Sports, Sportsmanship and Life

A TV commercial I’ve seen too many times says that sports are more than a game. That was certainly true for the soccer World Cup just played in Russia. Enormous crowds at home in every country watched each game as if national survival depended on victory. Hundreds of thousands of French people crowded the streets of Paris when their team won. It’s hard not to connect national pride with athletic triumph. If the US had a team in Russia, I would have rooted from them over everyone else.

The physical skills of individual players and the intuitive coordination of team play were spectacular to watch. But I was disappointed in an important aspect of these matches. Fighting for control of the ball always involved pushing, grabbing arms and pulling on jerseys, all strictly forbidden by the rules. Everybody appeared to consider this behavior a normal part of the game. Feigning innocence and surprise when they were caught in flagrante delicto was even more blatant than the “who me?” gestures of NBA players called for fouls.

Winning was more important than sportsmanship.

I just spent a weekend in Chicago watching a different sport at a high level with a different sense of fair play. My son’s team was playing in the USA Ultimate Frisbee National Masters Championships, for men over 33 and women over 30. Ultimate is a lot like soccer – playing on a soccer-sized field, passing the disk from one player to another trying to get it into the end zone.

But the spirit of the game is entirely different. Even at these national championships, there were no referees. Players were expected to make their own calls for the slightest infraction of the strict rules against physical contact. Disagreements had to be settled by mutual consent on the field, sometimes with the help of neutral official “observers”, mostly by discussion among the players.

The whole atmosphere of competition was based on mutual respect. Players congratulated the other team on good plays and helped each other up from the ground. After the game, the usual congratulatory line-up of the teams was just the beginning of acknowledgment of opponents. The two teams formed a circle with their arms around each other and presented gifts, usually cans of beer, to athletes on the other side, often selected for their fair play and good spirit.

These were serious competitors. Teams of 15 or 20, which had made it through two levels of regional play, traveled from all over the US for three days of competition.

The dominant sense of fair play and mutual respect is maintained by constant reference to the “spirit of the game”, as in these quotations from the “Official Rules of Ultimate”: “Ultimate relies upon a spirit of sportsmanship that places the responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors, adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play.” I watched many games over the weekend, and the number of infractions against this form of sportsmanship was minimal.

The words about the spirit of the game (SOTG) on the website of USA Ultimate are a primer about good behavior more generally: “Treat others as you would want to be treated”; “Be generous with praise”; “Go hard. Play fair. Have fun.” “SOTG is about how you handle yourself under pressure: how you contain your emotionality, tame your temper, and modulate your voice.”

Ultimate frisbee developed as a popular sport in the heady days of youthful rebellion against all forms of convention and authority during the late 1960s. The insistence on sportsmanship without referees was natural to teenagers who disdained what they felt was the heavy hand of the older generation. Yet the determination of ultimate players to prevent their ideals from being distorted by conventional sports culture is remarkable.

Not only has the spirit remained in force for half a century, but ultimate players have fought against the typical gender stereotyping of sports culture. Gender mixing and equality has been taken naturally from the start: like all frisbee tournaments, these Masters Nationals invited men’s, women’s and mixed teams on an equal basis. The players’ organization, USA Ultimate, recognized the bias towards men’s athletics that permeates sports around the world and has determined to counteract it. The players’ organization endorsed “gender equity” in 2008, as a reaction to outside media broadcasters, who preferred to display only men’s games. Knowing that they could not control the broadcast content of third-party media companies, USA Ultimate decided on a policy of encouragement and persuasion. The media companies, including ESPN, are now broadcasting men’s and women’s games equally at the college and club levels. USA Ultimate has instituted programs to specifically encourage more girls and women to play and form teams, since there are still more than twice as many males as females who are members.

By staying true to their countercultural roots, ultimate players have discovered that hard competition does not automatically mean animosity and cheating: “Time and again, great teams and star players have shown that you can bring all your competitive and athletic zeal to a game without sacrificing fair play or respect for your opponent.”

Given the constant lamentations about the end of civility and an epidemic of bad manners in modern life, ultimate’s SOTG might offer a better path. Some sports are more than just games.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook, WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, July 31, 2018

Health Care Politics Are Scary

I just got over a health scare. I don’t mean a big splinter under my fingernail or a stuffed nose. To me a health scare means believing that some serious bodily problem might ruin or end your life.

The “might” is important. It’s scary to be unsure if this bad health moment might have disastrous consequences. So much of health care recommended by doctors and practiced for ourselves by all of us is about probability.

Some things are certain. The doctor was certain I had ruptured my spleen playing football when I was 17 and certain that the internal bleeding had to be stopped right away. That was a health scare I didn’t know about until afterwards, when the surgeon told me, “You could have died.” He was just trying to cheer me up.

Lots of medical issues are more speculative. Doctors consider the probabilities that particular symptoms mean this specific disorder and that certain medical and pharmaceutical steps will help this patient. We the patients weigh our options, based on what we know and don’t know, using our own set of intuitive needs, beliefs, and probabilities.

My doctor helped me recover from this current scare by telling me, “Something else will probably kill you.” He and I both understood the value of frank talk about the future.

My scare was not at all about money. I knew I’d have to pay something for the visits and tests and more visits and tests. But I knew it would be affordable, because I have good health insurance. Like nearly everyone my age, Medicare is my primary insurer, the biggest health insurance organization in the US. Medicare is bureaucratic, but reliable. They will not go bankrupt, like my parents’ long-term care insurance provider did.

Medicare is incredibly cheap. In fact, coverage for hospital visits, so-called Part A, is free, with a deductible of about $1300 for each hospital stay. Not bad when the average hospital stay costs about $10,000. You only have to pay something per day if your hospital stay is longer than 60 days, meaning the total cost has probably gone well above $100,000. Medicare coverage for doctor visits, tests, and other services, so-called Part B, is not free – that costs about $1600 per year for anyone with an income under $85,000, that is, for most people. That’s cheap, too.

