It has become a matter of mundane observation that seemingly every group in modern society is rife with unethical behavior. Whether it is priests molesting children, doctors ripping off Medicare or lawyers chasing ambulances, the news of our day is most often about the wayward nature of our institutions and professions. To be sure there are always the standout heroes, the caregivers, the volunteers, the philanthropes, but they seem to garner our attention for their uniqueness rather than their representation of the whole. Historical perspective seems to give us a sense of “better times” when people played fair, when Platonic ideals were the rule of the day and not the “dog-eat-dog” philosophy we seem to live by. Admittedly every age has had its scandals, from Teapot Dome to Boss Tweed, from Piltdown Man to the frontal lobotomy. Politicians, scientists, businessmen and teachers, builders and reporters, almost every group imaginable seem to have succumbed to the basest instincts of our nature to cheat and lie. But it does seem the past was simpler, slower, less frenetic and fraught with danger. Even I remember the days when my neighbors left their doors open, when I could stroll to my elementary school alone and my mother didn’t worry about me being molested and murdered. Those times, alas, seem to be gone and it will be a Herculean task to prevent them being gone forever.
The answer will not come in the form of more preaching or more legislation. That has clearly not worked. When government tries to incentivize ethics it inevitably foments fraud. Medicare rip-offs are estimated to be on the order of 60 billion dollars a year! But lest we blame doctors for leading the way down this path of corruption, let us not forget the lawyers, who codify kickbacks by calling them referral fees, or politicians who excuse their golf junkets as fund-raisers and rail against sinners while they themselves are the most egregious examples of sin.
In 1998 the biggest story of the day was not war, or famine or genocide. The world was relatively peaceful and the government had a 2 billion dollar surplus. But it was discovered that our president had had extramarital sex with a younger woman. Congress was ready to impeach for high crimes and misdemeanors, and half the country was incensed at his behavior. Never mind that extramarital sex in the White House from Roosevelt to Kennedy, among others, was common knowledge even to school children. Interestingly, the republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a leader of the impeachment proceedings had been overwhelmingly sanctioned by the House just two years earlier on ethics violations. And representative Bob Livingston who succeeded Gingrich as Speaker-designate to lead the charge, stepped down when he was discovered himself to be having an extramarital affair. A new political sex scandal seems to crop up every year, sometimes every month.
And don’t look to our clergy or our press. The ‘holier than thous’ became the ‘hornier than thees’ and stole the innocence of generations. Not so surprising when organized religion has been responsible for more death and torture in the holy name of salvation than Genghis Kahn, Atilla the Hun, Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung all rolled into one. And when the muckrakers got down into the dirt to bring revelation to the masses it merely spawned the yellow journalists who traffic in rumor, scandal, sensationalism and lies.
Is there any group that is exempt from this pattern? Are accountants so corruptible? Ask the employees and shareholders of Enron and Arthur Anderson. How about engineers? Ask the project managers for the space shuttle Challenger. And what of the soldiers? Each side in every conflict will point to a whole segment of society guilty of the crime of being wrong. Is there an ethical ideal to which they hold other than the great cop out of doing what they’re told?
Well what of sport? That has to be pure. It is the embodiment of the human ideal, the pursuit of excellence and the use of nonviolent competition to satisfy our inherent desire for combat. Yet, no one is unaware of the abuse of enhancement performing drugs in all of sport, from professional football to Olympic swimming. Baseball, the ‘American past-time’, the enjoyment of which is in large part predicated on the comparison to past greats, must now put asterisks next to its players names. Records are no longer really records, just performance enhanced numbers.
And that brings me to the subject of my rantings, because there is yet one true bastion of ethical behavior in our society. In 1925, while competing for the U.S. Open, Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself when his ball moved ‘ever so slightly’, unnoticed by anyone but himself. He went on to lose the tournament in a playoff. When complimented for his sportsmanship he said ‘You might as well praise me for not robbing banks.’ In 2007 Mark Wilson was competing for his first win as a PGA professional. His caddy inadvertently called out the loft of his club on a par 3 and Wilson realized, as they walked to the green, that he may have been in violation of rule 8-1, ‘giving advice to another player.’ He called over a rules official, was awarded a two stroke penalty and lost the outright lead. He prevailed in a sudden death playoff. It is hard to find a single instance of cheating in professional golf and yet the tale is replete with accounts of self- imposed penalties. In 1983 Hale Irwin wiffed a 3 inch putt in the final round of the British Open. It wasn’t a penalty, and could have been excused as a practice stroke but he counted it and missed out of the finals by one shot. The number of stories of self imposed punishments that meant the difference between winning and losing, fame and obscurity, fortune and hardship in the annals of amateur and professional golf would fill many books. In 1986 Ray Floyd lost the lead in the second round of a tournament when he told his playing competitor that his ball had moved right before his putt, and to give him a 5 for the hole.
For sure there are the cheaters who don’t count their strokes, inflate their handicap for the member guest tournament, take mulligans and replace lost balls like police throwing down unmarked weapons at a crime scene. But there has been something existentially pure and moral about the upper echelons of competitive golf. And I, for one, choose to believe it defines the sport itself, or maybe it’s the other way around. Golf won’t make you more ethical if you’re not and if you don’t cheat at golf it doesn’t necessarily hold you’ll be an honest doctor or a faithful husband. But we will only ever regain our innocence and our ideals by teaching our young ones to ‘play nice. And there is no greater landscape to do that on than a beautiful stretch of green grass, pockmarked with pitfalls of quicksand and bottomless wells, to teach us that life may not always be fair but it is best played fairly.
Go ahead and pass new laws to help the sick and the poor, to put restraints on the greedy on Wall Street, to watch over our police lest they go too far in their pursuit of the bad guy, and to monitor the monogamy of our civic leaders. But we will only persevere in regaining the moral high ground if we resolve to reestablish our ethical compass. Instead of teaching business management to new doctors, we would be better off teaching them to memorize the Hippocratic oath. Instead of turning out more lawyers to sue each other, we would be better off making referral fees a violation of ethics. Instead of congressmen making speeches about why they support a bill that benefits their constituents, let them make lobbying illegal. Or let us take our toddlers to the park and teach them the rules of golf.
So Tiger cheated on his wife. Welcome to the world where 50% of us cheat on our spouse and to the world of the rich and famous where that number is probably 80% or higher. (Fame, like extramarital sex…be careful what you wish for.) It’s not an excuse and though there may be an explanation, it’s the equivalent of moving your ball in the rough. You just shouldn’t do it. But it could have been worse. He could have cheated at golf. And though he has confessed his marital sins let us hope and pray that we never see a day when a Mark McGwire or an Alex Rogriquez of golf gets up to say he’s sorry he ever used drugs. Golf will recover from Tiger’s infidelity but, at least for now, it remains the last bastion of ethics in an unethical world.
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