I don’t think I learned this from my parents, who really didn’t teach me much of anything. My father did teach me how to throw a curveball, which enabled me to pitch 29 consecutive innings without giving up a run when I was 14. Beat THAT, motherfuckers.
One night my mother, when doing her crossword puzzle, asked me if I knew about sex. I said that yes, my brother, Pete, had told me. “Oh, that couldn’t have been good,” she opined, and continued with her crossword.
One of many things I didn’t learn from them was about cheating: If you win because you cheated, you really haven’t won. I realized that it just was commonsense. So I’ve never understood how someone in a competition could cheat. I mean, winning like that amounts to coming in second. How does one avoid a vicious itch in the conscience when accepting a trophy? But there’s a real epidemic of it lately, each instance more insane than the one previous.
Cheating in chess: Magnus Carlsen, the Swedish world champion, lost a match to 19 year old phenom Hans Nielsen. Carlsen later said that Nielsen seemed disengaged and not really paying the kind of intense attention that most of us can only imagine. Nielsen admitted to having cheated during online chess games in prior years.
How would that even work in an over-the board match? Someone suggested little nodes between Nielsen’s toes sending him vibrations. Deadspin.com posited that Nielsen had vibrating anal beads that sent him some sort of message. In Morse code perhaps? That’s pretty much the most likely means of his getting information from outside the room, and it sounds just plain silly. Nielsen offered to play his next match naked, a cheerful offer upon which no one, fortunately, took him up.
In the next tournament, the two were paired again, and Carlsen, in a real display of pique, resigned after one move—I’m not playing with a cheater, of course, was his message. Carlsen managed to win the tournament anyway, and if anyone has any idea how that could happen, please let me know.
Nielsen now is under intense investigation for the rest of his life, and we’ll probably never hear the end of it, which doesn’t matter to most of us as you have to look for news about chess. Why would he venture to cheat? To beat the world’s champion, yes, that’s something. But…the win isn’t real, right? Also you have to endure vibrating anal beads. For his part, Nielsen denies cheating against Carlsen and has sued him for $100 million. You’re learning the American way, son! And only 19 years old.
Similarly there has always been talk about cheating in the bridge world. No news on that front lately; once the allegations came out, tournaments installed cameras everywhere and watched intently for finger movements around hands that could signify this or that. As an occasional bridge player, I have to say that if you concentrated as much on playing the hand as you would have to on what the finger signals meant, you’d win easily.
In my bridge experience, an added complication was that when Nancy and I played with another couple, I was frequently plowed. One night after a wedding, Jim X (I will not give his last name so as to spare him any embarrassment) and I piled Guinness Stout on top of the inevitable champagne, and, at the end of each hand, I could barely remember what had been bid. I’m going to be looking at fingers in motion?
Poker, in my staunch, well-considered opinion, is not a sport, but ESPN broadcasts it, so OK. Recently a woman named Robbi Jade Lew—with a voluntarily-assumed name like that, hasn’t she already consigned herself to the leering eyes of scorn?—played either an heroic bluff or cheated to win $269,000 off of a more-conventionally named Garrett Adelstein.
“Adelstein had an open-ended straight flush draw and went all-in on the turn. Lew had a weak jack-high hand but also decided to go all-in -- something most poker players would've never considered doing.” (CBS Sports, October 4, 2022). Are you kidding!? I haven’t the slightest idea what that means, but CBS Sports’ reporter sure does. Again, let me know if you can decode that.
After the hand was over, Adelstein called Lew back into a dark hallway and apparently challenged her on what he said had to be cheating. Saying she wanted no disruption, she gave him back his $269,000. Some would consider that an admission of guilt. Subsequently, the casino etc. began investigations. Adelstein said that nothing in her previous 11 hours of play would have suggested her playing that hand in that way.
How did she cheat? CBS Sports suggests no means. Deadspin.com reports someone positing a vibrating ring. OK, I’m hopeless about this stuff, but who is vibrating what to her?
Also not in my line (haha pun intended) is competitive fishing. Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky won a tournament with 35 pounds worth of fish. But the wall-eyes should have weighed half of that. The tournament director, with Mr. Runyan and a lot of other fishers standing witness, cut up the fish and found weights inside. Weights! Also extra filets. Which almost doubled the weight. Wouldn’t the difference be kind of obvious?
Apparently Runyan and Cominsky had won other tournaments this way, which raises the question that if they were being so obvious, why hadn’t they been caught before?
Here’s a link to the video during which the cheating is revealed. As someone who isn’t casually involved in daily violence, I warn you that the threats are kind of scary. And there is widespread use of the vulgarity I used above to underline my shut-out streak. I mean, those other fishermen were mad! And here I thought fishing was supposed to be calm and relaxing.
Recently Irish dancing competitions have been infested with cheating: apparently sexual favors exchanged for better scores. I can’t think of anything more cringe-y, so let’s leave it at that.
Finally, there’s even been alleged ballot box stuffing in the Fat Bear Contest in Katmai National Park in Alaska. IS NOTHING SACRED?
I could not in good conscience be a scold about this if I didn’t reveal the extent of my own cheating. When I pitched, I toyed around with throwing a spitball, if only because that lovable scamp Gaylord Perry got into the Hall of Fame throwing one.
A spitball is when some foreign liquid substance is surreptitiously applied to the ball, making the wind act on it differently, or more commonly, make it slip out of the pitcher’s hand with much greater underspin, making the ball sink as it nears the plate. The split finger fastball has become more popular, no doubt because those pitchers are enormous now and have hands bigger than their ancestors, and various new variations on the change-up do the same thing, so the spitball is pretty much obsolete.
Cheating in baseball is a touchy subject because (1) it’s been going on forever, (2) some of it is nodded at, and (3) the lines are a bit grey. Hear me out.
The spitball was essentially banned in 1920, but 17 pitchers who had always thrown it were grandfathered in, which makes for quite an exception (see grey area, supra). Burleigh Grimes threw it until l934!
Given my anti-cheating stance, Nancy has chided my seeming hypocrisy over the years. In my defense, when I threw a spitter, nothing happened. It just looked like my fastball. No harm, no foul? Please? I could lie and say I threw a spitter that didn’t do anything and it got tattooed over the fence, but to say that would be…cheating.
The Republican party has embraced a far more sinister, cynical, and dangerous form of cheating. In the upcoming election, and probably far more likely in 2024, Republican candidates will count on the aid of cheaters in election boards or secretaries of states’ offices to overturn elections fairly won by Democrats. This is not a wild socialist claim I am making. These are their explicit plans.
Republicans don’t advance any policy initiatives anymore except cutting taxes, eviscerating regulation, and paring the administrative state. No positive plans for governing emerge from their dank holes. In the marketplace of ideas, Republicans have lost, if only because they’ve chosen not to compete.
And the cheat of the decade in my view: McConnell’s refusal to consider Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, stating that the new president should have the right to appoint one, then rushing the under-qualified member of a Catholic cult, Amy Coney Barrett, through in the same circumstance. Cheating with a very large side dish of hypocrisy. How does McConnell look in the mirror? Maybe he doesn’t.
I come back to my first inquiry. Hey, Mitch and the rest of the Republican Party, my parents didn’t even have to teach me that if you have to cheat to win, you don’t really win, but I still know that. What’s your excuse? My nephew Monty posits that if there’s enough money involved, that’s all that matters. For you, the country, sadly, doesn’t.
"What are those anal beads telling me??"
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