Pants on Fire: If Everyone’s Gaming the System, Is It Still a Game?

“We swallow greedily at any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter”
– Denis Diderot

I grew up with a relative who I’d sometimes sit across a table from at a too-long family gathering and play games of solitaire. She had an uncanny knack for winning games, even in some of the more complex games that should be won rarely, statistically. After a while of this astounding win rate, I started watching a little more carefully and surreptitiously. Turned out that when she’d hit a wall that should have often ended a game, she’d just move a couple cards, or re-shuffle an order, and ka-boom… what do you know? Another miraculous win.

I’ve wondered if my distaste for that discovery ended up coloring my views on so many moments I viewed over the years as dishonest. I was a massive wrestling fan in my youth, until it was revealed that it was all pre-planned moves leading to pre-set outcomes. Wrestling tried to keep that a secret for years, and when it finally came out… they astoundingly barely lost any audience. People finally discovered it was all a big fat lie, and they resoundingly did not care. No wonder we end up watching whatever news cast tells us what we want to hear.

The commissioners and powers that be in major sports often tout the need to protect “the integrity of the game” in whichever game they are promoting, believing that their audiences might be more fragile than the pro wrestling audience, and less understanding if it turns out that the outcomes of their contests aren’t perfectly fair. When those audiences number in the millions, it’s a lot of dollars, and very little sense for them to approach it any other way.

Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker recently likened a playoff outcome as called by that evening’s set of NBA referees to wrestling, saying people were going to start viewing it “like the WWE” if the sport weren’t careful. The phrasing hit a little too close to home, mentally and emotionally. Between the rampant flopping and foul-grifting that is rewarded in today’s league and the earlier-than-ever tanking that took place this season, it has been too easy to wonder about how honest the outcomes of games have been.

Basketball is hardly alone in this moment, and it is also hardly this moment in time in which this is a concern. Baseball? Look up incidents like the Black Sox, loaded bats, trash can banging, illegal betting, or steroids. Those moments are scattered from the 1800’s to the present day. Basketball can also tack on illegal betting (even after embracing LEGAL gaming), as every major sport can. Football? Good lord, the list is long. Stickum and snowplows and salary caps and almost anything that ends in “gate” (see: deflate-, spy-, and bounty-gates, but thankfully not Water-). Even seemingly squeaky-clean hockey has it’s curved sticks, dislodged goals, fraud and racketeering, and surprise – illicit gambling.

This is not unique to this big four quartet of sport nor to American sport. Soccer, cricket, lacrosse, rugby… all have cheaters. Bettors. truth-twisters. Good lord, watch a less-than-honest soccer player hit the pitch when a penalty kick would be opportune. High level acting. And patently disgusting. Maybe it’s naive to wish that anything with outcomes that have literally millions of dollars on the line every time could be done cleanly… to be played the “right” way, whatever right is any more. Maybe that wish is so pie-in-the-sky as to have flaky crust raining down around my ears. But when you find yourself watching one of your own favorite players engaging in that same flop-and-grift, it’s suddenly too easy to say, “well, we’re missing out if we DON’T join everyone in the new way the game is played.” It’s a slippery slope to that rationalization, and it ends up in everyone pretending. Which is a nice way of saying a big, fat lie. Maybe that is actually what people want to see. It seems to be working out for wrestling.

But in the long run, it sure feels selfish, pointless, and eventually cancerous. A lot like cheating at solitaire.