The way these overhyped quotations have been interpreted helped frame an intellectual contest now under way for those who, as players or spectators, participate in what's been called America's secular religion. Our reporter is Robert Lipsyte of THE NEW YORK TIMES.
ROBERT LIPSYTE: This is where the lessons of sport begin, where children are supposed to learn to concentrate, cooperate, and to be, well, good sports. We're supposed to find a moral order in the game we play to prepare us for the rest of our lives. So what happens? Why do so many of us grow up trying to win at any cost, in sports, in everything we do? Is that what we really learned on the ball field?At the University of South Florida recently, a highly unusual gathering looked at our game through a cold eye. The conference is called Ethical Issues in Sports.
PETER FRENCH (Director, The Ethics Center): Sports really is more us than almost anything else that happens in this culture. Secular religion -- it is our religion in many respects. A lot of it happens on Sunday or on Saturday. I mean, it happens when religion is, used to dominate the lifestyles of people.WILLIAM SHELTON (Eastern Michigan University): At all levels, this nation with an insatiable appetite looks to the media to deliver, and they deliver it over and over.
LIPSYTE: The media delivers, along with the sports scores, stories about drug abuse among athletes, about fights on and off the field, domestic violence, even an epidemic of out-of-wedlock babies. If this is a religion, what kind of religion is it? Religion is important to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who converted to Islam more than 20 years ago on his way to a Hall of Fame basketball career.
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR (NBA Hall of Fame): Ethics really has become something for the ivory tower. Ethics is something for saints and people who live most of their lives in monasteries or convents. It has nothing to do with the practical realities of American life. And that is going to take a whole societal change.
LIPSYTE: Our choices of sports heroes have always been a clue of how we want to see ourselves -- a society where oppressed minorities can find success, where throwaway children can grow fat. Okay, but what do these so-called role models tell us about ourselves now?JEFF BENEDICT (Author, PUBLIC HEROES, PRIVATE FELONS): You don't have leaders like Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy or soldiers, generals, who have the stage now like our athletes do now. You go into any school and start naming off the most famous figures in grammar schools, and they're going to name names like Shaq, Michael. I mean, ask them about Roosevelt, they don't even know what century he lived in.
BRENDA LIGHT BREDEMEIER (University of California, Berkeley): I think one of the best gifts a coach can provide for an athlete that they want to develop in a moral and social sense as well as an athlete is to provide them the opportunity to reflect, to ask hard questions and get their athletes to think about their behavior in light of what they think is right or wrong.
LIPSYTE: Perhaps we're all caught in this glamorous, multibillion-dollar sports world where ethics seem overmatched against entertainment and big money.
Mr. PAGE: As a judge, I'm governed by a code of judicial conduct. Having minimum standards and a disciplinary process in place, it seems to me it raises the ethics of everyone in the profession. And maybe it's time to at least consider that for the world of sports.
DIANA NYAD (Fox Sports News): I think there's still enough athletes, enough coaches, and enough fans and journalists involved in the world of sports who are clinging on to those values of friendship and communication and heart. There are still enough people that see sports as this chance for us -- it's the arena where we could re-create those values.
