society that isblind to unequal treatment. We may be better at cover-ing up our bias, but making bias harder to detect is notthe same as making it go away. When I look at issues ofrace whether in sport or society at large, I do have greatconcern, not only about where we are or where we’vebeen but also where we’re going.

It seems that over the last ten to fifteen years it hasbecome more and more acceptable to look at and talkabout race in a way that has become very, very danger-

ous. It seems we have taken a step back and I find thattroubling and I’m not the only one to have these con-cerns. Indeed former United States Supreme Court Jus-tice, Harry Blackmun, wrote an opinion in a dissentregarding a 1989 case involving race discrimination inthe salmon industry. I would like to share at least part ofwhat he said. “The majority’s legal rulings (talkingabout how the court dealt with the issue of race discrim-ination) essentially immunizes these practices fromattack . . . Sadly, this comes as no surprise. One wonderswhether the majority still believes that race discrimina-tion or, more accurately, race discrimination againstnon-whites is a problem in our society or even remem-bers that it ever was.” Those were powerful words fromJustice Blackmun.

If we are to begin to solve the issue of race in sportand in society, each of us, all of us, and each person thatwe have the ability to influence are going to have to act.As Jackie Joyner-Kersey said at the town hall meeting,“we can talk and we can talk, but people need to listenand people need to do something about it.” Playing therace card without doing more will not solve these diffi-cult problems. In fact according to Cornell West, authorof Race Matters, talking about racism can even be dam-aging when rhetoric becomes the substitute for analysis.It is also damaging when it becomes the substitute foraction.

What can we do? Ultimately, that’s the question,isn’t it? To start, we must begin by looking inward andeliminating our own biases and setting aside our ownstereotyping of other racial groups. Stereotypes aredamaging whether intended to be positive or negative.Just as a sample of one is not representative of thegroup, neither is the group necessarily representative ofthe one. Most of my interactions with people are withindividuals. I have conversations with people. It’s howwe as individuals treat other individuals that will deter-mine how well these issues of race get resolved.

We need to begin looking at people for their indi-vidual qualities and not for their group characteristics,which is not to say that we have to like everyone. Thereare a lot of people around that I don’t particularly carefor. Nobody likes a jerk and I certainly don’t. But it’sthe characteristics of the individual that we have to con-sider, not the group characteristics that come along withthe individual. Until we as a society begin to deal withhow we treat individuals based on their individual selvesrather than their group characteristics, these issues ofrace will continue to plague us.

In certain team sports, we have learned to live andwork together. In that sense, we have shown that racialharmony is not an impossible dream. With the rightmotivation we can achieve an environment in whichpeople of all colors can live in harmony. We can do that.Some of you may be saying to yourselves, “well all thatsounds good, but I’m not so sure that individual effort

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really will have that much impact. After all this problemof race has been around for a long time and appears asthough it’s going to be around for a long time to come.”I can only ask that you give it a try because ultimatelythe problem of race stems from the individual and thesolutions will be found in individuals.

I would like to share with you a quote from aspeech that Robert Kennedy gave in 1966 at the Univer-sity of Capetown in South Africa that, for me, exempli-fies the impact that individuals can have when they arewilling to act. This quote has special meaning when youconsider the changes that have taken place in SouthAfrica since 1966 and the individual effort that wentinto that. What he said is this, “Each time a man (and Iwould add a woman) stands up for an ideal or acts toimprove the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice,he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. In crossing eachother from a million different centers of energy and dar-ing, those ripples build a current that can sweep downthe mightiest walls of oppression and resistance”.

Ultimately, the issue of race is one over which indi-viduals have control. If we change, the racial climatewill change. If we don’t, it won’t. The question for thoseof us in this room and also for those of us across thiscountry is whether we have the will to change - and thechoice is ours. I happen to believe that we can change.

In closing I would like to leave each of you with asimple question. It’s a question that I ask myself everyday. How each of us answers this question will deter-mine the future of the course of race in sport and insociety. The question is this: What is the action that youwill take to bring about change?

Thank you.

Justice Page then accepted questions from the audi-ence.

QUESTION: I am interested in helping stem the tide ofviolence in sports. What has been the role of the legalsystem as you understand it so far in making some ofthe events that occur in the arena have less of an impacton the rest of society?

ANSWER: The issue of violence, primarily off the fieldbut even to some degree on the field, is one that isbeginning to pervade society. If only the athletes werethe problem we’d be in pretty good shape. Unfortunate-ly that’s not the case. Let’s consider domestic violence,which is how a lot of violence is manifesting itself insport. In Minnesota, a state with 4 million people, wehad in excess of 13,000 cases come to our courts in1996—13,000 cases come to our courts and those onlyrepresent the incidents that came to court. They do notrepresent all the domestic violence for which no onetook action. We have a serious problem.

We have, both in sport and society, a problem that

quite frankly I’m not sure the legal system can do muchabout. We can issue restraining orders; we can lock upthe offender for some period of time. But ultimatelyevery one of these offenders is going to get out. Thequestion is, “how do we get people to play by society’srules?” Part of the answer has to do with the cost tothose who engage in domestic violence or other kinds ofviolence. What is the cost to them? Right now there’snot a very high cost—and so it continues. I’m not surewhat the answers are.

I know we keep ratcheting up the penalties and I’mnot sure that that’s been good or bad. To the extent thatanybody thinks about what they do before they slaptheir wife or girlfriend or whoever and are prepared todo it anyway, I’m not sure that increasing the penaltymakes that much difference. In some respects, it encour-ages the attitude, “well, if I’m going to go to jail, Imight as well get my money’s worth.” Although Ihaven’t seen the numbers, it’s a concern to me that thereappear to be more and more people who are willing tokill the victim, people who are not being concernedabout the outcome. So I’m not sure that inflating thepenalty makes that much difference. I don’t know whatthe answer is.

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION: Nothing happened withsmoking until lawsuits started to be brought against thecigarette companies. Having been an athlete yourselfyou know there’s an old boy network, a code of “we’reall athletes together,” that seems to prevent an EvanderHolyfield from suing a Mike Tyson, or a P. J. Carlesimofrom pressing charges against a Latrell Sprewell. Maybewe need suits brought when someone is legitimatelyinjured.

ANSWER: I can’t say much about the Sprewell inci-dent because there is ongoing litigation and we have allsorts of ethical issues as a judge talking about pendingor impending cases. But I will say, I think I can say, thatincidents such as these go beyond whether P. J. Carlesi-mo has an interest in filing charges. The state has someinterest in regulating that kind of conduct. In somestates, whether the complainant is prepared to filecharges or not, the state will initiate it’s own actions. Idon’t know whether that is possible in that particularcase, but it does seem to me that the state has an interest.

Regarding the Tyson incident: Some of the extra-curricular violence in sport is understandable. You are inthe heat of the game, something sets you off and it’s notall that unexpected that you might lose control. It’swhen people go so far over the top, go so far outside thebounds of the sport, that you have great concern. Obvi-ously, that’s one of the concerns about the Tyson inci-dent.

QUESTION: My name is Don Sabo and I’m Trustee

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with the Women’s Sport Foundation. Would you sharesome of your comments or observations, please, on thestate of gender equity in the United States or your homestate Minnesota?

ANSWER: Again, that is clearly an issue that is likelyto come before our court and one which I should notprejudge. However based on past comments when Iserved for a while on the Board of Regents at the Uni-versity of Minnesota, one of the issues that I was inter-ested in and concerned about was gender equity. Thatissue is of interest to me naturally; I have three daugh-ters. Why shouldn’t they have the same opportunitiesthat I had?

There is much discussion about “well if we increaseopportunities for women, we have to decrease opportu-nities for men.” First of all, I don’t think that’s the case;and if it is, so what? What’s the big deal? The questionis not whether we’re going to have equal numbers; thequestion is whether we’re going to have equal opportu-nity, which—I may get myself in trouble here again—makes me think about affirmative action. If we hadequal opportunity, we wouldn’t have to spend oneminute talking about affirmative action. That would be anon-issue. We ought to be talking about getting to equalopportunity whether it’s gender equality, racial equality,or any other kind of equality. We have to get there andwe’re a long way from there at this point.

QUESTION: Justice Page, you sighted a laundry list ofbad boy behavior and incidents on the sporting field,everything from the Yankees/Orioles brawl yesterday tothe Sprewell things, the Tyson things - and some off thecourt. Since you were raised in an era before all theseathletes were born and played in an era when they werekids at best, I’m wondering first if you’ve noticed anychanges in the amount or type of that bad behavior on oroff the field, and secondly, does that behavior reflectwhere society has gone or is it somehow contributing tothe way society is going?

ANSWER: Let me answer the second part of that first.I think it both reflects and contributes. It does both. Onecan go back 20 or 30 or 40 years and find the same sortof thing going on; however I have the sense that therehas been an increase not in misconduct itself , but in thelevel and the quality of the misconduct, as there hasbeen in society at large. Let’s face it. We have 7, 8, 9,and 10-year-old children leading the parade here insome respects. It’s not just the athletes that are badactors. We have a society whose character and moralfiber is definitely being challenged. We see the athletes.They are visible, but there are a lot more folks out therethan the athletes. None of this is new, this misconductwas going on when I played. It’s certainly far more visi-ble today, almost anything today rates a mention. Twen-

ty years ago, some of what went on wasn’t worthy ofthe evening news. Now everything is worthy of theevening news. I think that’s part of what continues thecycle. I don’t know what begins it.

