Cheating As American As Apple Pie

In honor of this weekend's Super Bowl, thought I would remind that cheating isn't peculiar to baseball.  Indeed, it seems to be an integral part of the American character:

Football changed from something like soccer or rugby to something like the contemporary American game.  What can these changes tell us about Americans and American sport?  Among other things, Oriard [Michael Oriard, Reading Football] argues that referees were needed because Americans had a different attitude toward rules than did our British ancestors.  British amateur athletes operated on a code of honor associated with the peculiarities of their elitist social class, a code that was as old as the games they layed.  Adherence among upper-class British boys to the code of honor was enforced by the captains of each team, and in so doing, both the social nature of the contest and the social status of the players were supported.

Americans, in contrast, had no such social understanding--Americans argue to this day that we are of the "middle class" and so have no code of honor to break.  This difference in culture is reflected in our games, and Oriard argues that Americans wish to exploit the rules of the contest as much as they wish to adhere to them.

Mechikoff and Estes, A History and Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education 

This perspective is important when judging the "steroid era".  To paraphrase Forrest Gump: cheating is as cheating does.  Before we can begin to evaluate the use of performance enhancing substances, we must first examine the longer standing issue of cheating in American sports.

In case you haven't heard, Arlen Specter is calling for congressional investigation into cheating by the New England Patriots after the NFL inappropriately destroyed evidence regarding illicit taping.  You remember Specter, don't you?  He's the one who came up with the "magic bullet" theory in the Kennedy assassination.  Maybe the Pats can make the defense that the camera angle was deflected off someone's sunglasses reflecting the other team off of a skybox window.  Or maybe we can take a serious look at cheating in football, in business, indeed in America.