Sure, there may be competitiveness/ego involved if his stats can justify the demand, but if a professional sports player (again I have Baseball in mind) already has one foot in the minors due to his sagging play skill, and is using steroids just to keep his job, he’s not gonna make waves by demanding a raise. (Unless he’s already on the lowest pay scale on the team.)
A perfect example of the kind of rationale I’m talking about.
Is DustyButt a competitor? Sure he is.
Does he cheat? Absolutely!
He even brags about it.
I’m assuming DustyButt is a “he” based on the content of his post. 
Makes no difference, actually, whether or not he was a sports figure. His words make cheating sound somehow heroic.
If a rule has a stated, specific consequence, and there is little or no chance of getting away with breaking the rule unnoticed (such as in a televised game with instant replays), then is it really cheating to break the rule? It seems more like a tactical choice.
From there, a sufficiently ‘motivated’ person could extrapolate that, if there is a chance to get away with it, that the risk of getting caught and taking the penalty is just another part of the game. Of course, this means that the cheater is playing a different game than the fair players - unless everyone else is looking for opportunities to cheat too.
But I don’t think that all “true” (addicted to victory) players cheat. Any player who has not made the above rationalizations will not percieve a victory achieved by cheating to be a ‘true’ victory, and so cheating would be anathema to them, since any time they cheated, they would have essentially ensured that they would not feel victorious.
Of course your golfers are true. Being a competitor doesn’t define a person either way. I’ve known a lot of people who believe, as DustyButt seems to, that those who don’t take any advantage are somehow suckers. And maybe they are.
i think you have to divide the competitors into those who gain financial advantage by cheating and those for whom money is not a factor in any way.
Bridge is a game where it is very easy to cheat but the ethical dilemma never confronts most players they just don’t do it, because it isn’t any fun to win that way, however in the area of professional bridge, cheating has been relatively common and even so among the very best players in history.
The internet is something totally different. I used to play spades on the intenet and it was ridiculous how much cheating occurred, it seemed that you were more likely to be paying against a cheater than not.
In professional sports with the exception of golf everyone cheats in some way, so given that fact, i think we need a new word for routine violations of the rules vs. serious ones, such as using performance enhancing drugs or fixing games or corking a bat or freezing the field.
That would hold if people, competitive people, didn’t cheat at solitaire or crosswords.
I think that some who cheat feel that it’s just another skill available to them. And they do feel a sense of accomplishment as you do.
If they cheat and win, and you don’t and lose, the bad’s on you.
Well, wiki didn’t know “freezing the field”, so maybe someone can enlighten me.
I guess you can tell I’m not a big baseball fan.
I frequently click over to wiki or one of the dictionaries when composing replies. I have a poor memory and often forget how to spell a word. Although this is not a competition (not outwardly, anyway. ;)), am I cheating?
Well, yes, but *those *people are pathetic in all ways you can imagine.
C’mon, they *know *in their hearts that they haven’t won by the rules of the game.
They haven’t won adulation of others.
They haven’t won on a monetary level.
Basically, they haven’t won on *any *level and are indeed losers.
No, you haven’t convinced me that a *competitor *will win at any cost. Just the sad.
it’s been charged that some teams in football have left water on the field over night so it would freeze and negate the effectiveness of the other team’s running and passing. Yes, it hurts yours too but it may still give you a better chance against a team with a high powered offense. that has been the charge anyway, obviously with the advent of domes and global warming less likely to happen.
in baseball teams have been accused of letting the grass grow longer to kill ground balls in the infield, of letting the infield dirt get rock hard so more ground balls get through for base hits, of tilting the earth along the foul lines so that bunts stay in play instead of rolling foul, of placing spies with binoculars in the outfield scoreboard to steal the other team’s signals which would then be relayed to the dugout and the batter (this is somehwat hard to believe except there is evidence it happened and supposedly it happened at the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thompson hit the “shot heard 'round the world”) and of refrigerating baseballs before games to make it harder to hit home runs. (And that is just off the top of my head, I know there is a lot more.)
Has anyone ever heard of a chess player cheating? (except for that time the one player was being bombarded with gamma rays or whatever it was.)
So let’s put a name out there, okay?
If Barry Bonds is proven to have used enhancement drugs, it’s your position that he’s not competitive?
You insist that being a competitor is a measure of moral quality?
A competitor is one who competes. In anything. Simple. The fact that he/she may cheat doesn’t negate that. Many cheat because they are competitive.
I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit into someone’s visions of heroic ideals, but it’s simply what is.
Remember a athlete named Lyle Alzado?
A financier called Michael Milken?
An American President who went by the name Richard Nixon who was “not a crook”.
I just don’t understand your arguement, Khadaji.
Oh yeah, and then there’s Junior Johnson.
There is, I hear, a lot of cheating in “casual” chess. The kind played in public parks and like venues. Cheating would be more difficult in professional chess matches because of the intense scrutiny.
And many don’t. Again, I’m just not sure what the point of this thread is. There are people on both sides of the line. What are we trying to discuss here?
Line? What line?
Answer your own question. What are you discussing?
Me, I’m discussing the fact that many competitive people do cheat, and that cheating does not mean that they are not competing.
I’ll venture that non-competitive people are far less likely to cheat. Which, I guess, makes docile people morally superior to aggressive people. More heroic, in a way. In general, I mean. 
Bombarded with gamma rays? 
Chess players can take bribes to throw games, or use computers to win them:
‘Two players are under suspicion of having received help from computers at the World Open in Philadelphia. One locked himself in a bathroom stall, the other, who was leading the event before the last round and stood to win $18,000, was caught wearing a “hearing aid” which turned out to be a wireless receiver used for surreptitious communications.’
‘Having gone through the documents, the various statements, and putting all the bits and pieces together, the committee is firm in its conviction that Mr Crisan has not gained his present rating and tournament results through honest means and fair play.’
How do you measure competitiveness? Is it by their willingness to cheat? You may have circular reasoning here.
Why not cheat? Honoring the purity of the game is fine for little league and whatnot, but what about when real stakes are on the line? Say cheating means the difference between living your dream life and wallowing in mediocrity the rest of your life?