QUESTION: I was raised in Africa, but every time Ilooked on television, I found blacks excelling in sports,so why do blacks excel in sports?

ANSWER: If I had the answer to that one I’d be amulti-billionaire. I don’t know. I excelled in sports. Isuppose to some degree because I worked hard and Ienjoyed what I was doing. I had some natural ability. I was in the right place at the right time and as best as I can tell looking back, one of the strengths I had as anathlete was the ability to focus on the task at hand andnot get sidetracked by all the things that were going onin the periphery. That’s just me, other people excel forany number of reason. We can get into this debate aboutblacks being genetically predisposed, but I have no cluequite frankly. The question I tend to ask, is “is thatimportant? Shouldn’t whoever can perform betterexcel?”

QUESTION: I’m Claudia Card from the University ofWisconsin, Madison. What do you think about makingsports athletic activities available to people who are notespecially gifted, including people who have disabilities?

ANSWER: Well, let me just give a cheer for Wisconsin.Two of my children are Wisconsin graduates, one ofthem last year. My other two children attended otheruniversities, one is from the University of Washington,and one will graduate from Northwestern.

One of the great things about athletics at the earlystages is everybody gets to participate. Later, we startnarrowing the participants to those who are highlyskilled. I think it is vitally important, vitally, that every-one who wants to participate have the opportunity. Hav-ing had four children that had four different levels ofathletic ability, it seems to me that it was just as impor-tant for the one with the least athletic ability to be ableto participate. It’s not about having fans in the stands,not about having people come and watch; it’s about par-ticipation. That’s where you learn. You learn about your-self. You learn about working with others, living withothers. You learn about your abilities and limits; youlearn about expanding your limits. These lessons areimportant for everybody whether you’re disabled oryou’re the best athletic specimen ever to come down thepike. Those lessons are important and valuable for all of us.

QUESTION: My name is John Wilson fromMillersville University, Pennsylvania. My question is:what is private in terms of what the media reports? I

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Claudia Card, Ph.D.

QUESTION: What drives you in the issue of sports andsociety? What are the issues and reasons? What is philo-sophical about sports?

CLAUDIA: My specialty is ethics and I spend a lot ofmy time studying evil, oppression, and injustice. Butthis is not why I’m interested in sports. The two sourcesof joy that most offset the depression of studying theother things for me are sports and music. I’m interestedin sports for its positive potentialities for offering joyand positive character building. This is a little ironicbecause I was invited to chair a couple of sessions thatare focused on nasty things that happen in sports:stereotyping on the one hand and an attempt to remedyinjustice in the form of Title IX, which concerns equity,on the other hand. But really what drives me is the joyof sports.

QUESTION: From a philosophical standpoint, let’stalk about joy and sports and human development.

CLAUDIA: The things that attract me to sports apply atall age levels. I’m interested in character development,which of course applies at all ages. I think even adultsare capable of interesting character development. In par-ticular, I’m interested in issues that have to do withsports and violence and war, not because I think sportscontributes to it but because I suspect that maybe thephilosopher, Neitzsche, was right to think that sports aresomething that can help to combat it. He wrote an essaycalled “Homer’s Contest,” in which he argued that theancient Greeks invented the Olympics as a way of sup-plementing those impulses that might have otherwiseled to war and did lead to war for a long time. Thismakes a lot of sense to me. If what sports does at its bestis develop competence and a sense of your own abilities,it makes you feel good about yourself. When people feelgood about themselves, they tend to feel positivetowards others also. At its best, sports competition fos-ters admiration in your opponents instead of hostilitytowards your opponents. Now this has to be qualified assports at its best because sports can degenerate, but it’sthis positive potentiality that really attracts me to sports.

Now, I’m a feminist and I’m very interested in fem-

inist ethics. Many feminists are very critical of competi-tion and down on it because they think competition is akind of mini war. I suspect they are wrong. As Neitzschethought, competition may be something that can providean antidote to war if it develops competence in all par-ticipants, not just in those who win but in everyone whocompetes. It develops competence and people feel goodabout themselves. I don’t think they are going to feelhostile towards others and want to put them down orlord it over them or hate them. This is a very excitingpotentiality of sports, although it’s probably not the rea-son why anybody does it. Probably few people havethought about that consequence. But since my interestshave always been in ethics and philosophy, I think that’sa very interesting idea.

QUESTION: When you say competence, could youdescribe that for me?

CLAUDIA: I mean both actual competence in the senseof really being able to do things well and a sense ofcompetence that is the feeling that you are able to dothings well. The latter is the sense of competence thatreally contributes to self-esteem. You can have compe-tence and fail to know it and fail to appreciate it. One ofthe things about sports, in the way it’s been practicedhistorically, is that those who do well get recognition forit and that recognition helps to foster the sense of com-petence so that you have both. What I mean by compe-tence is really being able to do something well.

QUESTION: Some many wonderful directions to gohere. You made reference to Neitzsche. Which otherphilosophers come to mind when talking about sports?Who are the philosophers you recommend? Which onesassist you in understanding some of your issues?

CLAUDIA: You asked which philosophers assist me inthinking about sports. My response to that is darn few,very few philosophers, until you get to recent time. Phi-losophy of sport is something that for the past two andone-half decades has been growing. There’s a journaland a society for the philosophic study of sport. Thesethings have existed for over twenty-five years now, but

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prior to that most of the people who thought philosophi-cally about sports are not recognized as philosophers.Philosophers have had too little to say about joy, forexample. One of the exceptions is, of course, Neitzsche.Neitzsche did have a lot to say about joy.

QUESTION: What is the importance of joy in personaldevelopment?

CLAUDIA: Well, I think of it this way. Schopenhauerwas right about something. If your highest value is plea-sure and you think that the only thing that is bad in itselfis pain, you have to be pessimistic about life because,frankly, life offers a lot more pain than pleasure. One ofthe things that can save life is joy and you don’t need alot of it to compare quantitatively with the amount ofpain you suffer. A little joy can keep you going a longway. One win can give you a high that will carry youthrough all sorts of things. Even if you don’t win, theknowledge that you played well and the exhilarationthat comes from exerting yourself and knowing you aredeveloping yourself can bring you through a lot of suf-fering. There’s usually a lot of pain that comes with thatexperience, but the pain is not something that depressesyou when you are aware of the development to which itcontributes. Joy is one of the things that does make lifeworth living. Sports is not one of the frivolous things inthat way. Sports, like music and the arts, is really centralto what makes life worth living.

QUESTION: Let’s talk about character and capabili-ties. What might you suggest in that relationship?

CLAUDIA: In the relationship between character andcapability, I think sports can play a role very similar tothe role that painting and music play. All three of themdevelop competence in various areas and the result isjoy in all of these areas. Competence develops characterin many ways. One is that it develops discipline. It takesa lot of discipline to achieve competence, to develop theskills and the capacities. Some people carry that toextremes and the discipline comes to be an end in itself.That’s a danger to guard against. When discipline servesthe end of providing joy, I think it has a very positivevalue.

Sports, when it’s fair—and a good competition hasto be fair—fosters respect for others as well as self-esteem. You admire someone else who does things well,whether they beat you or you beat them. It’s a pleasureto compete against somebody who is really skillful andit means much more to win if you are playing againstsomebody whose skills you can really admire. Respectfor others is one of the most basic things in ethics andcharacter. It teaches you to empathize with those wholose. If you admire their skills, you have to be a little bitsad for them if they lose.

COMMENT: Obviously, the kind of sport you are talk-ing about isn’t the National Football League.

CLAUDIA: Well, you have commerce mixed in withother things there and that’s one of the things that canlead sports to degenerate that just makes me sad andangry sometimes.

QUESTION: Let’s talk about what you mean by“sports when it’s done right.”

CLAUDIA: First of all, I mean when it’s fair, when therules of the game are fair and when the players respectthem and when the coaches respect them. But I alsomean when people are in it for the love of the game, forthe love of the sport, and not primarily to make moneyor to become famous. Those are side effects. At lunchtoday, Bonnie Blair gave a talk, which I think exempli-fied some of the very best of sportsmanship. She wasclearly into speed skating for the love of the activity andshe was in a kind of activity where becoming the best inthe world did not mean that she was going to be wellpaid. The financial benefit that she got to reap from thiswas minuscule compared to what leading basketballplayers like Michael Jordan get for their activity. Itbrought out the best in her. She was in it for the rightkinds of reasons.

One of the things that is corrupting collegiate sportsis introducing the money factor so that students aremotivated, especially if they need a college educationand can’t pay for it any other way. To go into sports tosupport themselves through school or to go into sportsbecause the rewards are so alluring that they go intosports when they otherwise wouldn’t be motivated to doit begins to corrupt the activity.

