Cheating and Sports

Baseball, Cycling, Golf....why are we so obsessed with athletes cheating? Matt explores this question through the stories of Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day
university Welcome, and we're back on the untold history of

(00:28):
sports in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we
examined possibly the most American thing about sports cheating. Growing
up as a sports fan in this country, I was
coming of age during the golden age of professional cheaters.
From college booster scams to steroids in baseball to one

(00:49):
of today's subjects, Lance Armstrong. I got to root for
the best of them. What a wonderful time to be
a kid. Here's Matt. A few lectures ago, I made
my case for The Bad News Bear. Is this the
greatest sports movie of all time? And one of the
things I mentioned is that the film shows the propensity

(01:11):
to cheat in American sports. Amanda Worlortzer strikes out the
opposition by throwing the spit ball, which is most definitely
against the rules in little league baseball. Well, today, I
want to explore cheating very broadly defined in recent American
sport history. But it's more than that. I want to
consider heroism and and and hero doom in recent sport history.

(01:35):
We turn athletes into heroes. But what happens when it
turns out that our heroes are cheaters when they are
not what they appear to be. We are going to
focus on two athletes today, Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods
to larger than life athletes who accomplished incredible things and

(01:56):
were worshiped by millions. But these are two athletes who
became mired in cheating scandals, though it's very different types
of cheating. I'm not going to moralize today, but I'm
going to tell you why I think we care so
much about their cheating, or really, I suppose I'm trying
to prompt you to ask yourself that question, why do

(02:16):
we care or or do you care? So think about
that as we go. All right, we begin with the
sport of cycling and Lance Armstrong. We talked about the
passion that Americans had for cycling at the end of
the nineteenth century. This was the air of the great scorcher,
Major Taylor and the White wheelman who challenged him. But

(02:39):
then the automobile was invented, and so for most of
the twentieth century, cycling was a very minor sport in
the United States, very popular in Europe, but not in
the US. This began to change in six when the
American Greg Lamande he won the prestigious Tour de France,
the hundred mile multi day cycling event held every summer.

(03:03):
And in a nice coincide, Laman's name in French means
the world, and I suppose he was reminding the world
that Americans could be good cyclists too. And then came Lance.
Lance Armstrong was a brash and cocky Texan who would
do the astounding, the the incomprehensible, and Lance Armstrong has

(03:28):
a remarkable personal story and a remarkable body. When he
was sixteen years old, he was one of the nation's
best junior triathletes and they did tests on Armstrong at
a clinic in Dallas, and the doctors learned that Lance
Armstrong had an almost superhuman ability to use oxygen efficiently,

(03:48):
which is very important in aerobic sports like cycling. His
body also did not produce normal amounts of lactic acid
when he exercised strenuously, and lactic acid is what makes
your muscles burn and hurt when working out. Armstrong's muscles
and burn like the muscles of an average person. Lance
Armstrong was built to endure. Armstrong focused on cycling, and

(04:14):
he quickly became the top American cyclist, and he seemed
poised to do what Greg Lamont had done. When the
prestigious Tour de France then in. Doctors told him that
he had advanced testicular cancer. Armstrong underwent surgery and had
the cancerous testicle removed, but the cancer had spread into

(04:36):
his lungs and into his brain. His oncologist told him
his chance of survival was not good, but Lance Armstrong fought.
He underwent three months of aggressive chemotherapy. He lost fifteen
pounds from his already very lean frame, but by the
next summer tests revealed that the cancer was gone, and

(05:00):
Armstrong returned to cycling. He kept off much of the
weight he had lost. He was just two percent body fat.
He entered the Tour de France in n So three
years after being diagnosed with cancer, and he stunned the
cycling world as he surged up the mountains that the
rest of the world's top riders were left behind in exhaustion.

