Seeking Right or Wrong Answer

Talking about ethics and sports, holding a summit called “Pursuing Victory With Honor” in the same week that Bob Knight kept his job but lost his dignity; that a pack of angry Dodgers chased a band of rowdy Chicago Cub fans into the stands; that the trial of Baltimore Raven player Ray Lewis on murder charges began, it seems so pointless.

Until John Wooden walks to a podium. Wooden will be 90 in October and he is not totally steady on his feet anymore. But in his mind and in his heart Wooden is just fine.

So when the question is put to Wooden, what do you think about Bob Knight, Wooden does not hesitate.

“I think Coach Knight is a fine teacher of the game of basketball,” he says, “but I would not want anyone I love to play for him.”

Wooden did not, would not, say he would fire Knight. That’s not so easy, Wooden had said before he came to the stage. You can kind of figure what Wooden would do. But you don’t know for sure. And maybe Wooden isn’t sure.

The former UCLA coach, winner of 10 NCAA basketball titles, was the featured speaker for this room filled with more than 500 coaches and athletic directors, recreation center directors and counselors.

They had all shown up in the Long Beach State student union for an eight-hour marathon of panel discussions and question-and-answer sessions. This gathering was billed as “A Summit Conference on Sportsmanship, Ethics and Character-Building.”

And you see these people--men and women, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, Caucasians, old, young and every age in between--taking notes, breaking unexpectedly into applause, standing and cheering, listening, talking, learning, and you think, hey, maybe this isn’t so silly.

At lunchtime you eavesdrop. Wooden hasn’t spoken yet. It is finals week and students are conked out, sleeping on couches, on the floor, with books open on their laps and yellow highlighters clutched in their hands and they are awakened by all these chattering adults.

The conversations are serious. During one of the morning sessions, Kathy Marpe, the women’s basketball coach at the University of San Diego, a 30-year veteran, was asked by Michael Josephson, the moderator and president of the Josephson Institute and Character Counts!, to give an example of an ethical dilemma.

Marpe explained that, though she believes it is wrong, that it is--in Josephson’s harsh interpretation--cheating, she has grudgingly coached her team in the methods of surreptitiously knocking an opposing shooter on the arm in a way that is difficult for referees to detect.

Even though she has tried to talk other coaches out of this tactic, even though she feels the game has gotten too physical, Marpe says that, yes, she still continues to teach this move.

“Because if I want to compete then I have to,” Marpe says.

At lunchtime, you could hear these coaches, administrators, all these people who serve as teachers to our children, debating.

Is it worse to “cheat” as Josephson calls it or to put your players at a competitive disadvantage, to let your teenage pupils feel as if they have no chance? Is it really a foul, after all, if no foul is called? Or is it wrong even if you get away with it?

There seemed no good answer. Not to these people who have to deal with the question. To Josephson the answer is easy. Either you make the illegal arm bump legal or you stop doing it.

But when it’s your job on the line, or the chance for your kids to be competitive or when your boss wonders what’s wrong with you, then the answer isn’t so easy. That’s what you’d hear at table after table: “I don’t know.”

It isn’t easy being ethical.

Even Wooden, who believes dunking is wrong, who thinks baggy shorts are silly, who feels a free education is enough for college athletes, no matter how much money they might earn for their school or the NCAA, had to pause for a moment.

Members from the audience had written down questions and Wooden was trying to answer them. “Would you,” someone asked, “have allowed JaRon Rush to play at the end of the season after he had admitted taking the money from the coach in Kansas City?”

Here was the point. Even though Rush had served an NCAA-mandated punishment, would Wooden, knowing it had been wrong for Rush to have taken the money, have played Rush just when it counted most, at NCAA tournament time?

“I’d like to think,” Wooden says slowly, “that I would not have. I don’t believe I would have recruited him at all. But I can’t say for sure.”

It’s so easy to ask the right questions. But coming up with the right answers, that’s not so easy. Sometimes there might not be an entirely right or an entirely wrong answer.

Teach that foul or not? Is Briana Scurry, goalkeeper for the World Cup champion U.S. women’s soccer team, a cheater because she admitted to stepping into an illegal area on a sudden-death shootout save she made against China in the gold medal game? Yes or no? C’mon. If you are Myles Brand, president of Indiana University, and Bob Knight comes to your home late at night, talks for two hours, two hours of apologies and admissions of mistakes and begging for a future, what do you say?

Easy, yes? No?

Pursuing victory with honor, easy. Yes? No?

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.