So there are two things that come to my mind whentalking about “sport when it’s done right”: the rules needto be fair and people need to respect them, and partici-pants need to be in it for the right kinds of motivation.

QUESTION: What sort of issues would you want tomake sure were covered in a course about sports andsociety? What kind of things would be the core orwould be central to that study?

CLAUDIA: In my field it would be a course in the phi-losophy of sport. First of all, I would have to justifytreating sport as a subject for philosophical investigationbecause, although philosophers and a journal and a soci-ety of sports have existed for twenty-five years, mostphilosophers don’t know this and most philosophers his-torically have not addressed the subject of sport. It’s aptto be regarded by professional philosophers as frivolous.But most of the literature of philosophy of sport fallsinto ethics and aesthetics, so I might offer it as a coursein social philosophy merging those two areas.

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At the very outset, I would want to take up the rela-tionship between basic concepts such as sport, athletics,games, and play. There is some very interesting litera-ture to deal with in those areas. Just try to define thesubject matter, for example. Why study sport? Why is itimportant? What is it? Then I would move into ethicalissues, primarily because my field is ethics, and aesthet-ic issues to some extent as well. I would also explore theinteresting area in which the aesthetics of sport and theethics of sport exist in tension with each other. But sinceI haven’t done the course yet, I can’t really be very spe-cific about how that would go.

One thing I would want to avoid is making thecourse negative, focusing on all the things that gowrong. They do have to be addressed at some point, butI wouldn’t want that to structure what the course wasabout. I want the basic emphasis of the course to beupbeat and to be positive and, particularly with respectto women who have been discouraged from an early agefrom taking sport very seriously, to be attractive.

QUESTION: To let them know there are opportunitiesfor joy here as well?

CLAUDIA: To let them know that it feels great.

QUESTION: Let’s talk about the feelings, the aesthet-ic, the reality of sport as opposed to the conceptualiza-tion and articulation of rules. How does that experiencerelate to other experiences that we want to talk about?How can sports be beautiful?

CLAUDIA: This can take us back to the definition ofwhat counts as sport. There are many forms of dance,for example, that are very athletic. Dance is somethingthat women have done historically, even when womendidn’t participate in many other kinds of sports. Yetdance has not been treated as a sport historically. That’sarbitrary. It could easily be treated that way. At the sametime, many of the things that have been treated as sporthaven’t been treated very aesthetically. I think this ischanging with respect to some of the sports in whichAfrican-Americans are now predominant, such as bas-ketball. The form and beauty, and the way things aredone is almost a dance at times. So the line betweenwhat counts as an art form and what counts as sports orathletics is very arbitrary. I would want to work on thecomparison of things like dance, which are very athletic,with forms of sports that aren’t thought of as art formsby the general populace. Although I think by some ofthe participants, they are. It’s very artistic. You can makean argument that anybody should recognize that this isartistic and graceful, that this has the qualities for whichyou praise a dancer.

In regular gymnastics, the floor exercises are danceat the same time that they are gymnastics. Both ice skat-

ing and gymnastics could easily fall into either categoryand they are often done to music. Even basketball isdone to music at the level of the NBA.

QUESTION: From a feminist standpoint, what are thechallenges of sports in American society?

CLAUDIA: From a feminist standpoint, women whohave been outstanding athletes have had to pay socialpenalties, and that’s not over yet. As a consequence,many women are discouraged from going out for sportsbecause they learn early on that it’s unfeminine. Theylearn that they will be less attractive to men and that itwill make their bodies too muscular and physicallyunattractive. So in order to make sports attractive towomen, it’s important to look at sexual politics and real-ly incorporate those issues. This is something I’ve beendoing since the middle ‘70s. I’ve been teaching coursesin feminist ethics, feminist philosophy, and feminist pol-itics.

QUESTION: What problems should we look at from afeminist standpoint?

CLAUDIA: I have to come back to something I saidearlier about violence because feminists are, in fact,quite divided about sports. There are those who focus onthe violence that actually takes place in sports and thinkwomen shouldn’t want to be part of this. There are thosewho look at competition and think competition is a badthing, that women should be exploiting their historiccapacities for nurturing instead of competing with oneanother. This is a mistake. I am with a different group offeminists who see competition as requiring cooperation,as pre-supposing cooperation, not as an alternative tocooperation.

One of the problems historically with the waywomen have been socialized is to think that if you dosomething that asserts yourself at someone else’sexpense, then you’ve done something wrong. If you’regoing to compete, you have to be willing to assert your-self at someone else’s expense and accept that that’stheir problem. In order to justify doing that, then youneed to look at the benefits of competition, of develop-ing competence. Historically women have had very lowself-esteem in sexist societies. The positive potentialityof sport is to address that, to develop the kinds of abili-ties that will enhance self-esteem and make women careless whether men think it’s attractive and be moreattracted to men who are attracted to women who arecompetent or be attracted to women who are attracted towomen who are competent.

QUESTION: Are there specific sports that pose greaterchallenges than others with respect to justice and fair-ness in relation to women? Are some sports more chal-

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lenging from a feminist point of view in redressinginequities?

CLAUDIA: Some sports require women to behave inways that are much more traditionally unfeminine thanothers; for example, basketball and a lot of the teamsports. Some of the sports, such as gymnastics and iceskating, are more readily integrated with a feminineimage. They also have associated problems. For exam-ple, you have to be very thin, which correlates with alot of the beauty images that have been popular recent-ly for women. For those sports where you need to bebig if you’re going to be good—not dainty and certain-ly not anorexic—there’s more of a challenge there infighting the image that this is unfeminine and unlady-like.

I want to say that being unfeminine is not a badthing. In fact, I think being feminine is a bad thing—notbeing female, but being feminine—because the particu-lar norms that have defined femininity are norms thatinterfere with just ordinary competence. It’s okay totake up space. It’s okay to walk in flat shoes and to bephysically good at lifting and moving around and not tohave to depend on someone else any more than theyhave to depend on you. But that doesn’t correlate withthe patriarchal images of femininity. So I agree with thecritics who say that basketball is unfeminine. It is andthat’s one of the things I like about it.

COMMENT: Let’s make the cross into the aestheticevents as we’re talking about the societal image of beau-ty and the functional ramifications of changing and thesocial action required to make this happen. Philosophi-cally we should probably devote some time in a courseto the definition of beauty, the social definition. So let’stalk a bit about that argument.

CLAUDIA: I had a colleague whose specialization wasaesthetics. Twenty-five years ago, I asked him what peo-ple in aesthetics say about beauty in human beings?Courses in aesthetics don’t deal with that. What theydeal with is paintings and pieces of music, works of artthat are artifacts created by human beings. They don’tlook at human beings as artifacts. But a woman wholives up to the standards of femininity is more an arti-fact. I think this is something that people who haveexpertise in aesthetics should address. It’s long overdue.I don’t have the answers here, but I think it’s worth tak-ing seriously.

QUESTION: How might sports properly be done inschool?

CLAUDIA: I think it’s very important that sports befair and that the games that children be allowed to playbe fair games, that they not unfairly disadvantage someparticipants. This has historically been a problem forwomen in so far as the games that children play werestructured around male bodies. To the extent thatwomen’s bodies really are different, such as the centerof gravity is different, we need to have games that arestructured with women’s bodies in mind also. That’s justone element of fairness. Other elements are the rules ofthe game and what counts as winning, what sorts ofqualities an individual can develop that will enable themto win or to have a fair chance at winning. So the rulesneed to be fair and students need to be taught to respectrules that are fair. They should also be taught to be criti-cal of rules that are not fair, that is, to develop a sense offairness that isn’t just a function of the rules that theylearn to play by and this takes a long time. It takes along time to develop an independent sense of fairness,so that they can then go back and criticize the rules andraise questions about what their teachers told them.

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Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D.

QUESTION: What is your area of interest in sport?

HINMAN: My own focus on sport is actually prettyminimal. When I was an undergraduate, I read a bookcalled Homo Ludens, which means man at play. I wascaptivated by it and years later I’m still captivated bythe ideas that he presented and the way in which play,and sport is one subset of play, sets up its own struc-tured world. It’s a really interesting model of creativitywhere you have discipline and structure and it’s created,in a sense, out of nothing. But I did do a dissertation onthe concept of play, an incredibly serious German dis-sertation.

One of the interesting things about play and gamesand sports is that it is one of the very few places wheretime can stop. Occasionally you can even roll back theclock, as we’ve seen happen on occasion. There is also aspecial space that gets set up in a game. The spacebetween the boundaries and the space out of bounds. Ifyou step out of bounds, you’re out of the world of thatgame and it can happen. When I was a little kid, I usedto play football on our street in our home in Chicago.Even though it was a street game, we would still set upthat space. It’s an imaginary space, but it’s really power-ful.

So part of my interest came about from an interestin play in general. The other thing is that I’ve done a lotof work about virtues and about Aristotle. Who else iscloser to this world than Aristotle? He was Alexanderthe Great’s tutor. He was involved in the real world inall sorts of ways and he had a real clear sense of that.The whole Greek world had a sense of the agonisticdimension, the competitive, the sport, the playfuldimension of life and that’s where my interests havetaken me.