(05:24):
He won the Tour de France in n and he
dominated the field in a way never seen before. His
performance was just astounding in the wake of his victory
when journalists wrote everything we knew about human athletic achievement
needs to be reconsidered. And then Lance won the Tour

(05:46):
de France the next year in two thousand and then
again in two thousand and one, and then in two
thousand and two, and then two thousand and three, two
thousand and four, and two thousand and five at seven
straight titles. And while doing all this, he started his
Live Strong Foundation, which raised awareness and money for the
fight against cancer. Lance Armstrong became an inspiration to American

(06:10):
sports fan certainly, but he was a hero to anyone
with cancer or anyone whose life had been touched by cancer,
and more and more that just seems to be everyone.
Millions of people were walking around with those yellow rubber
bracelets a statement of support for cancer research and for
Lance Armstrong. You know what Lance Armstrong was. He was

(06:32):
an American folk hero, the lone Texas cowboy, riding high
in the saddle, fighting for justice. He dated pop stars
and went mountain biking with the President of the United States,
another Texan, George W. Bush. But throughout it all there
was a nagging question, how can he really be doing this,

(06:56):
how can he be that good? And French journalists, who
had a better understanding of what was possible in cycling
than most Americans, they insisted that Lance Armstrong had to
be doping, that is said, he must be taking illegal
performance enhancing drugs. But most Americans, even hard nosed sportswriters,

(07:18):
they dismissed the accusation. No, not Lance. We love Lance.
We put our heads in the sand. It's all very
similar to the way we valorized a pair of baseball
players in the late nineteen nineties. So let me make
a very quick detour and talk about baseball. In Mark

(07:39):
McGuire and Sammy Sosa went on a home run hitting spree,
and they went after the single season home run record
sixty one set by Roger Marris in nineteen sixty one.
And there was something magical about these two two players,
one white, one black. One McGuire a quiet, hulking American,

(08:00):
the other Sosa, a a joyous and powerful Dominican, were
playing for story teams in the Midwest, the Cubs and
the Cardinals, and they weren't just hitting home runs. They
were crushing baseballs, each home run further than the last.
And American sports fans ate it up. The stadiums were

(08:21):
packed wherever these guys went, and as they got closer
to the record, regular TV broadcast would be interrupted whenever
one of them was coming to the plate. You know,
it was we now interrupt Seinfeld because Mark McGuire is
coming to bat. It was must see TV. I mean this.
I don't think baseball was ever more popular than it

(08:44):
was in the summer. Ever, part of the reason for
the home run obsession was that this was the same
summer as the Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. During
that summer, the President was coming clean and admitting to
an inappropriate relationship with a twenty three year old White

(09:05):
House intern. And so Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa hitting
baseballs to the moon. It was a wonderful diversion from
that sordid story. As I said, the record had been
sixty one home runs in a season, but in Mark
McGuire hit an astounding seventy Sammy Sosa hit sixty six. Mmm.

(09:30):
Seems a little suspicious to me. It seemed a little
suspicious at the time. Maybe they were taking steroids. Steroids
are synthetic testosterone. Steroids increased body mass, and muscle power.
They also increase speed and agility. People used to say

(09:51):
that steroids don't help you hit a baseball. That's not true.
They do. They make your back quicker and then when
you hit the ball, the ball goes farther. There is
a reason baseball players took steroids. They work, but we
didn't want to question it. Head in the sand and
McGuire and so said. They were everywhere that year. The

(10:13):
cover of Time, Newsweek Sports Illustrated named them their co
Sportsman of the Year, and their accomplishments were even sexualized.
The shoe company Nike. They conflated sex and power hitting
when they produced the definitive commercial of the steroids era.
In their Chicks Dig the Long Ball commercial, two top

(10:37):
pitchers Greg Maddox and Tom Glavin of the Atlanta Braves.
They get fed up with all the admiration that Mark
McGuire is receiving, especially from Heather Locklear, the actress who
at the time was at the at the top of
the Hollywood food chain for her work on Melrose Place,
and these two pictures decide they want to get the girl,
so they start lifting weights and drinking protein shakes, and

(11:00):
they transformed themselves into power hitters. Chicks dig the long ball.
They said home runs are an aphrodisiac. Americans were horny
for home runs. Some people looked at the incredible, hulk
like physiques of McGuire and Sosa and accused them of

(11:21):
taking steroids, but they denied it. And it was the
same with Lance. There were a few people who claimed
that Armstrong had to be taking performance enhancing drugs. He
was just too fast, he had too much endurance, but
he denied the claims. He angrily denied the claims. He
sued anyone who claimed that he was doping. Lance Armstrong

