Tennessee-Rutgers, Roger Clemens and the Culture of Cheating in Sports

It sure seems the case on a day such as today, with the wildly inconclusive, but nevertheless riveting Clemens-McNamee Congressional hearing in the background and, in my world, the final seconds of Monday night's Rutgers-at-Tennessee women's college-basketball game rumbling in the foreground.

I will not say that the scorekeeper in Knoxville, Tenn., cheated for the hometown team because I was not there and I have not deposed all the witnesses. But because of the way our perceptions are being shaped on a minute-by-minute basis in this information-teleported world, I can note with some conviction, however, that it's as if the Nixon Administration edited the live feed and subsequent taped replays of those final seconds of the Lady Vols' 59-58 victory. It's strange how more than a second flashed before our eyes, with the clock stuck at 0.2. It was as if we all were subjected to alien abduction and subjected to it over and over, like in the movie "Groundhog's Day," every time we view the replay.

Though the inventor of the timing system and replays point to some kind of human error or intervention, the point is that Rutgers fans are just as passionately convinced of being cheated of victory as Tennessee fans are convinced of a legitimate win. In this kind of polarized situation, someone has to be lying or cheating, right? (Turn up the volume: what did Clemens just say?)

This reminds me of an evening spent at the home of Ivan "Three-Second" Edeshko in the old Soviet Union in 1990. Three-Second Edeshko got his nickname for throwing the famous court-length pass in Munich to Aleksandr Belov, who scored a layup at the buzzer to send the United States to its first-ever Olympic men's basketball defeat in 1972. The play is infamous in sports because the Soviets completed the play on their third try, the first two ending in failure and a U.S. victory.

My friend, photographer Harley Soltes, and I watched a documentary of that game with Edeshko. We viewed those twice-played final three seconds over and over. Fueled by a little bit of vodka, Soltes and I became more and more furious with each replay, which, to us, clearly revealed the injustice all over again. Edeshko was equally convinced that justice had been served, calling the complaining U.S. players "American babies."

When there is disagreement, there is a presumption that the other side or the other guy lied or cheated. And, viewing these disputes through its own set of filters, each side is equally convinced of its own righteousness.

It should not have taken a Congressional hearing to point this out. But it helped. Was it just me, or did the issue seem to divide somewhat across party lines, with Democrats more zealously pursuing Roger Clemens and the Republicans going for a piece of Brian McNamee's skin or ... er, syringe? That is, everyone had some kind of agenda, even some members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who were more impressed with having met Clemens during his barnstorming session on Capital Hill last week.

(By the way, speaking of breaking rules, even House committee members or their staff are not above it. Those who asked Clemens for autographs may have violated a federal law against soliciting items of value from persons with interests before the committee, according to a report in the New York Times).

The level of athletics that I cover on a regular basis - high-school, plus the route to college - puts me in contact with two groups, parents and fans of college athletics, that are among sport's greatest sources of internecine conflict. If I also covered SEC football, I suppose I'd have hit the sports-infighting trifecta.

This we-lost-so-they-have-cheated environment of course has been fueled by a culture of cheating that hasn't just emerged, it has exploded like an atom bomb. From steroids, to game-fixing, to spying, to test taking or recruiting, it seems these days that every flip of any sports section in America reveals a new cheating scandal. We listen to the impassioned denials of those we'd love to believe, only to watch the likes of Marion Jones get hauled off months later in handcuffs. Shoot, they even cheat in sports, such as cycling and tennis, that nobody cares about.

What's next, revelations that the late Earl Anthony wielded a heavier bowling bowl because he was juiced? Headline: Criss-crosses Helped Poker Champ Stay Alert.

Cheating in sports is nothing new. I covered professional sports, mostly basketball, for nearly 20 years. I watched coaches teach athletes how to cheat, from subtly inching up the sideline on inbound plays to incapicitating a posting big man by jamming an elbow into the small of his back in such a way that it appears to referees as if the defender was holding his hands up and away from his matchup.

I'm also mindful of baseball's colorful, rules-bending history of spit balls, corked bats and pine-tar-smothered batting gloves. But this new era of cheating, in which an athlete is willing to alter body structure to win, is something else altogether. And the cheater-until-proven-innocent leap that more and more are taking also is something new and dangerous.

Because I write about young people - and because I am a parent - I keep wondering about the messages we are sending Generation Next. How are we ever going to unwind such an absurdly wound-up culture? Clemens keeps asking how he can recover his reputation; I wonder how all of sport can recover its. With the integrity of every game being assaulted on every imaginable front, we seem to have birthed a nightmare that inevitably escalates to a world in which everyone does cheat, simply because we cannot trust anyone not to.