QUESTION: Let’s explore that in some more direc-tions. Let’s talk about play. What does play mean?

HINMAN: One of the things that happens in play isthat we sort of rehearse for the real world. Sometimesthe rehearsal becomes the real world for us and that’swhen play becomes so deadly serious. But you find thatthe virtues that you need in everyday life get developedin play: for example, the ability sometimes to wait orpatience; the ability to work hard, perseverance, to hangin there in the face of adversity and in the face of notgetting what you want immediately. Yet they get devel-oped in a really powerful way because we choose toplay. You can never make someone play, although youcan make them go through the motions. But when wetruly play, we develop those strengths of character as theresult of our choices. They come from within rather thanbeing imposed from outside.

We heard Walter Payton address this conference. Hewas very gracious in attributing many of his successesto his teammates’ support, but everyone in that audienceknew the incredible amount of discipline he showedyear after year in terms of training and conditioning andthe way in which that paid off. We develop those virtueswithin the context of a sport and then hopefully wecarry them over into life as a whole. That is one of thesenses in which we develop character in sports.

QUESTION: We talked about virtue development.How about character development in the context of Kthrough 12?

HINMAN: One of the interesting things one tries to do

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Lawrence Hinman, Ph.D.

in sports at an early age is to try to develop thosestrengths of character in kids that are really going tomake them able to navigate life better. Sometimes weplace too great an emphasis on competitiveness insports, especially at that very early age. It’s a competi-tiveness with the other athletes that is stressed and notcompetitiveness with yourself and how you can be yourvery best. The more we’re able to open up sports atthose early ages and encourage a wide range of virtues,the more everyone’s going to benefit.

QUESTION: What is the important contribution thatsport itself can make to the general education, character,and social development almost of a nation?

HINMAN: It’s interesting to see the ways in whichsports can have an impact on our society either for posi-tive or negative. When you find that there are sports fig-ures whose moral failings are not only obvious but forwhich they have no remorse, this sets a tone particularlyfor younger people. They start to think that if this per-son does that then maybe we should all be doing thesame type of thing and we all get diminished in thatprocess. That is an example of when sports fail. Butwhen sports works well, it does a number of things for us.

There’s an old Jesuit model about a sound mindand a sound body. Indeed, I think it’s absolutely rightthat part of the way in which we achieve harmonywithin ourselves and with other people is that sense ofphysical well-being. Sports helps us to achieve that. Italso helps us to achieve a sense of physical compe-tence in the world. We’re at home with our environ-ment; we’re not intimidated by it. That’s one of thevery important reasons for gender equity in terms ofsports. Codes of etiquette have a well-intentioned side,to show respect and consideration. Yet some traditionalthings, such as holding doors for women, can put themin a position of not being very powerful. We need tofind ways of showing respect and consideration thatalso empower people. One of the things sports does forwomen, as well as men, is increase that sense of theirown power and their own competence in the world. Ithink that’s a real plus.

COMMENT: We were talking about society and playand the role of that in the development of our children,especially addressing gender equity.

HINMAN: Sports in terms of gender equity hastremendous power. That’s why this encouragement thatwe see for sports, not only at all age levels, but also atall levels of competence, is tremendously important.What it does in each instance is challenge us whereverwe are in life, whether in terms of age or in terms ofability, challenge us to be just a little better. I think

that’s an important challenge for us to have and that weall benefit from that. We benefit individually when weourselves improve and we benefit socially when we aresurrounded by people who are increasingly competent. Isee this very much as a win/win situation when we’reable to do that.

QUESTION: Have you thought much about how theeducation system might be changed to encourage,enhance, develop and utilize sports in the educationalprocess?

HINMAN: I haven’t studied much about it, but I have adaughter who is going from kindergarten into first gradeso I’ve thought a lot about it because I care about her. Iwant her life to be a good one. From what I’ve been ableto ascertain, there seems to be an encouragement ofsports but not an integration of sports. Sports is a sepa-rate compartment in school and they don’t necessarilytie it all together. I’d really like to see more of that tyingtogether at a very early age.

One of the things that I’ve noticed, particularlywhen young kids play, is that it’s a rehearsal for life.They are both playing the game and they are playingroles to try out and to live by. Someone I was talking torecently said that as a kid he used to even act out someof the slow-motion shots when they were playing, andthe announcers fade in and fade out and all that type ofthing. Quite literally, they were seeing themselves inthose roles.

What we do in that process is be creative. We createourselves. We are constantly in this process. We are notsimply being who we are, but we are also deciding whowe are going to become. Sports and play can play atremendously powerful role in shaping that. The morethat we’re able to do that in a way that ties in with thewhole of the curriculum, then the more everyone’sgoing to gain by that.

QUESTION: In addition to gender equity, what aresome of the more important issues as you see it fromyour own research? What concerns you?

HINMAN: Probably what concerns me most deeply areissues about the whole role model question. It seems asif several different things are going on at the same time.First of all, you have people who are excelling at sports,excelling in ways that are almost unthinkable they are sogood these days. It’s truly impressive. But their earlyexcellence in one area often out-strips the developmentin many other areas. Furthermore, they didn’t sign up tobe role models. That’s really clear. Usually, they lovethe game and they like to be rich and that’s okay.There’s nothing wrong with that. But the difficulty isthat they are cast in the role of models for other people.Additionally the line between public and private has

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become increasingly blurred. This is most evident in thenews media. Sometimes this is good. We are able to seeprivate moments that are truly inspirational. But veryoften the kinds of private moments that a certain seg-ment of the news media gravitate toward are preciselythose moments that are most surprising and in that senseapparently newsworthy. Usually, the surprises are not tothe good. What that does is add detail to our perceptionof these sports figures lives that often has a really nega-tive impact in terms of how we see them as a rolemodel. If we still see them as a role model, then wehave problems.

COMMENT: One of the problems in modeling in sci-ence, and in every other area, is defining the attributesof the model.

HINMAN: Yes, the attributes of the model in this case,may well be attributes that do not serve you well ineveryday life. They may serve you well if you are young,powerful and a millionaire, and if you have everyone’sadulation already. But if you don’t have all those thingsand you still have those character traits, you may indeedfind yourself in for a very difficult time. The charactertraits that we find to emphasize are not necessarily theones that are very good for most of us as citizens.

COMMENT: When we start talking about transferencefrom sports and achievement to the real world, there’s areal philosophical question about what should be trans-ferred.

HINMAN: There’s definitely a question about whatyou should transfer from our images of sports and sportsfigures to the everyday world. Some of the things thatwe can transfer are, indeed, truly impressive. You seethe discipline and dedication in every day of a person’slife. Look at an athlete like Michael Jordan and you see,not only the physical discipline, but you also see themoral discipline. It’s a really interesting thing.

One of the things that philosophers talk about isvirtues. Think about a virtue, such as anger. Aristotlesays it’s a virtue to be angry at the right person, at theright place, at the right time, and in the right way. Well,we’ve seen a lot of examples of people who don’t knowhow to be angry in sports. But look at someone like Jor-dan, he knows how to be angry. If you get him angry, hewill just play harder and you will lose worse as a result.There’s a kind of effectiveness about his anger that is incontrast to the kind of self-indulgent anger you see insome other sports figures. So we find both role modelsthere and I hope that the Jordan model is the one thatwins out.

QUESTION: Would you explain a little of Aristotleand his virtues with respect to sport?

HINMAN: Many of the virtues that Aristotle encour-aged us to have that are precisely those needed in theworld of sport, for example, the virtue of courage. Aris-totle is very clear about this. He said, “Courage requires,among other things, good judgment. It’s not foolhardi-ness.” Think about the sports where people take unnec-essary chances for minimal gains. That’s the kind ofthing Aristotle eschewed. That’s not a virtue; that’s fool-ishness. In this case, virtue is the ability to face one’sfears and overcome them.

I remember when I first discovered there were anumber of mountain climbers who had fears of heights.I thought, “Gee, I can relate to the fear of height, if notthe mountain climbing.”

But one of the things that was impressive about thatis that they took their worst fear and confronted it headon. The type of thing that we find in sports continuallyis the development of virtues such as courage, virtuessuch as perseverance. One of the things Aristotle alwayssaid is that virtue is a habit. You can’t have virtue onTuesday morning. Virtue is something that you do for alifetime and you see that in dedicated athletes. You seethe way in which the discipline is a habit, somethingthat they do every day of their lives.

Another thing that Aristotle realized is that you dothese things ultimately because what draws you is yourlove of them, your attraction to them. You see that ingreat athletes. You see that they love the game and thatthey also love many of the things around the game, butthere’s an element of just pure enjoyment. They do thatin that moment because the one thing they want to do isplay that game. That’s characteristic also of play in gen-eral. What makes it distinctive, is that we do it for itsown sake. The difference between play and work isoften understood as the difference of what we do for itsown sake or what we do for the sake of something else,usually a paycheck. That’s why play, and in many wayssports, is its own reward. It’s the doing of it that’s thereward.

