THE LONG-STANDING PRACTICE OF CHEATING
You don’t generally think of the old fishing hole as a place to cheat, and it’s unusual to see any cheater get indicted, but it happened recently when authorities charged two fishermen in the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament. With more than $28,000 in prize money at stake, an investigation revealed lead weights and fish fillets stuffed into the stomachs of fish caught by the two, meant to increase the weight of their catches.
“I take all crime very seriously, and I believe what these two individuals attempted to do was not only dishonorable but also criminal,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley said in a news release. This was one of several high-profile cheating incidents this month. Cheating was alleged in a poker game — nothing new there, considering how poker and cheating have always gone together. But this occurred in a popular California YouTube poker game. One top player accused another of cheating when she called an all-in bet in a game holding cards that anyone else would have folded. Did she know her opponent’s hand? Details are still sketchy, and although she denied the charges, she returned $135,000 in chips to settle the matter. Suspicions remain high.
A claim of cheating also arose in the rarefied world of high-level chess when a low-ranked young grandmaster beat the No. 1 player in the world in a live-board match, an almost unimaginable occurrence. The top player had little doubt cheating was involved, even though it was not obvious how it was accomplished. What made it more suspicious was that the young player had admitted to past cheating in online tournaments and had been banned for a time in 2020.
None of this is new. As long as there has been competition, there has been cheating. Consider the “innocent” 1950s. Amid Elvis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sputnik ran a deep undercurrent of cheating.
The most famous home run in baseball history is arguably the walk-off by the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson in the ninth inning of the final game of a 1951 National League playoff series with the Brooklyn Dodgers to clinch the pennant. The radio call “The Giants win the pennant!” is a legendary broadcast moment. But it turns out the Giants were cheating by stealing the catcher’s signs and relaying them to batters from the scoreboard. Thomson denies seeing this specific signal, but those involved admit they had been telegraphing signals throughout the Giants’ pennant run.
Most basketball fans are not aware of it, but a college basketball team once won the NCAA championship and National Invitation Tournament in the same year. City College of New York, known as CCNY, won both in 1950. A year later, CCNY and other major universities, including Kentucky and Bradley, were implicated in a point-shaving scheme unrelated to the tournaments. A grand jury intervened, careers were ruined, CCNY deemphasized basketball and Kentucky was forced to cancel a season.
Cheating is wrong, it’s unfair, it should be condemned. It inculcates a corrosive cynicism in our young people. The problem is, whether it’s performance-enhancing drugs or deflated footballs, we all have a little larceny in our hearts.
As bad as cheating is, there can be some humor in it. Consider the great Baltimore Orioles manager of the 1970s, Earl Weaver, considered an expert on baseball rules and who took them seriously. He once brought a rule book on the field to point out where an umpire got it wrong. The umpire refused to listen, and an enraged Weaver tore up the rule book on the field in front of the fans, a confetti of rules flying everywhere.
Once when one of his young pitchers had just given up several hits and was facing bases loaded, Weaver came to the mound and said simply, “Son, if you know how to cheat, I wouldn’t wait any longer.”