All my probabilities would change if I didn’t have good health insurance that I could count on until something else kills me. That puts me in the minority of Americans. Health problems become health crises for most Americans when they worry, “How are we going to pay for this?”

My doctors’ recommendations were based on careful scientific studies of tens of thousands of cases over many years. My political representatives’ recommendations about health care are based on self-interest and dogmatic political ideology, designed to misinform me and everyone else. The discussion of health care and health insurance in this country is worse than useless, it is often deliberately misleading. How can average Americans judge health probabilities when our politicians constantly threaten to upend our health insurance system?

Democratic politicians created an imperfect system which drastically reduced the probability that an American family would be uninsured. I think that’s great. Democratic politicians have been arguing for a long time over whether some version of “Medicare for all” would be even better for most Americans. We need that debate.

The Republican contribution to our national health discussion has been, “We will destroy that system and tell you about a much better system later.” If they really had developed another system, we would know about it by now.

Conservatives hated Medicare when Democrats created it in 1965. They have never stopped complaining about it and have never done anything to make it better. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced in December that Republicans wanted to cut spending on Medicare. A few months ago, the White House budget proposed cutting $554 billion from Medicare over the next 10 years. In June, the trustees of Medicare, who are mostly Republicans, like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, reported that Republican policies have hurt Medicare’s financial prospects.

Nobody knows what our President, Cabinet, or Republican majority in Congress will do about American health care tomorrow, next year, or any time in the future. That makes all of our health care probabilities worse by increasing the financial uncertainties of all Americans. Nothing they have done so far has made anyone’s health better. That is a national health scare.

I hope that something else kills me before any Republican health care plan goes into effect.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, July 24, 2018

Immigrants, Refugees and Racism

My father arrived in the US as a refugee in 1938. But he was the wrong kind, because he was a Jew. Although thousands of Jewish refugees from the Nazis were able to enter the US, official US policy did not welcome them. The State Department put so many barriers in the way of Jews trying to escape from Nazi Germany that the official yearly quota of immigrants from Germany was not filled from 1933 to 1938. That quota itself was part of the long American history of distinguishing between “good” and “bad” immigrants based on race.

There were no immigration restrictions in the new American republic, but only the good kind of people could become citizens – white people. Slaves were excluded from citizenship by the Constitution. In 1790, Congress restricted new citizenship to “any Alien being a free white person”.

Blacks who were already free were barred from entering the Southern slave states. Whites in Illinois, like many northern states, did not want African Americans either, so they not only denied the citizenship rights to blacks already in Illinois, but also discouraged slaveowners from freeing their slaves in Illinois.

A new kind of bad people began to pour into the US in the 1840s, 2 million Irish fleeing the famine. About the same number of Germans immigrated to America in the middle of 19^th century, but the Germans were mostly good Protestants and the Irish were bad Catholics. A popular movement developed to fight off the Irish hordes under the banner of patriotism. In 1849, a secret society of Protestant men in New York called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner sought to recreate an America of “Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism”. They grew into the American Party, often called the “Know Nothings”.

In 1857, the Supreme Court pronounced what it hoped was a definitive statement about bad immigrants in the Dred Scott case: descendants of slaves brought to the US could never become citizens, because black people were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That ruling lasted only until Lincoln promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the states passed the 14^th amendment exactly 150 years ago.

Almost immediately another dangerous foreigner threatened white America, Chinese laborers imported to construct the transcontinental railroad in the West. California laws prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens, and popular sentiment was whipped up against the Chinese by labeling them sexual predators taking jobs away from white Americans. Congress in 1882 passed the first immigration act targeting a particular ethnic group, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers.

Racist immigration restrictions are typically fearful reactions to changes in actual immigration. At the end of the 19^th century, floods of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, including millions of Jews, brought a backlash of demands to stop such bad immigrants. Congress eventually responded in 1917 with an “Asiatic Barred Zone” which excluded all Asians, except for Japanese and residents of the US colony of the Philippines. In 1924, a more comprehensive quota system favored good immigrants from western and northern Europe; not-so-good immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were limited, and all Asians were barred. The quotas were designed so that 86% of immigrants came from northwestern Europe and Scandinavia.

The Immigration Act of 1924 remained in force through World War II, although extralegal restrictions had to be employed to prevent too many Jews from Germany from entering the US. This and the entire history of immigration restrictions accurately represented American public opinion, at least among the white majority, where racist stereotypes of dangerous non-white foreigners mixed with fears of job competition. A Gallup poll in November 1938, two weeks after the Nazis destroyed Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes, and sent 30,000 Jews to concentration camps during Kristallnacht, asked Americans: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” 72% said, “No.”

The human disasters of World War II, including but not limited to the Holocaust, changed American opinion about refugees. Jewish refugees were admitted in increasing numbers after 1945, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished nationality quotas. For the first time in our history, American laws reflected the sentiments inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Congress overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan Refugee Act of 1980, declaring the “historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands.” Since then the US has taken in 3 out of every 4 refugees resettled across the world.

Donald Trump began his campaign by insulting Mexicans and promising to ban Muslims. He is leading the reversal of American openness and a return to our earlier racially-based immigration. Although we still accepted more refugees than any other country in 2017, for the first time we accepted less than the rest of the world. Canada, Australia, and Norway accepted more than five times as many refugees per capita as the US.

The pulling apart of asylum-seeking families is only the most inhumane aspect of this repudiation of what has made America great. We are retreating to the worst aspects of our history. The richest nation on earth will no longer be the most generous.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, July 17, 2018