Pensees: Cheaters Usually Prosper - Musings on the Patriots, Clemens, and Christian Fans

Cheaters Usually Prosper - Musings on the Patriots, Clemens, and Christian Fans

It’s a fact of life: cheaters usually prosper. This, of course, flies in the face of the adage that most of us heard since we were small children. We were told that cheaters never prosper. If that adage were actually true cheating would not have any tempting power. Though it could be argued from a theological standpoint that cheaters never prosper it is the immediate guarantee of prosperity that makes cheating so alluring.

I would suggest that using adages such as “cheaters never prosper” is a man-centered approach to discouraging our children from sin. It is man-centered moralism. It says, quite simply, “if you want to prosper, don’t cheat.” The problem, however, is that quite contrary to the adage are the facts of life. Cheaters usually prosper. Particularly if they don’t get caught. That’s why cheating is so tempting and so prevalent.

Major League Baseball and the National Football League illustrate the fact that cheating prospers. As a regular Christian guy who happens to be more interested in culture than sports, I have been fascinated by the thought processes of the American people (including many Christians) over the national attention to the Mitchell Report in MLB and the Patriots’ cheating debacle in the NFL.

On my way home from various meetings at night I listen to FSR and occasionally hear more Christian horse sense about the cheating than I do from Christian people in the blogosphere. I also hear sound byte after sound byte of a culture in decay and I am reminded of the god-like grip sports has on our contemporary world.

Some wrong-headed things I hear (in random order) and my comments:

Well, the Patriots may have been the team that was caught cheating, but it happens all the time.

Huh? So we’re supposed to not think any lower of them than of any other team based solely on the potentiality that all the other teams cheat as well even though to date it seems to be the Patriots and the Patriots alone that have been proven to cheat? We’re supposed to pretend that that so-called perfect season was perfect? I’d say that this kind of ridiculous reasoning doesn’t fly in other areas of life, but sadly it does.

I remember the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Many defenders argued that every red-blooded male has a dirty thought every now and then and would try to get away with an affair if he could therefore Clinton shouldn’t be obligated to answer for his cheating. He simply had the bad luck of getting caught. But it is both arrogant and defiant of Scriptural reason when we decline to respond appropriately to sin based upon the reasonable potentiality that there are a whole lot of other people that are probably doing the same thing. The Patriots (and other caught cheaters) just happened to be the ones that were exposed.

But there is a Providence in getting caught. There is Sovereignty in exposure. It is God who determines when sins are revealed or not revealed. “The sins of some men are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later” (1 Timothy 5:24). A just man deals with what he sees, not with what he does not see. If my favorite team or my best friend happens to be the one out of millions of cheaters that is exposed I, as a man of integrity, cannot determine my reaction based upon what I cannot see. I must answer to God for how I deal with what He has providentially exposed to my view.

I do not begrudge any Christian for liking the Patriots or Roger Clemens or any other exposed cheater in professional sports. However, I will tell all my Christian friends who favor the Patriots over other potential cheaters (as well as those Christian friends that collected baseball cards with Clemens’ image) that there is only one Judge and He is Sovereign. It is He who selects some but not others for their sins to “go before them to judgment.” It is trite to blow off lying just because others do it. A Holy God would have us submit our sports love to His Sovereign plan of exposure and respond to the facts as Christian people with Christian values. Just because the entire class is possibly cheating does not give us license to mitigate the cheating of the one student who was caught.

Patriot fans get irked by the reminder from non-Patriot fans that their team cheated. They did cheat. And it appears to have been a pattern. That’s a fact. It’s really as simple as that. Deal with it. It shouldn’t be hard for a Christian to do. Their season was not perfect. Period. Whether or not the taping of signals helped them win games is completely irrelevant.

The government should stay out of this.

I’m a small-government libertarian, but I disagree. While I have difficulty believing that Senator Specter has pure motives, I concur that “[we] have a right to have honest football games”(source). This is an ethical right because the NFL is a business that - if not formally nonetheless actually - markets honest competition.

