Sportsmanship and the Center

By Sean Ryan

Chairperson, Board of Directors

As 2025 kicks into gear, I frequently find myself reflecting on how 2024 ended in terms of sportsmanship and competition.  Whether it was the presidential election or some of the stories that swamped the world of sports, I wondered how things would be if situations were different.  In each scenario, what if the shoe were on the other foot?  Or what if just one little detail were different?  How would that change the perception of the incident?
 
Regardless of who won and lost as well as how it happened, we can be sure of one thing:  the polar extremes representing each side have become twisted and deranged because we tend to believe that the loudest voice is the victorious voice.  What is interesting, though, is that it appears the loudest voices have a strategy that might overlap with collective bargaining:  shout the loudest and speak the most extreme opinions while tacitly being comfortable with gaining only a fraction of the demands met.  If we use a sports analogy, kick the ball as far downfield as possible, but be content if it is returned a few yards so long as it’s out of our end of the field.  For example, pick any political election this century that has national implications and watch how the rhetoric of the ads and debates will include obtuse statements and ludicrous proposals; however, the sole goal of these ads is the same as if a campaign was run without them:  that one political party wins an elected seat.  In other words, feel free to say whatever ridiculous sentence so long as doing so gets the vote of the people and your candidate elected.  If it’s twisted or somehow false, let the public do the homework to come to that conclusion; the odds are that they won’t, and we’ll have them believing whatever we want.  After that, it doesn’t matter what will happen because we won, they lost, and we prevented our opponents from being in control.  (What’s sad, though, is that we are currently living in a time one might argue that we don’t really know what is true, and it’s equally difficult to discover the truth.)
 
Similarly, watch any legal drama to see a lawyer in a courtroom pose a statement or a question to someone on the witness stand that is a blatant step out of bounds in the trial process.  The statement or question will most likely be immediately withdrawn if the opposing attorney objects or if the judge recognizes it as inappropriate.  The rules of the game might have rectified a wrong, but the human jury still had the seed planted that could discredit the witness and sway a vote.
 
This has occurred frequently in labor negotiations in sports.  During the lockout that preceded the 2022 MLB season, both Rob Manfred (MLB Commissioner) and Tony Clark (head of the MLBPA) would frequently find themselves in front of a microphone speaking to the media spewing statements with an altered tenor to sway the opinions of the public with the goal of creating an intangible pressure on the opposing side to cave in their demands.  It was a classic example of pulling out all the stops in an extreme way just to help negotiate a compromise.
 
Perhaps the explanation for these tactics might include the fact that doing things the moral way isn’t yielding the desired results, leading the participants to believe they must fight fire with fire.  “We tried playing nice, but it wasn’t working, so now we must play dirty.”  But fighting fire with fire only results in a bigger mess.  Like many issues in the world of sportsmanship, the only true solution is to make the individual choice to do the right thing.  We may not be able to control the actions of those playing the game, but we can control our own responses to those actions.
 
During the 1960 US Presidential Election when Kennedy defeated Nixon, footage from a Presidential Debate showed both Kennedy and Nixon calmly complimenting each other while informing the audience that both candidates deeply cared for our country, wanting it and the people of the nation to prosper.  The difference, according to the candidates, was in the methods of how to achieve the same goal.  Fast forward to a more recent debate of your choice and watch the exact opposite happen.  Amplified volume and finger pointing have replaced civil discourse, exploiting the extremes through fear and threats to convince constituents that one candidate is the savior, and the other is the devil.
 
And what if this phenomenon were examined in sports?  On the heels of what occurred following the annual college football game between Ohio State and Michigan, what if a state senator from Michigan introduced a bill to make flag planting at midfield a felony instead of a state senator from Ohio?  What if Ohio State had won on its own field and planted its own flag before the same state representative introduced the same bill in Ohio?  Would the extremists on the opposing side still be calling them sore losers?  Does it matter that Ohio State, the losing team in this specific contest, went on to compete for a national title while Michigan did not?  The slightest change in detail changes the entire situation, which shows why it may be better to pull the lens back and see the forest for the trees rather than jump on an extreme bandwagon.
 
Do we have the individual ability to become vulnerable and consider the thoughts and opinions of our opponents without endorsing them?  Doing so does not mean we agree with them; rather, it means that we are trying to understand why they feel the way they do and to see if there are any commonalities.  After all, we are still free to disagree with our opponents after we hear what they have to say.  But making the slightest alteration to how we individually formulate opinions may yield positive results. 
 
The solution (as well as the truth) is usually somewhere in the middle.  Whether the topic is trans athletes or immigration, I’d wager that a compromise could be found if we took the time to listen to each other rather than discrediting our opponents and vociferously shouting our own opinion.