c. 1998 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ What are the rules for breaking the rules?

When it comes to sports, philosophers, theologians and ethicists appear to be as divided as the rest of the public.

They do not even agree on what should be the fundamental principles guiding sports behavior, short of general condemnation of murder and mayhem.

There is not even agreement on whether rules were broken to allow a injured Nykesha Sales to set the University of Connecticut’s all-time women’s basketball scoring record.

Then there’s the attitude: Who cares?”It’s only a game. We are not talking about morality or issues of life or death. That’s the only comment I would have,” said the Rev. Richard McBrien,

a theologian from Hartford who teaches at Notre Dame University.

Sales ruptured her Achilles’ tendon in a game against Notre Dame in Storrs,Conn., last Saturday (Feb. 21). The injury effectively ended the senior’s playing career for the UConn Huskies, two points shy of setting the scoring record.

But on Tuesday, at the opening of a game against Villanova and with the agreement of both sides, Sales was allowed to set the record by making a basket without opposition. The Huskies then hung back as Villanova scored to even things up.

Sports purists were scandalized. Sales fans were exhilarated. Even people who didn’t know the difference between a basketball and a hockey puck joined the fray. Then, of course, there were the people in between, wondering what all the fuss was about.

One would think that turning to people trained to think ethically would be the way to find a dispassionate point of view, right? Think again.”It has more to do with propriety than ethics. I don’t think ethics come into it at all,”said philosophy Professor Daniel T. Regan of Villanova, where the brouhaha began.

In the interests of full disclosure, Regan is the Villanova faculty’s representative to the athletic department whose opinion was sought on the agreement to allow Sales to set the record.”No rules were formally or actually broken,”Regan said because broad agreement was reached by coaches, university officials and Big East conference biggies.”This was a singular situation,”Regan said. There are no large issues raised by it, he said.”It was just something nice her coach wanted to do. Who got hurt?” Even the woman whose record was shattered, Kerry Bascom, applauded the move, he said.

As for those who say that “contractual ethics” were violated, Regan said, in this situation “contractual ethics to my mind are a lot of baloney. But then I am not a social contract philosopher. I am a natural-law guy, and there is nothing unnatural about this.” Regan gets an argument from sports philosopher Stevie Chepko, who teaches at Springfield College in Massachusetts.”The philosophical argument would be, is that in sports you establish an unreal world … and part of what I believe is, you enter into a contract where both of you have agreed to do your best. By allowing her to score without opposition, then you violate that contract,” Chepko said.

“When we cease to do our best, is it any longer sport? That’s the issue. The classic example is running up the score by a team far ahead,” she said.”The only unsportsmanlike thing you can do is not playing as hard as you can.” Expecting injuries is a part of the game, Chepko said. Should a gold medal be given to an Olympic athlete who falls short because of injury? she asked.

Allowing Sales to set the record “may be a humane thing to do, but it is a fundamental violation of the contract,” she said.

Having agreed to alter the outcome of sports history, the people who made the Sales record possible did the right thing by openly disclosing what they had done, said Michael Rion, a West Hartford business ethics consultant.

It would have been a different story, Rion said, if the teams had conspired to make Villanova seem as if it weren’t participating in the agreement.”The kinds of scandals in business that often end up in the press are often the result of people assuming that no one will find out. Disclosure is a pretty good principle,” said Rion, a former president of the Hartford Seminary.”People of good will disagree about the best way to balance the competing ends of a business corporation,” Rion said, as they have in the Sales shot.

Sister Miriam Therese Winter, who teaches feminist spirituality at Hartford Seminary, expressed annoyance at all the agonizing.”This is beautiful, inspiring, wonderful. A whole group of people got behind this. It’s just positive energy. Why do we make something negative about something so positive?”

DEA END RENNER