I watched two pro baseball games this past Summer. I saw the Cubs and the White Sox. Both times I was the guest of a friend. One friend is a season ticket holder. The other dropped a wad of cash for us to be able to sit very close to home plate. Both times were great experiences. We enjoyed the games with the naive assumption that the men on the field were natural athletes honed by years of discipline, chemically clean. At least we either deliberately chose to believe that or, more likely, chose to ignore the reality that many of the players are cheaters. Either way, we (or, more precisely, my friends) were paying customers of a product that is supposedly honest. I doubt that we got what we paid for. I doubt that there is very much truth-in-advertising when it comes to sports.

Sports is business. The sports business ostensibly offers its clients clean athletes. When a business does not deliver its product or is guilty of truth-in-advertising violations it must be accountable; especially when that business controls the market. Thus we have institutions like the Better Business Bureau that monitor normal businesses. Sports businesses, however, are above all accountability. When fans purchase sports gear and pay top dollar to see athletes who are at the top of their game they assume they are getting what the businesses claim they are offering. The MLB and NFL are corrupt businesses and they have so abused their exemption from anti-trust laws while enjoying an invincible monopoly on the market that their wrist-slapping of cheaters is pure pretense.

I think it is appropriate for the government to demand accountability. “For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil” (Romans 13:1-4). I am not saying that I think that Senators Mitchell and Specter are pure in their motives or that they are handling the matter in the best way possible (especially Specter), but I am saying that they (as representatives of the government that represents the people) have the authority to address evil. It is evil to allow some players to use HGH with impunity thereby stealing from honest athletes fame and money. It is evil to pay obscene amounts of money to cheaters and then promote them as heroes to young men and women. Authority should intervene.

What they did really doesn’t affect the end result.

This is the lamest of justifications. Mike Martz is right: “For somebody to say that is kind of disgusting,” Martz said Thursday at the NFL Scouting Combine. “The whole point is whether they cheated. Isn’t that really the point? I think so” (source). Yes, Mr. Martz, that is the point. And you’re right. It is disgusting to say that the taping probably didn’t affect the end result. But Christians - Christians! - are saying it all the time.

Would we accept that defense from a student who was caught reading his neighbor’s test? Would we give him a pass because there was no way we could determine if he was actually helped by reading the test? Puh - leeze.

Cheaters do prosper. In this world. The reason a believer chooses not to cheat is faith. In this world there is much to be gained by cheating. Especially if it can be accomplished without getting caught. But faith, God-given faith, believes in the reality of another world that transcends the very real pressures of the world we live in. When a baseball player or a student in the classroom chooses to be a person of integrity they might also be choosing to lose their job or get a poor grade, but for those whose only hope for happiness is in the fleeting moments of their earth-life the promise of cheating is just too rewarding to decline.

I think we should tell our children the truth: cheaters do prosper. Immediately. That’s why it is so tempting. And the powerful urge to cheat should reveal to us our earth-bound desires for Scripture says that we are tempted “when each one is drawn away by his own desires.” If we desire prosperity now cheating often works. If we desire God cheating will never prosper.

C.J. Mahaney has an excellent article on cheating that every sports fan should read. Here is a portion of the article where Mahaney draws our attention to a pro player who really understood the gravity of his cheating. With this I close.

The now infamous Mitchell Report on steroid use in major league baseball pointed a finger at high-profile players like Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada, and Gary Sheffield.

Long before the Mitchell Report was released, a lesser-known pitcher named Daniel Naulty was caught using steroids. Naulty pitched for the Twins (1996–98) and Yankees (1999), which put him in contact with a number of players later named in the Mitchell Report. Naulty not only is a professing Christian, but is now pursuing a Ph.D in theology with the hopes of one day becoming a seminary professor.

Naulty has repeatedly confessed publicly his use of steroids. He told the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune,

I stole people’s jobs. That’s the part for me that was so wrong. I have to explain to my boys that I took people’s jobs by cheating, and that penetrated my soul a number of years ago and still haunts me today.

And in reflecting on all the players behind the scenes he influenced to use steroids, he told USA Today,

I want to apologize to as many [fellow players] as I can. If they forgive me, great. But I need to be prepared to be declined and I’d understand if they didn’t. I took a piece of their life away from them that I could never give back. You reap what you sow and I might very well reap a lot of what I sowed.

Let me tell you what he won’t reap. He won’t reap a perjury charge or a seared conscience or the ridicule of a world that easily discerns someone who is lying. And he will reap the love and respect of his sons.