What you look for in life is that you try to find thejob that’s really play. You try to find the job that if youdidn’t have to work, you’d do anyway. Then every dayis a joy. That doesn’t mean that every day is easy, justthat it’s a joy.

QUESTION: How might we understand the built-inconflicts that are natural to what sport is. How do theeconomic imperatives or social imperatives or govern-mental imperatives relate to this?

HINMAN: You see some conflicts in sports that arebuilt in structurally. Those are the kinds of conflicts Iworry about most rather than those that depend on indi-vidual personalities and the like. Think about collegeathletics, in particular your top-flight basketball andfootball leagues and the like. One of the things that

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occurs at these schools is that you have people who arecalled student athletes. This is one of those areas wheregrammar actually makes a difference. Is student anadjective or a noun here. Is there a hyphen betweenthose two words and where do you put the accent? Is itstudent athletes, or is it student athletes, or do theyboth get emphasis?

One of the issues that has surrounded the NCAA,and it has been an issue for universities in general, isthat they have an odd kind of dual relationship with stu-dent athletes. That’s not true about the relationship withstudents in general. That is, in colleges and universities,their concern is with students. The question that theyhave to ask themselves continually - and they do a rea-sonably good job of this - is what is going to be in thebest overall interests of our students as students. What’sgoing to contribute to their academic welfare? Thenthey seek to provide those things to the fullest measurethat they can. In that situation, presumably the studentand the college or university are all on the same side.Their shared concern is with the academic well being ofstudents. That’s the ideal world. There’s no built in con-flict there.

In contrast to that, you have a dual relationshipwith the university and student athletes. The athletes’first roles are as students, but they are also athleteswho bring to the university tremendous assets. Theyalso receive from the university all sorts of benefitsthat are completely separate from issues about theirstatus as students. If universities had just gone out andhired teams to put on the field, they would have astraightforward and relatively unproblematic contrac-tual relationship with those teams. They would paythem the market value. In effect, they are doing someof that except they are doing that with students and notprofessional athletes. Can we pay these students? Theyare not professional. Yet the relationship is very muchone in which the university, particularly in the largerdivisions, makes hundreds of thousands of dollarsfrom some of these teams. It is a very murky relation-ship.

As a moral philosopher, one of the things I’m par-ticularly wary of is structures that have conflict builtinto them. There’s enough conflict to go around as it is.But when we build it in such ways that conflict musthappen sooner or later, then something is wrong. I don’tknow the answer to that, but I am always in favor of usdeveloping structures that eliminate those conflicts asmuch as possible rather than necessitate them.

COMMENT: Could you speak about amateurism ver-sus professionalism?

HINMAN: The issue of amateurism versus profession-alism is interesting. The word for amateur goes back tothe root word in Latin for love. What characterizes anamateur is that he/she is one who loves it. In someextended sense hopefully, we’re all amateurs. But whatsets professionals apart are really two things, two verydistinct things. One is that their whole life is devoted toit; the other thing is they get paid for it. Those twothings are very different kinds of things. The fact thatthey devote their whole lives to it doesn’t particularinterfere with their love for it. The fact that they get paidfor it may or may not.

So we get this odd kind of division between theamateurs and the professionals. We find it in sports, butwe find it everywhere in life. You find it in the academicworld. There are amateur scholars and they have a verydifficult time gaining recognition outside that world.Amateurs can do things, but we’re suspicious of them. Ithink that one of the things we need to do is perhaps beable to see the love in other people and see the love thatmotivates amateurs and prize that. That’s one of thethings we want to nourish in one another in any situa-tion we can.

The words amateur and professional get used in allsorts of different senses. Often professional is a way ofelevating something and it can be elevated in either oftwo ways. Either it can be elevated by drawing it closerto a higher standard or it can be elevated by pushingothers down so that the difference between where youare and the next step down is greater, not becauseyou’ve gone any higher but because you’ve managed topush the others down. The latter is the objectionablesense of professional in my opinion.

QUESTION: In other professions, a whole slew ofduties show up when professional certification isobtained, such as when you get your MD. When you arehired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, do you also have awhole other set of duties show up in the same way?

HINMAN: It would seem that, whatever profession youlook at, there are certain kinds of duties that arise by thevery nature of the activity to which that profession isdedicated. So presumably in medicine, one of the funda-mental goals is about healing and about health and onehas certain responsibilities as a physician.

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Jan Boxhill, Ph.D.

JAN BOXILL: I grew up in a family of twelve on adairy farm and there were five brothers and six sisters.Basically our fun was playing sports and it was very,very competitive. I played baseball, football, basketball.You name the sport and we played it together. If youknow about a farm life, you know there are no rules.Everybody does what they have to do. That’s actuallywhat got me into sports. It’s been a passion of mine for-ever and still is.

QUESTION: With respect to your academic focus andpassion in sports, how does that relate?

JAN BOXILL: Sports were important to me, but whatbecame even more important to me was its necessity orsignificance in society. When I went off to school afterplaying on the farm, I realized that girls didn’t have thesame opportunities that boys did. I wanted to have thoseopportunities that I had been impassioned with as achild while working on the farm. It became important tome to understand why it is that I want everybody to beable to participate. What is it that grabs people aboutsports? What I came up with is that it is the single mostavailable vehicle for individuals to develop self-respect,self-esteem and self-development. That’s what it did forme. So, I wanted that to be understood for everybody.

I began to look at what the nature of sport was andI’ve come up with a paradigm. First of all, it is a freely-chosen, voluntary activity designed for no other goalexcept itself. So the end is within itself. It is an artificialbackground, an artificial floor. For instance on the foot-ball field, there are artificial sequences. You take themout of the regular work-a-day world. You develop asense of creativity, self-expression and self-developmentthat makes you not only feel good about yourself, butmakes you feel good about the person that’s challengingyou to do your best.

It is also a rule governed activity. There are all kindsof rules. Rules that define the activity, the rules of thegame, as well as rules of decency. We change thoserules all the time in order to make the game challenging,as well as make the game fair. We want to prevent asmuch harm as we can and we want the games to bechallenging at all levels. So we have different rules for

little league baseball than we have for major leaguebaseball. We want the rules to be such that each personis challenged at their level of competition.

Another feature is that it is physically challengingand involves competition. Many people think that com-petition and cooperation are in conflict, but actually not,not in sports or anything else. You cooperate to beginthe game; you cooperate to play in this artificial area.You agree to abide by the rules and you agree to abideby the referees’ decisions. We don’t challenge that. Wemay challenge a call, but we don’t challenge the factthat the referee has the right and the authority to makethe calls.

It forces you to develop yourself in this artificialarea in order to know a lot about who you are and it alsogives you a sense of creativity. Of course, most of all,it’s fun. I like to see it kept that way. That is sort of anideal notion. I realize that as an ideal or paradigm wedon’t always abide by that. That’s what I want to beginto look at—when we don’t. What happens when wedon’t? What happens when we take the goal outside ofthe game itself? For instance when money becomes theobject, it changes the nature of the game. I want to lookat how we can protect the essence of the game, the idealof the game, and still have these things. So what I’mlooking at is what is the ideal or paradigm of sport. Itdoesn’t fit everything. It is not a definition. It’s this par-adigm. Where are we and then how do we keep as closeas we can to this paradigm?

What I argue is that sport provides a significantmoral function in our society. Many people say thatsports is a microcosm, and it is. I’ve often heard athletessay, “There are drugs in society. Therefore, you’re goingto find drugs in sports. There is violence in society.You’re going to have violence in sports.” That’s true.But because of the dramatization of sports and becauseit is such a significant aspect of our society, it does morethan just reflect society. Sport isn’t passive, it’s active. Itreflects back onto society and it affects what it’s areflection of. Whatever our role is—whether we’re par-ticipants, whether we’re coaches, whether we’re agents,whether we’re journalists—we in sports have more of aresponsibility because of the nature of sport to be moreaware of how it reflects back on society.

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We often have heard (Charles) Barkley, who sayshe’s not a role model. In a sense, people in sports don’thave a choice. It would be like me as a professor saying,“well, I really want to be a professor, but I don’t want toteach students or I don’t want to grade students or Idon’t want students to come to see me or I want to beable to say whatever I can up in front of people and totell them things I probably shouldn’t say.” But profes-sors, athletes, journalists, etc. do have a responsibility tosociety. They may not like it; but the more successfulthey are, the more responsibility they must accept. Noone is asking them to raise any children but their own.We do ask them to take on the responsibility that theyhave chosen. It’s not something that anyone forced onthem. It’s part of being in that role. They can’t choosepart of a role and disregard the rest of it.

QUESTION: Some people would just like to reject thesocietal aspect of sports. But the reality of the game insociety is that those who are playing the game havethese roles. Who puts these responsibilities on them?

