They usually focus on matters like insider trading scandals and just how far Coke and Pepsi will go to win the cola wars. But like many Americans, a few business and ethics professors at Stanford University were mulling over the Tonya Harding affair when someone made a wisecrack.
“He said, `I guess it isn’t just Texas cheerleading that leads people to this,’ ” says Kirk Hanson, a senior lecturer in business ethics.
Jokes aside, ethicists, sociologists and just about everyone else are pondering the question: What leads people to this? How does the will to win overwhelm the sense of fair play, or even the rule of law?
Hanson was referring to another recent scandal that inquiring minds couldn’t get enough of: The attempt by a Channelview, Texas, woman to arrange a murder so her daughter could make the school cheerleading squad.
That generated exhaustive coverage, books and two TV movies-a media harvest sure to be dwarfed by the Jan. 6 attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan.
Harding’s ex-husband, who is going to jail for his part in planning the attack, has accused the figure skater of joining the plot. She denies that, but acknowledges that she did not reveal immediately what she knew and that she initially lied to the FBI.
Whoever ultimately takes the blame, the scheme was to improve Harding’s Olympic prospects by disabling her rival. Long after the gold medal is awarded, the lessons will be pondered in any facet of life where two people, two teams or two companies compete.
In sports, says Lonnie Kliever, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, the motivations to break the rules aren’t hard to figure.
“There are precedents all over the place,” Kliever says. “Athletics has become inseparably bound up with big money. And when you’re looking at big bucks, the chances for corruption are exponentially increased.”
Kliever had an inside view of one such instance. In the mid-1980s he helped investigate the SMU football program in which rules violations led to an unprecedented “death penalty” that banished the sport from the school for two years.
Since then, the professor has researched and written about sports, ethics and society, and he hasn’t lacked for material.
The long list includes college recruiting violations, point-shaving scandals and athletes who take performance-enhancing drugs or illegal steroids to build up their bodies.
Regardless of whether Tonya Harding was involved, Kliever says, the attack on Kerrigan “isn’t surprising if you see it in a longer history of efforts to maximize your advantage in ways that violate the canons of fair play.”
What is surprising, he says, is that the danger is moving off the field. Pitchers who throw beanballs and linemen who try to hurt quarterbacks are an accepted, if not embraced, part of sports-during the game.
“The effort to purposely maim an athlete in the contest itself is held in check by the possibility of immediate reprisal by the other team,” Kliever says. “Here we’re seeing a whole new viciousness and a whole new desperation to take out an athlete.”
It’s not just money, Hanson says. Look at how the world is treating the Buffalo Bills, losers of four consecutive Super Bowls. Fans back home may have stayed loyal, but even the players said they felt mocked and shunned by the rest of the country.
“It’s indicative of the American fixation on winners,” he says. “I think that 50 years ago, even 20 years ago, there was a stronger ethic of doing one’s best. That’s a lot weaker today.
“Unfortunately, society has come to say that winning is the only thing that matters. That can only lead people to believe they are failures if they don’t come out No. 1. So some weaker personalities succumb to temptation to cheat or sabotage others in the competition.”
We’re not just talking sports here. The same themes run from insider trading on Wall Street to political dirty tricks, from corporate espionage to plagiarizing a term paper.
“I tell my students there are times in your life you won’t be doing so well in a job, or the economy can turn against you,” Hanson says. “We’re all tempted to turn to fraud or dirty tricks. Only a lifetime of building character and ethical values will give you the strength to resist.”
Vivian Weil, director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology, says many people don’t start out with bad intentions.
“You don’t have to look just to evil impulses in people to see how they get started on a path that leads to something really deplorable,” she says. “People get caught up in what they’re trying to accomplish, and they block out other considerations.”
They also rationalize a lot. Kliever says at SMU, boosters who paid players or condoned the practice “used the age-old excuse that everybody cheats, and the only way to get a level playing field was to cheat.”
Hanson-while stressing that he cannot judge Harding or her entourage-says they seem to exhibit some of the same traits as Wall Street scammers and even former President Richard M. Nixon.
“The psychology that runs through many of these instances is, `I’ve sacrificed my life to get ahead and win. I’ve worked 80 hours a week for my company,’ or, `I’ve gotten up at 4 a.m. every day and skated. I don’t want to admit to myself that maybe it wasn’t worth it, that if I come in second, maybe I made a bad choice.’ “
For Nixon, he says, the Watergate cover-up that led to his resignation stemmed from the mind-set “that I’ve struggled so long to get here I’m not going to let some little thing like this threaten it.”
“If you sacrifice everything for a single goal, your perspective is frequently badly skewed,” Hanson says. “So you salvage becoming wealthy, or you salvage winning, by cheating.”
And sometimes you get away with it.
“You can’t look around and say people who do cross the boundaries will always be punished,” Weil says. “We know that Michael Milken (the junk-bond trader who served a jail sentence and paid huge fines, but remains a rich man) filled some people with envy more than anything else.”
Hanson worries that the focus on winning overshadows other values.
“American culture is much more hesitant than in the past to ostracize somebody who has acted unethically. We tend to excuse things because they were done in the rush to win.”
In sports, that meant that baseball pitcher Steve Howe was welcomed back after many arrests for drug use because his ability still could help a team. In business, Hanson says, “If somebody’s back in the market (after an unsavory episode), everybody still wants to work with him because maybe there’s a chance to make a bundle.”
Should we be surprised to see these harsh realities surface in the gracious, glamorous world of figure skating?
Former Olympic skating champion Dorothy Hamill recently revealed that someone once tried to run her down with a car. She believes that a skating rival, whom she would not name, was responsible. Questionable ethics in the sport may go back much further.
“We were thinking, `Oh for the days of Sonia Henie,’ ” says Weil, referring to the beloved skating star of the 1930s. “Then we saw an interview with someone who was a competitor of hers. She talked about Sonia and the power her father wielded, and that she believed there was a Hungarian skater who lost out to Sonia because of the influence of her father. So you wonder.”
Brenda Phillips, an assistant professor of sociology at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, says the unexpected convergence of malice and figure skating has helped generate huge public interest.
“We assume women are not competitive and not involved in criminal activity, and they are,” says Phillips, who teaches women’s studies. “We need to realize that women are good people and women are bad people.”
Another factor may be the dual role of women as victim as well as possible perpetrator.
“I suppose this is getting more attention because women are involved,” Phillips says. “But this isn’t a cat fight. In a cat fight, two people are going at it. Nancy Kerrigan isn’t in a cat fight. She’s a victim.”
However the affair concludes, Weil hopes the attention does some good.
“It’s interesting how this commands the headlines,” she says. “I suppose it’s kind of a backhand acknowledgment of the importance of ethical standards. We don’t seem to be able to avoid these scandals, so we hope there’s some benefit.”
Hanson says his experience with students and in the business world has made him more optimistic.
“I think there’s a new interest in ethics,” he says. “Perhaps we’ve had to fall very far from our ideals to rethink our cultural values.
Kliever doesn’t share the optimism, particularly in sports. He’s also doubtful that punishing those who attacked Nancy Kerrigan will deter others, just as previous scandals didn’t deter those who plotted the attack.
“These guys were not rocket scientists,” he says. “There are always people who think they can get away with something nobody else could.”
