What Golf Can Teach the Rest of Us (Part Three)

Here at TSLP International, we're studying three of the many lessons we can take from the great game of golf. (Ideally, we'd be examining this issue at a golf course.) Part One described the fledgling golfer's manner of financing, and wondered why other young professionals (lawyers, college athletes) couldn't fund their formative years in the same way. Part Two looked at the implicit betting system that underlies tournament golf, with its perfect incentive for competitive play, and suggested that other sports (and by implication, other occupations) could mitigate any bad incentives produced by their compensation schemes by mirroring golf's payoff system.

What else can we expect out of a game? What else can golf teach us? How to stop cheating, that's all.

1. The other week I was watching an NFL game and couldn't believe what I saw. Just after the whistle blew, ending a play, one of the defensive players gave what could only be characterized as a slight push to an offensive player, a lineman I think. The lineman keeled over like he had fainted. The referee, apparently catching only the aftermath of this inconsequential contact, called the punitive "personal foul" penalty on the defensive player, giving the offensive team fifteen yards and converting what would have been a difficult down and distance to a first down. A flop. (If flopping becomes endemic to pro football, not only will I stop watching, but the NFL will begin a slow death spiral to match the fix in which the NHL finds itself.)

2. All the major sports suffer from rampant cheating, right in front of our eyes. Players flop at the slightest contact, falsely signaling that an opponent has broken a rule. Players fake injuries, exaggerating the severity of contact in an effort to influence an official's decision. Players will even lie directly to officials, pointing the wrong way on a basketball going out of bounds or pretending to be hit by a baseball pitch when they weren't. Worse, players will even commit purposeful violation of the rules if they think they can get away with it. A football lineman might hold an opponent if he thinks his hold might be shielded from an official's sight; in a similar instance a basketball player might do the same. (For the most egregious example of faking, scan through your cable channels one night and find a game from Italian League soccer. So many players take (fake) tumbles, moppy hair flying, hands clutching pretend wounds while voices scream out in pain, that spontaneous laughter is the only possible response. It is a scream, indeed.)

3. All this conduct is a form of cheating: breaking the rules on purpose (or accusing the opponent of breaking the rules) in the hope of not getting caught. All athletes cheat, right? Wrong. Professional or other serious golfers don't cheat. They don't kick their ball out of a bad lie when no one's looking; they don't re-place a ball on the green closer to the hole; they don't pretend to find their ball in the deep woods when no competitor is nearby. Why are golfers (nearly) alone among professional and other serious athletes in their honesty? Why don't golfers cheat?

4. I'm not going to offer a paean to golf's traditions and values or the honesty of the golfer: the assumption that golfers are in some fundamental way more honest or trustworthy than are other professional athletes begs the question. No, this is sports law, and so (naturally) we're going to try to identify and examine the role that the rules of golf play in this outcome. In what fundamental, pervasive sense do golf's rules differ from those of other professional sports? How do they promote more honesty? And what can we learn from golf that might help solve the endemic problem of flopping and other forms of cheating?

5. Golf is distinct in this way: the rules of golf make the player the referee. Putting aside the (unfortunately increasing) instances where a professional player asks a tournament official to provide a ruling (to help apply golf's perplexing rules), for the huge majority of "calls" the player just makes them on his own, and does so honestly, even when honesty inures to the golfer's detriment (which is the only instance where honesty matters). Where the players are the referees, there's no incentive to fool somebody: any flop or fakery would make no sense, as the player would be trying to trick himself into a scoring error. In addition, although perhaps some outright cheating goes on in golf, maybe deep in those woods where no one is around, any deceitful act on the golf course might easily be witnessed by one's playing partners. No player in a serious competition is going to be able to toe the ball out of the deep rough and get away with it, at least not very often.

6. Are other sports ever self-officiated? Sometimes. Think of a "pickup" basketball game, one where the participants (usually those on the offense) make foul calls. Never in such a game would a player flop around pretending to be affected by a blow that never came. In a sense, the player would be fooling "himself," in that both players (the one faking the affect and the one who is implicitly accused of the blow) share unblemished knowledge of the truth, and know that the other knows the truth: that the blow never happened. But introduce a referee, and suddenly players are cheating, trying to mislead the official in erroneous calls to gain advantage. But without the referee, players don't cheat because to cheat is to lie and the lie is evident for all to see.

7. Now obviously it won't do to have the deciding moment in an NBA championship game decided by a player awarding himself two foul shots after callling a foul on his opponent. But other sports can adopt self-policing as much as possible. For instance, all player rules that regulate off-court conduct should be relegated to the player's union or to self-policing. The most significant and oft-cited reason to ban performance-enhancing drugs is their potential effect on non-using players, putting them at a competitive disadvantage. So if the PED ban inures to the benefit of other, non-using players, why not put those other players in charge of enforcing the ban? Why not use an employee-run honor system, much like the student-run honor organization many law schools use to protect against cheating? Don't be dismissive of honor systems: peer pressure, plus jealous protection against competitive disadvantages, give these systems real teeth. Of course, illicit drug use (unlike exams) is done in secret, away from suspicious eyes. But remember the choice is comparative: how well do you think the present "proctor" approach (where instructors walk around the room, looking for wayward eyes) to PED enforcement is working? Tricking the authority figure is for some an accomplishment; gaining undue advantage on one's peers seems base.

8. As for those acts of cheating that practically cannot be relegated to self-policing, namely those that take place during the course of the game, the solution is easy: add a game official to watch the action and penalize cheating. It's easy to see: anyone can watch an NBA game and see players faking to draw offensive fouls. The penalty for cheating should be as severe as the erroneous penalty call the cheater was trying to induce.

9. Conceptually, a cheating referee can be justified along the same lines as instant replay. Instant reply is annoying, time-consuming, and disruptive. Its justification, however, is a powerful one: it helps to ensure the correct result in a game. On-court cheating, such as fakery and flopping, produces erroneous decisions by game officials that is just as threatening to the correct result as would be any other incorrect call that a replay might reverse. Consequently, the remedy, even if instrusive, can be justified along the same lines as the instant replay. If other sports cannot mirror the near-complete self-policing of golf, then they need to address the problem of cheating by increasing their scrutiny of the players.