JAN BOXILL: The reality is that they do have theseroles and who puts these roles on them is, in part, all ofus. It can’t be separated out. It can’t be just the journal-ists because part of it is that the media plays a signifi-cant role. They promote basically what we want to see,but also we are given to see what they want us to see. Ithink they have more of a responsibility than they’vesaid. I realize that this is a business. I’m not so naive tobelieve that I’m speaking about an ideal situation. I’mnot so naive to believe that the practice of sports doesn’talways fit with the ideal. But at heart I do think that thesabotage of ethics is a decline of excellence. Once onegoes overboard and believes that we can do things with-out realizing the ethics of it, then we’ve debased theexcellence of the sport itself. By that, I mean, we pro-mote the violence.

Yesterday there was this big brawl in baseball. It’sbeen shown over and over and over, and there reallyisn’t any need to except that people want to see vio-lence. But just because people want to see violence,doesn’t mean we have to promote it in our industry.Agents’ interests are in money. But that doesn’t meanthat is the only thing they can be interested in is money.They also must be interested in the ethics of the sportitself. So I think that all of us set those rules. Butbecause sports are such a public endeavor, unlike stu-dents taking exams in their classes which is not subjectto public scrutiny, there are more rules and roles set togo with it. So it dramatizes both our virtues and ourvices.

QUESTION: You made reference to excellence. Howdoes excellence in the philosophical tradition relate toexcellence in sports?

JAN BOXILL: Excellence is achieved through follow-ing the rules in order to be creative. What you’re givenis an artificial area. It’s like using the medium of poetry.There are certain kinds of poems that you ask your stu-dents to do or that other people do. You have a mediumto develop your creativity and to develop who you are.It’s in the competition where you see the excellence.The death of ethics is the sabotage of excellence. Onceyou do something like cheating, it debases the wholegame. The game is set up in order for you to followthese rules for creative self-expression in order to devel-op yourself. If you cheat, that’s not a means of develop-ing yourself. It’s a means of developing something, butcertainly not the physical and mental challenges that goon in sports.

For me, excellence is what allows the individual toachieve as high as he or she wants to achieve. For thatreason, you choose competitors who are slightly betterthan you. You don’t choose competitors who you willalways defeat. You might occasionally choose somewho are going to be slightly less than you if you reallywant a confidence booster. If UNC women’s basketballplayed the high school team, that’s of no value to any-body - not the high school team nor the women at UNC.What you look for is an opportunity to get better anddevelop yourself and test just how far you can go, whichis why you go to school or why you do anything. Itdoesn’t mean we all have to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbars.After all, we’re all not seven feet. But within our limits,we do have an opportunity to develop ourselves as far aswe can go. That’s the beauty of sports. There are sportsavailable for almost all body types, at least for men andit’s changing for women. There still perhaps isn’t theavailability for women to play football, but there areavailable sports so that each body type can developexcellence and have an opportunity to feel better aboutthemselves. I think that’s the beauty of sport. It’s funand it’s a way of developing yourself in many ways.

QUESTION: Can we talk about sports and educationfrom K through 12? It sounds as if they should some-how be connected.

JAN BOXILL: There’s a wonderful article written byJanice Walton called “Why Everyone Deserves a Sport-ing Chance”. What she does is argue, and I thoroughlyagree with her on this, that sport isn’t just like educa-tion; it is education. It is something that tells us whetherwe’re going to be a part of society or not. Educationprovides us with a means of learning about ourselvesand learning about the world. Sports does the samething. We are educated in order to participate in thissociety. We do sports for the same reason. If we denypeople access to sports, we’re denying them a wholeavenue of access into society because sports is muchmore than just the fun. It permeates so many aspects of

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our society that I think it tells us whether we’re going tobe included. Sports tell us who are going to be the suc-cessors and leaders of our nation.

That is one of the reasons why I spend a lot of timediscussing women in sports. Women have been deniedaccess for many years, but thanks to Title IX they havelots more opportunities than they’ve ever had. I thinksports has allowed them an access into the businessworld. I read recently that 95-98% of the CEOs in thiscountry played sports—varsity sports of some sort,either high school or college. It tells you that sports pro-duces leaders. And why? Because it challenges peopleto compete against themselves, not just against others. Itchallenges them to be better at what they can do and toaccept adversity. It teaches them how to take on adversi-ty and go beyond it. It teaches you how to achieve suc-cess and it also teaches you how to deal with failure.Since we want all people to participate in society, it’simportant for women to participate as well and we needto start in kindergarten.

We don’t just let little girls play hopscotch; we letthem be active. We don’t send them out in little skirtsand little dresses with the admonishment not to get dirtybecause it’s not a ladylike thing to do and perpetuate thenotion that women and girls should not participate insports. That it’s unladylike and will harm the reproduc-tive areas, etc. Title IX and the proliferation of womenin sports have shown that those prejudices are reallyfalse and that they are prejudices. That’s one of the goodthings about sports. It shows us where we need tochange our own ideas.

When I was growing up, girls who were active insports were called tomboys. I have been known as atomboy from day one. You get labeled and homophobiastill plays a significant role in these attitudes. The par-ticipation of women in sports and ads with women insports tries to show that all types of people participate.Same thing with men, all types of people participate. Ithas nothing to do with their sexual orientation whatso-ever. Whatever their body types, they should be allowedto develop.

Another thing it promotes is not separation betweenmen and women, but integration. Men like to participatebecause there is a bonding. There’s a saying: this is amale thing. Well as a matter of fact, cooperation in oursociety is a human thing. If we recognize that the goodreason men participate is the same reason that womenand all of us want to participate. It has the same values.It doesn’t mean we have to play together. Although insome cases, we will. But it does mean that each groupbe allowed to play to their best.

Another thing it allows us then is to see just how farthe body can go. That’s why we’re challenged at everylevel. When it comes to schools, I think it’s more thanjust P.E. classes. P.E. classes are important, but most ofthem are boring. For some people, they didn’t do them

at all. The P.E. teachers are pretty much told, ‘look,you’re unimportant’ and that’s sad. If you take P.E.classes and combine them with a competitive game,then children learn both the process of working togetherand playing together. They see the product they’veachieved at a level they never thought they couldachieve. It’s important to start early but only where thecompetition is to their level and not excessive.

It’s important for us to recognize just what thatcompetition is for - it’s for developing the child, all ofthem. It’s not just about winning and winning at allcosts. Once we look at only winning, we start to changethe nature of the game. The winning comes through adeveloped process. It’s both a process and a product.The desire to win is important, but winning at all costsis not. The desire to win is what’s important. I think it’svery important.

QUESTION: Are there any other specific things you’dlike to comment on?

JAN BOXILL: Actually, there’s one thing with thechildren at school. I participate in a program at the Uni-versity of North Carolina where I talk to high schoolsophomores. In talking about sports that are available, Iasked the girls in the class how many would like to haveparticipated in football. 90% said that they would. WhenI mentioned this to my college class, they were quitesurprised. Most of the sophomore girls in high schoolsaid they would love to be able to participate in football- and not powder puff.

I think there’s something good about participatingand respecting your opponent. That’s another aspect thatis so important about sports. It teaches you not onlyabout your own self development and respect, but alsohow to respect others. I think we see that with the hand-shake at the end of the game. What we’re saying in thissymbolic gesture is, “Thank you for the challenge. Irespect you.” While watching the NBA playoffs, themedia told us that the Lakers and the Utah Jazz appar-ently don’t like each other or that some of them don’trespect each other. I think that when money is involved,it’s just not about the game anymore. But I do think thatwhat sport does is to help us learn how to respect eachother because all of us have to play together.

One of the things that I emphasize is that we are alldifferent. Every one of us is different, but also we’re allthe same in some sense. We want to be respected for ourchoices and we have to recognize that we can’t go italone. None of us can do whatever we want by our-selves. That’s what the game shows you. There are tallpeople, short people. There are football players, thereare others. You cannot succeed in a football game with-out depending on the others and they depending on you.You must depend on your team and you’ve got to havethe cooperation of your opponents as well. You can’t

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win a football game without the opponents agreeing toplay in accordance with the rules.

QUESTION: What are the most important goals andaims in your work?

JAN BOXILL: The most important goal and aim in mywork is to get people to understand, first of all, what isthe moral significance of sport. Since my area is socialand political philosophy, I want people to be able tounderstand what positions they have and to understandwhy they have them. I want them to say more than, “It’smy opinion and that’s the end of it. That’s how I feel.” Iwant them to be able to take how they feel and whattheir opinions are and to be able to analyze them andunderstand them. When it comes time for them to haveto be leaders or parents or participate in some aspect insociety, I want them to be able to articulate what theirposition is.

Since sports is such an important aspect in our soci-ety, it is important to recognize why it is. Sports tell us alot about our society and that’s what I think I want peo-ple to understand. It tells us our virtues and vices. It tellsus when we don’t live up to those virtues and vices. Italso reflects back and tells us how we might, in sports,be able to help change those things. An example that Iuse a lot involves Marge Schott, who made some racialslurs. She justifies her statements by saying, “Lookeverybody says things.” Well that might be, but the factthat she’s in a position where she can make a differencemeans she shouldn’t be saying those things. It is herresponsibility to make that change. When people in thatposition accept that responsibility, then perhaps we canbegin to train children. If we see people in that positionas well as other athletes acting in ways that are verydetrimental to others, what it says is “Well, he or she isin a position making all this money, so I might just dothe same thing.” I want people to understand that thesignificance is more than just a game. The gameinvolves a great deal of moral tones with it and it canteach us much more than what we think it can.

