by Mr. Tabano, Billows Editor-in-Chief
Just yesterday, revered four-star U.S. military general and now former CIA director David Petraeus announced his resignation from the CIA because an extramarital affair of his surfaced. Just last month, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles because of allegations that he cheated by doping his blood in such a way that would enhance his performance. Just three months ago, Melky Cabrera of the San Francisco Giants, the then-runaway candidate for the National League MVP award in Major League Baseball, tested positive for illegal performance enhancement drugs. Just this past August, an investigation began that would eventually implicate nearly half of the students in one 200+ student lecture course at Harvard University in an academic cheating scandal involving plagiarism. Just yesterday, just last month, just this past September, just this past August…
These events span a miniscule 100 or so days of time, but there’s no need to reach back into the annals of our history to dig up abhorrent examples of cheating and cheaters in our society. All too often, cheaters seem to ineloquently and clumsily stagger their way to the forefront of our social consciousness all on their own. The natural question then is, why? Why is there so much cheating in our society? Or, for you pragmatic thinkers, why do so many cheaters get caught?
I’m not going to answer any of those questions here. Quite frankly, I’m not concerned with how or why people cheat or how or why they get caught. My take on cheating is this…if you cheat, you’re not paying the price. You’re not paying the price to get whatever it is you’re cheating to get.
Lance Armstrong’s recent fall from grace inspired me to choose this as an inaugural topic because his case makes my take on cheating seem a bit overzealous. After all, the man nobly battled cancer, was clearly one of the hardest working athletes ever put on Earth, and a great upstanding social figure…BUT…When it comes to the Tour de France, and when it comes to competing to win that event, if he did dope his blood, then he didn’t pay the full price for the reward, plain and simple. The full price to pay was one in which his normal bodily conditions would make him susceptible to the same stressors that other Tour racers that competed against him had to endure. The sad truth for me with Armstrong’s case is that if he did dope his blood, I think he may have still won at least four of those seven titles without doing so, which is still a pretty legendary legacy in the sport. So though I feel for Lance, the fact is if it’s true what he did, he didn’t pay the full price.
I believe in the idiom that everyone eventually has to “pay the piper”. Even if you cheat and don’t get caught like the unfortunate folks in the aforementioned cases did, it’s still going to haunt you. Somewhere, some way, somehow, it’s going to be sitting there waiting for you. The peek you take over at your classmate’s exam answers; the homework assignment you’re frantically copying down verbatim during lunch for your afternoon class; the Creatine-Nitrous-Adrenal-HGH-Power Boost-Mega Muscle-whatever supplement you drink before throwing on the cutoff tee and strutting into the weight room carrying imaginary watermelons under your arms; even the little white lie you tell mom and dad about where you were after curfew to avoid punishment…they’re all going to wait for you until they can find you at the moment when you are at your weakest…and then they will strike with hellacious vengeance. The moment when you realize that you’re not really who you think, talk, act, or even look like you are will be a devastating blow to your psychosocial self that you better hope you’re well-equipped to face when the time comes.
How do I know? All my cheating moments have found me, that’s how. Every single one of them found me at my weakest point, and like a ravenous bird of prey swooping down on a wounded rabbit, showed no mercy on me. And since I’m still around to talk about it, I have to say I would much rather have fought the fight I cheated to avoid than to fight the Piper, because the Piper always wins, at least that’s my take.
I’ll close here with a quote from legendary wrestling Olympian and coach Dan Gable, who had this to say when asked how he would have reacted if before his match with a Russian wrestler in the Olympic finals (whom he beat) he learned the guy was using steroids:
If I was going to wrestle in the finals of the Olympics against a Russian, which I did, and if I knew he had been trained specifically to beat me, which he had-but then if I knew the guy was on steroids, that would HELP me. Whereas some might think `oh, he’s cheating’ or he’s got an unfair advantage, for me you didn’t pay the price. You’re not as committed as I am. It’ll tear him apart. He may be strong, but all I have to do during that nine minutes of wrestling is loosen one single wire in his brain, make him do something that isn’t perfect, and he’ll fall apart. -Dan Gable