Chad Carlson

Categorical Shortcomings: Application, Adjudication, and Contextual Descriptions of Game Rules

In the final extra time minutes of the 2010 World Cup quarterfinal match between Uruguay and Ghana, Uruguay’s star striker Luis Suarez deliberately batted the ball with his hand off of his own team’s goal line. The referee quickly detected his action, penalizing Suarez with a red card for deliberately handling the ball and rewarding Ghana with a penalty kick. Given that he had no other way to stop the ball and with only seconds remaining, his decision appeared—despite the odds—to be a calculated one. Had Suarez not stopped the ball, Uruguay’s World Cup run was over. Even with the impending penalty kick, Uruguay’s chances of winning were slim but not impossible. Yet when Ghana’s Asamoah Gyan failed to convert the subsequent penalty kick, Suarez’s “deal with the devil” turned into either an act of strategic brilliance or the mischievous manipulation of a loophole in soccer rules. Suarez’s actions raise questions about games and their rules. He openly violated the rules and willingly accepted his punishment, yet he also broke the rules in order to deny Ghana a fair and earned victory. So his case indicates a larger problem—what to make of this type of egregious but strategic rule breaking. To better understand the appropriateness of Suarez’s actions, one needs to understand the more fundamental relationship between games and their rules. And it is here that, despite much effort, the field of sport philosophy is still without a satisfactory paradigm that explains game rules. The existing paradigm focuses mainly on a categorical distinction developed by John Searle between constitutive rules that make the convention possible by determining relationships where none existed before, and regulative rules that identify relevant existing relationships and regulate behavior. This constitutive/ regulative categorical distinction has a number of clear uses. It can help us understand the need for rules to define practices like sports. It also indicates that some connection exists between sports and potentially incompatible rule violations. But it still remains unclear whether the constitutive/regulative distinction adequately provides a rough account of game rules or even if it sufficiently explains the relationship between games and their rules. More importantly, can such an account of game rules actually help us to evaluate a player’s behavior in relation to a game’s

The Motherland, the Godfather, and the Birth of a Basketball Dynasty: American Efforts to Promote Basketball in Lithuania

The United States transported basketball to other nations around the world in many different ways and with varying degrees of success during the early decades of the twentieth century. In Lithuania, the efforts of Lithuanian American star Frank Lubin and other Americans in Lithuania proved wildly successful and wove basketball into the fabric of Lithuanian national identity. Throughout the late 1930s, these members of the Lithuanian community in the United States spent a great deal of time in their motherland and changed local perceptions of basketball to the point at which it became Lithuanias national pastime.

Basketball’s Forgotten Experiment: Don Barksdale and the Legacy of the United States Olympic Basketball Team

The 1948 United States Olympic basketball team has largely been forgotten in the annals of American history despite taking a major step toward racial integration in American sports. Don Barksdale, the first African American to represent the US on the hardwood in the Olympics, joined nine players from the American South and legendary University of Kentucky coach, Adolph Rupp - a man notoriously identified as a racist. While Barksdale experienced very little racial mistreatment during the London Olympics, the lead-up to the Games reveals Americas ambiguous views on race relations. During training in the segregated states of Oklahoma and Kentucky, Barksdale experienced varying levels of treatment from his teammates, coaches, and citizens of the two southern states. His experiences paralleled those of another racial pioneer, Jackie Robinson, who mentored Barksdale throughout his basketball journeys. Today, Robinson stands as a household name for breaking baseballs color barrier while Barksdale, whose feat occurred just one year after his mentors, has been all but forgotten within Americas collective memory.

Sports and Christianity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

those ‘irrational intuitions, [...] prejudices or [...] traditions of the past that threat to enforce irreflexively a vision of sport that prevent or limit the equal participation in sport of the individuals (technologically modified or not)’ (p. 121). To sum up, this book is very attractive for both beginners who want to get a basic knowledge of the main trends and problems within sports ethics and experts in the matter who look for novel ways to expose and deal with such trends and problems. This is highly remarkable since, as I mentioned before, Pérez Triviño proposes an innovative approach by integrating ideas from diverse fields like law, bioethics, sciences, and philosophy. Thus, this book is a perfect example of how cross-disciplinary work can make meaningful contributions to sports ethics. I would like to bring this to a close by adding a critical caveat regarding the novelty of Pérez Triviño’s proposal. Although he brings his own legal methodology, with the corresponding novel theoretical system, I long for a methodological chapter that clearly lays it out. Regardless, the hope is that this review helps readers to discover and appreciate the main features of Pérez Triviño’s unique approach.

Ethics and Morality in Sport Management

Any books that you read, no matter how you got the sentences that have been read from the books, surely they will give you goodness. But, we will show you one of recommendation of the book that you need to read. This ethics and morality in sport management is what we surely mean. We will show you the reasonable reasons why you need to read this book. This book is a kind of precious book written by an experienced author.