QUESTION: What would you particularly advise orsay to young athletes? You were talking about the gener-al people before, but can you address this.

JAN BOXILL: What I would say to young athletes atthis time, is first of all, know yourself. One of the ways toknow yourself is to participate. You can’t sit on the side-lines and gripe. You also need to recognize that at everylevel you have to rely on others for your development,whether it’s your teachers or your coaches. The assump-tion is that if somebody is a coach or teacher, they know alittle bit more than you do. So what you want to do is takeadvantage of the resources available to you. If you don’t,you have no one to blame but yourself.

You also have to come in with a good attitude. I dothis presentation for a lot of sports camps and my themeis: aptitude plus attitude determines your altitude. It isone thing to have a lot of talent, but talent isn’t going tobe enough. If you have a bad attitude, you’re not goingto go anywhere. No one wants to play with you. I knowa lot of really, really talented athletes both males andfemales who went no place. In some cases, they weregiven scholarships to go on to college. But because oftheir attitude, they never finished. And where are theynow? They are no place and continue to blame others.They need to recognize that when there are sour grapesthe common denominator is normally them. The biggestadvice I can give to children going into sports is thattheir attitude is as important as their talents. They’ve gotto develop those hand in hand.

In my workshops, I talk about the language we useto refer to others. If you use derogatory terms to refer toothers, it says more about you than it does about theother person. You need to use language that is respectfulin both ways. It’s not a matter of being politically cor-rect; it is a matter of respecting each other. You’re notgoing anywhere unless you realize that you have torespect others. Some people feel that if they don’trespect themselves, they don’t have to respect others.That’s not how it goes. Just because some people don’trespect themselves, they don’t have the right not torespect others. You can’t control the behavior of others,but you can control yours. That’s the one thing that’s inyour control, your attitude.

QUESTION: Could you mention just a little bit aboutphilosophical interests. I think philosophy has drivenyou a little bit in this area.

JAN BOXILL: One of the philosophers that I find mostuseful is a contemporary, moral and political philoso-pher called John Rawls. Rawls has developed what hecalls a social union and I’ve adopted his notion of asocial union. A social union is an activity or practicewhich has rules and offices attached to it, but where weall have a shared end. So in competition, the shared endis the good play of the game as well as the desire to winand also recognizing that somebody is going to win. Inthat, he says that we appreciate each others’ excellencesas we appreciate our own so we allow each person todevelop. Rawls political theory probably is what mostaffected me in doing this.

Also, of course, looking at the ancient Greek notionof sport. Even though lots of people will say that this isancient, it really isn’t. The process and product are stillthe same. Nobody wants to just win; we want to gothrough the process in order to win. I don’t want to takea pill and say I’ve won. Winning isn’t everything. Wewant the process that goes along with it. We would callit perhaps, a deserved victory. Using the example of

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UNC beating a high school team that I mentioned earli-er, it would be a hollow victory. If we cheated, it’s also ahollow victory. The process is as essential as the prod-uct, probably more so, because it’s through the processthat we learn about ourselves and through which wedevelop the respect for others. It is not just the product.It often doesn’t matter who wins. In the end, that’s notreally what you recognize. What I think you recognizeis that even your biggest competitors are your friendsand that’s what is neat about sports. The biggest rival ofthe University of North Carolina women’s basketball isprobably the University of Virginia. It just so happens,

that I’m probably as good friends with the UVA coachand some of the players as I am with those at UNC.That’s the beauty of it, right? We compete as hard as wecan, but yet we’re still friends. I learned this very earlyplaying with my family. We played hard; we fought, wewere brutal. But as family members, we were also bestfriends. We support one another in every aspect. Werealized that sometimes we might have overstepped, butwe never hurt each other to the point where we couldn’tcontinue. We do try to prevent somebody from doingsomething, but we don’t deliberately try to hurt thembecause we know what the whole thing is about.

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Blake Burleson, Ph.D.

QUESTION: Are the problems in sports today a matterof a few bad apples or are the problems systemic?

BLAKE BURLESON: That’s a good question. I thinkit’s easy to see the bad apples when we see the LatrellSprewell’s and Michael Irvin and this kind of thing. Oftensports administrators and coaches and athletes want tosay it’s a few bad apples. My own opinion is that it’sprobably more than that. The problems in sports are sys-temic. When we think about the 1980s and 1990s andexamine sports a little moreclosely, we think about whathappened in the state of Texaswhere we had the governor inthe state of Texas in the 80simplicated in the SMU scan-dal. In 1996 there was a sur-vey of 198 Olympic athletes.They were asked the question,if they could take a drug andthat drug would assure themof an Olympic medal and tak-ing that same drug wouldmean they would die in fiveyears, would they take it?95% answered yes, they would. The problems are quitedeep here.

QUESTION: What values expressed in the sports indus-try do you find worthy of critical ethical examination?

BLAKE BURLESON: Sports brings us certain valuesand it expresses these through the media and throughthe players, coaches and administrators. Which valuesought we to examine? Well, we could look at a numberof things. We see things here by just looking at theaphorisms or the truisms that we hear fulminated. Showme the money. Homo-econominus. Man, the economicbeing. The bottom line is money. When I was an acade-mic coordinator in an athletic department in a university,the athletic director once told me that we were in theentertainment business. We’re also in the educationbusiness, but mainly we are in the entertainment busi-ness. But if filling stadiums is our bottom line, then cer-

tainly we’re going to abdicate certain responsibilities forstudent-athletes.

Another aphorism: just win, baby. Al Davis hasmade this statement famous, but we hear it everywhere,not just in sport. Homo-victorious is man the winner.The bottom line is winning. I remember as a ninth grad-er on Lake Highland’s Junior High football team in Dal-las, Texas memorizing the speeches of Vince Lombardi.Winning is not a sometimes thing; it’s an all the timesthing. You do things right all the time. You don’t win

some of the time; you win allof the time. There is no roomfor second place.

Another one perhapswould be the Nike slogan—“Just Do It.” There’s some-thing about that which I like.Get the job done, just get itdone. There’s also somethingthat speaks to the model ofhomo-festivus - man, the partyanimal, man with an appetitethat ought to be quenched nomatter what the cost. Just do it.Whatever feels good, do it. A

kind of hedonistic model. These are some of the values Ithink that we ought to be exploring and looking at thatwe hear expressed by athletics.

QUESTION: Would you agree that sports often con-tributes in important ways to the moral development ofour youth in American society?

BLAKE BURLESON: Sports contributes in significantways to youth in our society. One reason that sports cancontribute to moral development is because sports offersa kind of laboratory. You place a child in that laboratoryand give him a chance to do some things well, but youdo it correctly and in an ethical way. Sports is able to dothat because it’s simpler than life. If you get up to batand you swing three times, you’re out. It doesn’t matterif you are black or white. It doesn’t matter if you’reshort or tall. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are.You are still out. If you do swing the bat and run and get

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Blake Burleson, Ph.D.

to first base, it doesn’t matter what your religion is orwhat your sex is. You’re on first base. You’re safe. It’ssimpler. It’s also the case that punishment is dealt outswiftly in sport. The lineman hits the quarterback andhe’s penalized fifteen yards right there if it’s after he’sreleased the ball. Another reason I think that sports is alaboratory is that we can observe it. We can see what thebatting average is. We know how high the person jumps.This is all observable. So sports is able to serve us as alaboratory, especially in early development.

If we think about Lawrence Kohlberg’s models ofrational moral development at the pre-conventional andconventional levels, sports is an excellent place to learnsome things. However if we look at post-conventionalmoral reasoning and what we think when we go beyondwhat society might teach us, I’m not sure sports is ableto serve as a laboratory for some of those things. Butcertainly at some levels, the lower levels, it is a tremen-dous place to learn things.

QUESTION: What do you predict for the futureregarding sports and morality?

BLAKE BURLESON: One of the issues that ethicistsare interested in right now concerning sport has to dowith the idea that sport is sometimes considered morallyisolated, that it is an arena unto itself and ought to gov-ern itself. Actions that are committed on the field aresimply that, actions on the field. It is a sort of make-believe world. Things happen and perhaps are not dealtwith in the way we might in normal society. In thefuture I think we’re going to see government perhapsbecome more involved because some sports organiza-tions have not really regulated themselves. As an exam-ple, look at the recent ruling by a civil court awarding$64 million in damages against the NCAA regarding therestricted earnings of coaches. Their point here is thatsince the NCAA hasn’t been able to regulate them-selves, we will do it. This is something that is going tobe a key issue in the future.

QUESTION: Tell me a little bit about your own experi-ences in sports and how it’s affected your life.

BLAKE BURLESON: My own experience in sports istypical of growing up in Texas and playing Little Leaguebaseball as a child and also being involved in football. Iwish we’d had soccer, as a popular sport when I wasgrowing up. I learned a lot of lessons in sports. I remem-ber when I was about nine years old being on my firstbaseball team. My father was the coach. I remember get-ting up to the plate and not swinging the bat, hoping todraw a walk. I remember just standing there and hopingto draw a walk. I got a walk once out of ten times, butstruck out the other nine. My father said, “Look I’drather you strike out than get a walk.”

