Most of the time, it’s really a playground taunt made by a ten year old.
In sport, cheating sometimes deserves a darker meaning. There’s the seedy, underhand world of PEDs. Or the equally dark corner of corruption, the throwing of games or somehow matching in-play occurrences to the specific demands of back-alley bookies.
But there’s also times when the dark meaning accorded to cheating is wildly disproportionate.
Golf, with the fallacious belief that golfers inherit some sort of higher moral standing just by playing the game, treats alleged cheats almost like lepers while at the same time it rarely prosecutes or names miscreants, and doesn’t bother at all if they’re of a certain significant stature.
Other sports are less snotty. In soccer, and increasingly in basketball, “simulation” has reached a kind of acceptance.
In our football, it’s now being called – rather amusingly – “anticipating contact”, as if it’s okay to throw yourself in the air theatrically if you believe there’s even a miniscule chance you might be touched.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3I65Lqjh4fo%3Frel%3D0
In the NBA, it’s “flopping”. This brilliant video is doing the rounds at the moment showing the worst examplesand if it’s anything to go by they need a Gareth Bale or Peter Pawlett to fine-tune their technique.
In the NFL, the illegal practice of “holding” actually gripping an adversary who does not have the ball – goes on during every single play, and that’s with SEVEN officials on the park watching.
Just last week in baseball, there was a furore about Clay Buchholz, a fine pitcher enjoying an exceptional season, allegedly doctoring the ball to make it swerve fantastically away from flailing bats.
There was some disgust at this accusation and the usual denials, but baseball’s attitude, as the game’s great chronicler Roger Angell puts it, is that they play “a hard, rules-dominated game that can stand a little cheerful cheating”.
There’s a dishonourable history within the game of seeking an edge by corking the bats, watering down the basepaths to slow down a speedy visiting team, or scuffing, shining and wetting the ball to make it do odd things as it flies through the air. The latter, of course, is an underhand tradition baseball shares with its genteel English cousin, cricket.
Rugby is arguably the most open and upfront sport regarding cheating. Here, it is very largely a free-for-all, and there is something underhand and illegal going on all the time.
Sometimes the referee will spot it, sometimes he won’t, sometimes he’ll just ignore it because it doesn’t have a significant bearing on play. Despite a few grumbles, usually everyone accepts it and gets on with the game.
Because rugby takes the mature view – or nave assumption, take your pick – that it all tends to even itself out.
And most of the time, it does. Diving or simulation or anticipating contact is castigated in soccer but isn’t it just an attacker’s reaction to a defender’s equally illegal unbalancing nudges or off-the-ball elbows? Which occur more often in a game?
There were a few shrugs in baseball at Buchholz looking like he’s stepped out of a shower every time he pitches, a general acknowledgement that everybody’s at it in a myriad of different ways, and the game continues.
Sure, come down as harshly as possible on the druggies and the truly corrupt. But the rest of it needs a proper sense of perspective.