(11:46):
financially ruined anyone who made that accusation. And but the
record show Lance Armstrong took hundreds of drug tests and
he passed everyone. But the suspicions and the accusations continued
even after Armstrong retired from the sport, and more and

(12:07):
more cyclists who were now also retired, They said that
they saw Lance Armstrong dope, that they saw him take
illegal drugs, and in fact some admitted that they had
doped with him. In two thousand and twelve, the World
Anti Doping Agency they formally charged Lance Armstrong with taking
illegal performance enhancing drugs, and the evidence was so overwhelming

(12:31):
that the Tour de France stripped him of his seven titles.
The next year, in Lance Armstrong finally came clean, so
to speak, he sat down with Oprah Winfrey. Oprah actually
makes two appearances in our lecture today, and he admitted
that he had been doping the entire time. He admitted

(12:53):
to taking banned performance enhancing drugs for all seven of
his tour victories. And we now know that he masterminded
a drug taking regimen, and he demanded that anyone who
wanted to ride on his cycling team they had the
dope as well. Lance Armstrong was a liar certainly, and
because he knowingly and blatantly broke the rules of his sport,

(13:17):
he was a cheater. And my question is do you care?
Do you care that Lance Armstrong cheated specifically? And do
you care when athletes take illegal performance enhancing drugs? You know,
baseball players like Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa or Barry
Bonds and Roger Clemens, and that list goes on and

(13:38):
on and on. You know, athletes cheat in their sports
and all sorts of ways. In football, they purposely hold
at the line of scrimmage. In baseball, they hollow out
the center of their bat and they fill it with
court or super balls, or they throw a spitball. This
type of cheating is often described as amusing or ingenious,

(13:59):
and we say, that's why there are referees and umpires.
But for the most parts, sports fans seem to have
drawn a line with steroids. And here's why, I think,
and this takes us to the essence of our fascination
with sports. For us to identify with an athlete, you know,

(14:20):
to be thrilled by their physical performance, the athlete needs
to be like us. The athlete has to be human.
We want to revel in their accomplishments and say, wow,
I can't do that. But that sense of awe and
wonder can only exist if the athlete is made of

(14:40):
the same materials that we are. And we have decided
that steroids widen the gap between us and them too much.
So when Lance Armstrong or Mark McGuire juiced themselves up
to their eyeballs, we no longer understand what they are
made of. That they cease being like us, and so

(15:01):
racing up the alps or or hitting a baseball. Four
D and fIF defeat. These feats are less meaningful if
the athlete exists on a different biological plane. Is it
supreme skill in human will? Or is it just the chemicals?
We don't know, And so that seems to be a

(15:22):
type of cheating that we do not countenance. After the break,
Tiger Woods cheats a different way. Speaking of cheating, let's

(15:48):
turn to Tiger Woods. Actually, let's first talk about the
racial history of golf. I think this is an important
story to understand in order to appreciate the revolutionary impact
of Tiger Woods. The last time we discussed golf was
when we're talking about a creation of those exclusive country
clubs where wealthy Americans gathered to separate themselves from everyone else,

(16:12):
and African Americans were barred from playing on most of
these private golf courses, though they could be found on
these golf courses serving as caddies at Augusta National in Georgia,
the home of the Master's golf tournament as late as
the nineteen sixties. If you went to the Masters, all
of the golfers were white and all of the caddies

(16:35):
were black, every one of them. And do not think
for a minute that this was a coincidence. This was
the nation's racial hierarchy being reproduced and reinforced on the
golf course. The players are white and their servants in
this case called their caddies are people of color. That
was all done on purpose. Racial exclusion was encoded in

(16:59):
professional golf from its beginnings the Professional Golf Association the
p g A. It was founded in nineteen sixteen, and
it had a Caucasians only rule, white golfers only. The
first exception to this rule came in nineteen fifty two
when Joe Louis, the ex heavyweight champion. He essentially shamed

(17:21):
the San Diego Open into granting him an exemption and
letting him play. So Joe Louis is the answer to
a great trivia question, who was the first black golfer
to compete in the PGA tournament? It's Joe Lewis. The
p g A was not officially desegregated until nineteen sixty one,

