CROSSING THE LINE

The worst place to preach from in the world of sports is a high ethical pedestal. So here I sit, ready to be knocked off.

The subject is last Saturday’s Women’s World Cup final, specifically Briana Scurry’s illegal move on the save of the penalty kick that gave the United States team its title.

There is no questioning the excitement of the World Cup as an event, nor the excitement of the winning moment. There is also no questioning the appeal of the U.S. team, nor the giant strides, both real and symbolic, made on behalf of the women’s movement and women’s sports in this country.

There is also no questioning the fact that the U.S. cheated to win. Replays show it. Knowledgeable soccer fans watching spotted it immediately. And Scurry said it.

Her quote: “Everybody does it. It’s only cheating if you get caught.”

Interestingly, while that statement was reported fairly extensively in this newspaper and others, its significance was easily dismissed, sort of buried under an avalanche of jingoism and a perceived ongoing need for nationalistic validation via sports.

In fact, the entire issue may have been buried in the public psyche in the same pile with Michael Jordan pushing off on his game-winning, career-ending shot and Dallas winning the Stanley Cup with a goal made while Brett Hull was in the crease had it not been for news slowly filtering out of China Wednesday that the public there is upset. Thousands of miles away, the fans of the losers are screaming something that is universally translatable to: “We Wuz Robbed!”

Unpopular stance notwithstanding, to the purest way of thinking, they were.

There are people who make a study of this sort of thing their life’s work. One of them is Father Paul Goda, a professor in the school of law at Santa Clara University.

“What we had here is what we have in a large-scale problem with all of law and morality,” Goda said. “You do as much as you can get away with. We have ecclesiastics who do this. It is known as sin.

“Honesty is tough. In football, if you are a little offside, you are offside. That’s the legality. The problem is the morality.”

Another expert is Michael Josephson, head of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, who said, “There is a huge moral significance to what is happening at large public sports events. If I am a youth soccer coach, what am I to conclude from this? That I teach that we are to get away with whatever we can?

“All my instincts tell me that this is not the way we should go.”

Both Goda and Josephson wrestle with the same fact that I do. So much good and positive was accomplished by the U.S. women’s team, by the way it carried itself and made itself accessible to the public by making itself accessible to the media, by the effort that it put forth in a final game played in heat and pressure that, quite frankly, would have melted and rendered helpless most males.

Yet it would be worse to ignore the issue completely; probably unforgivable that it took millions of Chinese screaming on the other side of the world to make us address it at all.

“The fact that she [Scurry] made the statement is much more troubling than her conduct,” Josephson said. “She said, ‘It is only cheating if you get caught.’ That’s a horrible statement. The statement, in itself, is misconduct.”

Josephson, of course, does not blame Scurry but rather what we have created in Scurry. He is fully aware that what she did would be, and is, done by most soccer goalies in the same position--although reviews of the tape showed that China’s goalie stuck as closely to the rules as is conceivable.

No, it is that Scurry said what she said without feeling, sensing or even having an inkling of its significance. That’s what scares the Josephsons and Godas of the world.

This is how we think about sports competition, how we teach our children to think about it. No greater proof of that is needed than Coach Tony DiCicco’s comments on Scurry’s illegal move on the save. DiCicco said, in essence, that we need more of this sort of gamesmanship in international sport because Americans have, for too long, played by the rules and been victimized for it by more sophisticated foreign players.

The fact that the referee didn’t call anything on Scurry’s move is a frequent crutch in these situations, a feel-good way to get off the moral hook.

“I don’t have any comment on this whatsoever,” Hank Steinbrecher, secretary general of U.S. Soccer, said Wednesday. “I mean, the referee makes the call. It’s the discretion of the referee.”

Another interesting aspect of this is what would be happening if the tables had been turned, if China had won this way.

“All hell would have broken loose,” Goda said.

Indeed, we really aren’t the least bit interested in the ethics of sport. We are interested in results. Our favorite Olympics was the L.A. Olympics because we won everything. The Soviets, of course, didn’t come, but we hardly noticed in our orgy of flag-waving.

It is almost as if Vince Lombardi, a very ethical man who would be horrified at the impact of his quote, set the tone for us with his “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” That’s wonderful locker-room motivation, but a frightening societal keynote.

As a high school athlete, I was taught that when the ball went out of bounds in a basketball game, to dash over and grab it in an attempt to convince the referee that everybody in the place knew that it was my team’s ball. I also was taught to change cadence of the snap-calling as a quarterback, hoping to make the defensive line jump offside. Suffice to say, these are not among the sins I have discussed in the confessional.

I have also observed with some measure of admiration when a golfer turns himself in for an incorrect scorecard or a minuscule rule violation just because it is the right thing to do. Same thing when tennis player Andrei Medvedev recently overruled a linesman and gave a point back to Andre Agassi in the French Open final, because Medvedev knew the call had been wrong.

So all is not lost.

Or, maybe in the minds of the majority, there is no problem here, just the perception of one by people like priests, ethics lawyers and sportswriters with too much time on their hands.

More likely, this is the kind of subject matter, and column, that gives the patrons at the sports bars something in which to wrap their uneaten greasy hamburgers while watching the guys on “SportsCenter” create new verbs for home runs by Mark McGwire.

Still, I can’t help but recall a two-day meeting in April in Arizona, where a gathering of 30 or so sports officials, including college presidents, athletic directors, coaches and even John Wooden, came up with a code of conduct for sports and its participants called the Arizona Accord. Item No. 6 reads:

“All sports participants must consistently demonstrate and demand scrupulous integrity and observe and enforce the spirit as well as the letter of the rules.”

This is binding to no one or no team, of course. It is meant to be a guideline, a suggestion, a stance against winning at all costs, winning by cheating.

Perhaps, on pondering this, there will be a youth soccer coach or two who will, while never lessening for one moment all the good that came from the U.S. women’s recent World Cup victory, include Item No. 6 when handing out the team T-shirt.

Staff Writer Grahame L. Jones contributed to this story.