I started swinging the bat, and every now and then Igot a hit. This was an early lesson that sports taught meand it was related to the inner-morality of baseball. Inorder to succeed, you have to risk failure. That certainlycan be transferred to many other areas of life.

I was a pole vaulter in college and vaulted for Bay-lor University. I had the record there at the time and Ihad a good experience as a student athlete. I think moststudent-athletes’ experiences are probably good. I’veoften worried about the 40% or 30% who don’t have agood experience in terms of being successful, both ath-letically and academically. But my experience in sportshas been a big part of my life.

QUESTION: If you had some grade school and highschool kids in here, what would you tell them?

BLAKE BURLESON: So many of our youth today aremotivated to be successful in sports and they think theycan make it. When I was an academic coordinator atBaylor University, every year when we had our freshmenrecruits come in for football I would ask them to puttheir head on their desk. Then I would ask them, “Doyou think you have a good, legitimate chance to becomea professional football player? Nobody’s watching. Yourhead is on the table. Nobody’s looking, except me.”

It was an old Baptist plea, down the aisle kind ofthing. Usually about 90% would raise their hand thatthey could make it professionally. So I think advice issomething youth often don’t hear. I’m not sure how toget the message across to be balanced as a human being.This is part of our difficulty. How do we do that? Theyare probably not going to listen to me. They are proba-bly going to listen to athletes who have made it, athletesthey respect. Yet even so, I’m not sure they’ll get themessage. It’s a difficult message to get across. In myown experience, even after I was through with sports, Iwas still fantasizing about what it would be like to playprofessional football. We are brought up fantasizingabout that and it’s a difficult thing. I’m not sure whatadvice you can give. It’s a tough one.

QUESTION: In your course on sports ethics, what aresome of the more interesting elements that you cover?

BLAKE BURLESON: In sports ethics, you have anopportunity to study your culture because sports is awindow on your culture. So sports ethics is like businessethics. It’s like medical ethics; it’s like any other ethics.They are the same basic issues. We are looking at gen-der issues. We’re looking at issues of race. We’re look-ing at issues regarding education and sport. We’re look-ing at social values in sport and how sport shapes socialvalues and how social values shape sport. We also lookat what issues are particular to the sporting realm, issueslike sportsmanship and competition. Is competition ethi-

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cal? That’s an un-American kind of thing to say. But ifyou look at sports from an ethical perspective, I thinkyou have to ask hard questions like that. How should weregulate competition so that we allow people to be fail-ures or at least to lose and not be considered sub-human,which is something we often have problems with in thiscountry where the winner is the one we glorify andeverybody else is left aside.

QUESTION: Since you work out of the department ofreligion, what does religion have to say about sports?

BLAKE BURLESON: Religion and sport have had along history. If we look in Western society, we thinkabout the Olympics for example. The Olympic festivalsin ancient Greece were originally religious events. Theywere events dedicated to the gods. The athletes preparedthemselves in dedication to Zeus or to another one ofthe deities. The Christian church really began condemn-ing sports because they were often the ones victimizedby sports, whether it was in the gladiator ring or whatnot. Churches had a long association, or let’s say a longhistory, of condemning sports.

In this country when we think about the founding ofthe country, we think about the puritans that came overand their distrust of sport. That’s really the way sportbegan in this country. We had a lot of laws about whenyou can play sports and when you can’t. About the mid-dle of the nineteenth century though, some of the clergybegan to reconsider things. This had to do with somesocial actions related to children and the idea that chil-dren should have a place to play. We should have play-grounds. After a Sunday sermon one clergy, Higgin-botham, jumped in a river and swam across to show thatpeople should do sporting activities. He was defrocked.He was no longer allowed to be a minister. This was aserious thing at the time.

What we have today is basically a wedding of reli-gion and sport in our culture. It’s sort of come to theother extreme. We have thousands of para-church orga-nizations. The grandfather was the Fellowship of Chris-tian Athletes. You can think of other prominent institu-tions like Athletes in Action, but there are literallythousands now that work within sport and use sport fortheir purposes: often evangelism or other things. Thereis a good and bad to that, I suppose. There is a lot ofgood that these organizations do. From a theologicalperspective, however, I think there’s not enough criticalexamination of sport by these entities. They simply usesports for their purposes without ever really evaluatingsome of the things that are going on in sport. Very rarelydo they criticize sports. In that sense, the church has lostit prophetic voice here. The church rarely—I say churchin the generic sense—criticized sports. There are somethings about sport today that we need to examine in anethical way and the church has not been doing that.

QUESTION: In terms of your own work, studyingsport and rolling it into the academic curriculum, whatare your aims and goals for your course? What are youtrying to make happen?

BLAKE BURLESON: I teach a course of graduate stu-dents. Most of these students are going into sport man-agement. I suppose that the goals I have for those stu-dents would not be particularly different from the goalsan ethicist would have in another arena, such as busi-ness or politics. For me the first goal is to help the stu-dent to understand who they are, for them to understandtheir own strengths and weaknesses in terms of moraldecision making. We all have blind spots. We all haveareas that we neglect whether it’s our reasoning abilityor our ability to empathize with people that are differentfrom us or our ability to sense and to gather data aboutthe situation or our ability to see the big picture. We allhave strengths and weaknesses. So the first task for meas an ethicist is to help the student understand theirstrength and their weakness.

The second task is to explore the moral arena ofsport, in its inherent values and also in terms of its val-ues that are beyond the sporting realm. For example, Ithink you want to examine sport itself. You want to lookat competition and violence. My goal is to get the stu-dent, who is often a former athlete or who has been apart of athletics all his or her life and who thinks of ath-letics as his or her career, to examine this cultural phe-nomenon for the first time. It’s usually a given for themthat it’s good, but there are parts of it that are not per-fect. There are, in fact, things we need to look at andexamine. So my goal is to get them to look at this forperhaps the first time and then to explore the many areasthat they will be going into. If they are sport managersor coaches, it is important because they will have to dealwith this.

QUESTION: Do you have any questions?

BLAKE BURLESON: Another aphorism that we hearpromulgated by sports figures and sometimes the mediacomes from Charles Barkley: “I am not a role model.” Itwas interesting to me that, when he first said that, therewere many in the media who said amen. They said theyagreed. This is the idea that I am an island unto myself.In fact, Charles Barkley, by definition is a role modelbecause he’s one of the greatest power forwards thatplayed basketball. Role models are those in our livesthat demonstrate excellence, wherever that is, whetherit’s athletics or politics or business or the academicworld. When someone demonstrates this craft in anexcellent way, they become role models and there’s anobligation here. They have an enormous amount ofinfluence in our society. So this is another area that Ithink ought to be examined as something being said by

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those in the media and in sports that perhaps we oughtto take a second look at.

QUESTION: Let’s continue for a moment on the mod-eling idea. Obviously just because somebody’s a goodpower forward doesn’t mean that he is necessarily agood role model for the way to treat a wife. I’m nottalking particularly about Charles Barkley here. I’m justsaying that whether it’s rock stars or sports stars, wemay not admire their life styles while we do admiretheir particular talent.

BLAKE BURLESON: Your point is that you can be agreat athlete and still not be a good person. We can lookaround and see many examples of that, however a childdoesn’t pick up on that. As an adult we can use ourmind. We develop our reasoning ability and understandthat it’s okay to like the way someone plays without lik-ing the person. A child, however, probably can’t do that,at least up until a certain age. I’m not sure how we teachour children. My first statement here is that a role modelshould behave well because they have an enormouspotential for influence. The fact is we don’t always dothat and how do we teach our children to separate that. Ithink that’s another issue. How do we do that? I’m notsure how we do that. That’s a good point though.

QUESTION: Are there any particular philosophies orreligions that you appeal to in the classes, some morethan others? Is there any particular viewpoint that yougo toward?

BLAKE BURLESON: I teach at Baylor University,which is a private Baptist university with 12,000 stu-dents. Generally the students will be largely made up ofChristian groups. We usually take that as our founda-tion. Often they come from strong church backgrounds.What I try to do is to take the foundation that they bringwith them and challenge that. I’m a Baptist ministermyself and have grown up in the church. I believe thathas given me a lot of tools in terms of my own ethicaldecision making. However, the unexamined life is notworth living. So one of the things I want to do is chal-lenge these beliefs that they bring so that they will beable to differentiate what their religion has actuallytaught them and what their culture has taught them.What we usually find is that they think that it is thesame thing. This is something that is problematic froman ethical point of view.

H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a book called Christ inCulture, in which he examined the different ways thatthe church has understood its relationship to culture.Probably the most heretical position the church can takeis to assume its values are the same as the culture’s. Alot of my students are not able to differentiate betweenthe prophetic voice in the church and what their culturehas taught them. That’s the challenge that I try to bringto them, while at the same time affirming their religionstraditions, because that’s probably the foundation fromwhich they are going to make most of their decisions.

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