(17:41):
making it the last of the major professional sport associations
to allow black athletes to participate, and there would be
some very good black golfers in the sixties and seventies.
There was Charlie Sifford. He was the first black member
of the p g A. There was Lee Elder, the
first black golfer to play in the Masters in but

(18:03):
through the Civil Rights era and to the post Civil
Rights Sarah, golf was among the whitest of American professional sports.
Then came a Southern California kid named Eldrick taunt Woods.
Nicknamed Tiger after one of his dad's army buddies. Tiger

(18:23):
Woods has essentially been in the limelights since he was born.
He made his TV debut when he was two years old.
He appeared on The Mike Douglas Show with his father
at not to mention Bob Hope, and he was swinging
the club and sinking putts, and his father boasted that
his two year old son would one day be the
best golfer the world has ever seen, and it was

(18:45):
a prescient remark. Tiger Woods tore through the amateur ranks.
He dominated collegiate golf while at Stanford, and then Tiger
turned pro in and before he ever swung a club
as a professional, he signed an unheard of forty million
dollar contract with Nike, a company that was eager to

(19:06):
find its way into the golf market. This was the
Air Jordan's effect. Right, Jordan had led the way and
shown how lucrative it could be for Nike to align
themselves with the ascendant athlete of the moment, and Tiger
Woods seemed to be that athlete. Tiger Woods is the
son of Earl Woods, a man of African American and

(19:29):
Native American ancestry, and Tita Woods, who Earlwoods met while
in the U. S. Army and on a tour of
duty in Thailand. She has South Asian and Dutch ancestry.
And when Tiger Woods burst onto the scene in the
mid ninety nineties, it was right when Americans were discussing
new terms like diversity and multiracial nous, and Tiger Woods

(19:53):
embodied these ideas, the multi ethnic, multiracial. Tiger Woods was
very much a man of the multiracial moment. You know,
his his multi race stillness is ethnic diversity. Who didn't
Tiger represent He was the embodiment of modern America, a
modern America that was becoming less white, more colorful, and

(20:17):
more diverse. Tiger Woods was an amazing success in professional golf,
and right away maybe the biggest golf tournament of the
year is the Masters, played every April in Augusta and
the Augusta National Golf Club, which hopes the tournament that
they didn't even allow African Americans to be members until

(20:40):
so in In his first time playing the Masters as
a pro, the multi racial Tiger Woods, he won the
Masters by an astounding twelve strokes, the largest margin of
victory ever in that tournament. At that time, Tiger was
only twenty one, still the youngest player to ever win
the Masters. And this was hailed as a civil rights triumph.

(21:03):
You know, Tiger Woods, a man of many colors, winning
in what was perhaps the most exclusive and whitest of
all American sporting spaces. Tiger Woods the racial trailblazer. One
week after his Master's triumph, Tiger Woods was on the
Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah is back on this show. Tiger

(21:25):
Woods opened up and he talked about race and his
racial identity, and he told Oprah that as a kid,
he had come up with the term Cablanasian for himself,
or he invented to honor his parents diverse heritage. He
was Caucasian, white, who's black, Indian or Native American and Asian.

(21:46):
He was Cablanasian. There were a few people who ridicule
Tiger for this invented word. I mean some in the
black community especially, They saw this multi racial stance as
a betrayal of his real race. No, you're black, Tiger,
they said. But I think most people saw this as
a serious attempt by a young man to articulate his

(22:07):
complex heritage, and especially growing up in a nation that
forced him to check a box and pick one and
only one racial identity. And so the rise of Tiger
Woods in the white world of golf, much like the
Air Jordan phenomenon, it was presented as evidence that America
was becoming a post racial society, you know. The hero

(22:29):
worshiping of Jordan's and now Tiger was presented as evidence
that we as a nation had gotten over our racial hangups.
And there are those who suggest that athletes like Tiger
Woods and Michael Jordan's they made the election and presidency
of Barack Obama possible. The argument here is that white
Americans had to identify with a black athlete before they

(22:50):
could vote for a black president. White Americans wearing their
Air Jordan's and rooting for Tiger on Sundays, perhaps these
everyday acts opened up Americans to the possibilities of a
black president. That's the idea. I think it's intriguing. So
Tiger Woods was like Mike in a number of ways,

(23:11):
but especially in the way he was dominating his sport.
He hit the ball further than everyone else. He possessed
a determination rarely seen in that sport. Tiger was stalking
Jack Nicholas and his record of major tournament wins. Jack
Nicholas won eighteen majors. This refers to the four big

(23:31):
tournaments played every year in golf, and eighteen majors. This
was the benchmark in men's golf. In two thousand and nine,
at only thirty three years of age, Tiger had already
won fourteen. It seemed inevitable that he would pass Nicholas.
The question was not if he would get the record,
the question was when. And then on Thanksgiving weekend two

(23:54):
thousand and nine, the entire Tiger Woods storyline changed, and
it changed fast. First, we learned that Tiger Woods crashed
his SUV while backing out of his driveway at a
high speed early in the morning, and according to the
initial reports, his Swedish wife Ellen, she heroically smashed the
window of the card for the record it was with

(24:15):
a three iron and she dragged Tiger from the wreck.
But then the questions began. Had Ellen rescued Tiger or
had she actually been attacking her husband with the golf club,
thus causing the accident, Well, it was the latter. Almost
immediately came rumors of a relationship on the rocks, followed

(24:37):
by the stories of Tiger's alleged marital infidelities, and then
the story exploded. I mean, day after day we read
stories of Tiger having sex and motel rooms, sex and
church parking lots, sex with coffee shop waitresses, sex with
porn stars, sex and more sex and never ending sex.

(24:58):
It was a media and public feeding frenzy, and it
was a sign that a good sex scandal might actually
be this nation's most popular spectator sport. From Tiger came
the denial of guilt, then the admission of guilt, Then
the ritualistic, tearful public apology, and then a check into

(25:20):
a rehab clinic for for sex addiction, not drugs or alcohol.
There were the jokes on late night TV. You know,
question what course gives Tiger Woods the most trouble? Answer? Intercourse.
Finally came the divorce, a divorce with an undisclosed settlement,

(25:41):
but a settlement so large. I am told that the
transfer of money into his wife x wife ellen Swedish
bank account it actually bolstered the value of the Swedish
krona against the American dollar. That doesn't seem possible to me.
But if so, wow. But once again, let me ask you,

(26:03):
Tiger is a cheater. A different kind of cheater than
Lance Armstrong, but a cheater. Do you care? Here's my
take all the extra marital cheating. I don't really care.
I mean, sure, shame on you, Tiger, but it's none
of my business. But the nation turned on Tiger Woods.
Americans were outraged, and I think one of the reasons

(26:27):
for the collective national outrage was this. For almost two centuries,
Americans have equated athletic excellence with moral excellence. Championship athletes,
we've been told have strong moral fiber. This is a
belief that goes all the way back to that idea
of muscular Christianity. You know, the idea that sports build

(26:51):
character and moral fiber, the idea that only those with
character can succeed in sports. Well, it turns out it's
not true. As Tiger Woods proved. It turns out you
can golf by day and cheat on your wife at
night and in the afternoon and in the morning. It
turns out being able to hit a golf ball close

(27:12):
to a hole is not evidence of a strong moral compass.
Neither is being able to hit a baseball over the
fence or throw a football sixty yards in a tight spiral.
In fact, there are those who actually suggest that Tiger's
extramarital sleaziness, that it fueled his tremendous confidence and his
sporting testosterone. You know. They suggest maybe womanizing made him

(27:33):
a better golfer. Sex as steroids. I don't know. But
when the really great athlete Tiger Woods turned out to
be the really terrible guy, Tiger Woods, he received the
collective outrage of a nation that was upset with an
athlete not living up to our somewhat impossible standards. We

(27:56):
want to believe that good guys win in sports, that
there is some direct link between sports and morality, but
more and more on one dering if that's true. That's
all for now. Next time on the Untold History of
Sports in America, presented by One Day University Sports and

(28:18):
September eleven, School of Humans,