Topic : Cheating

History remembers John Joseph McGraw primarily as the famed and ferocious longtime manager of the New York Giants. But as unrelenting as McGraw was as a manager during the first three decades of the 20th century, he had been even more unrelenting as a player in the 1890s. It was an era of dirty baseball, and the Baltimore Orioles delighted in being the dirtiest. The most pugnacious Oriole was McGraw, who played third base—”the toughest of the toughs and an abomination of the diamond,” one sportswriter said.

McGraw was born in Upstate New York, the oldest of eight children of an Irish immigrant railroad worker. In 1884, when diphtheria swept through his village, he was a slight, eager 11-year-old whose proudest possession was a battered baseball he had been allowed to order from the Spalding catalog. He watched helplessly as, one by one, his mother and four of his brothers and sisters died. His father took out his grief and anger on his son, beating him so often and so mercilessly that at 12 he feared for his life and ran away from home. He supported himself with odd jobs until he won himself a place on the Olean (New York) professional team at 16—and never again willingly took orders from any man.

Although he was short and weighed barely 155 pounds, he held far bigger base runners back by the belt. He blocked them, tripped them, spiked them. When they did the same to him, he was usually not one to complain. “We’d spit tobacco juice on a spike wound,” he remembered, rub dirt in it and get out there and play.” McGraw had a face “like a fist,” one reporter wrote, and he saw nothing to be ashamed of in his style of play:

“We were in the field and the other team had a runner on first who started to steal second, but first of all he spiked our first baseman on the foot. Our man retaliated by trying to trip him. He got away, but at second Heinie Reitz tried to block him off while Hughie (Jennings)...covered the bag to take the throw and tag him. The runner evaded Reitz and jumped feet first at Jennings to drive him away from the bag. Jennings dodged the flying spikes and threw himself bodily at the runner, knocking him flat.

“In the meantime, the batter hit our catcher over the hands so he couldn’t throw, and our catcher trod on the umpire’s feet with his spikes and shoved his big mitt in his face so he couldn’t see the play.”

U.S. News & World Report, August 29/ September 5, 1994, p. 63

“Marathoner Loses by a Mustache.” So read the headline of a recent Associated Press story. It appeared that Abbes Tehami of Algeria was an easy winner of the Brussels Marathon—until someone wondered where his mustache had gone! Checking eyewitness accounts, it quickly became evident that the mustache belonged to Tehami’s coach, Bensalem Hamiani. Hamiani had run the first seven-and-a-half miles of the race for Tehami, then dropped out of the pack and disappeared into the woods to pass race number 62 on to his pupil. “They looked about the same,” race organizers said. “Only one had a mustache.” It’s expected that the two will never again be allowed to run in Belgium.

Today in the Word, Moody Bible Institute, Jan, 1992

A survey performed for the IRS with 2200 people discovered: 23% admitted cheating by either underreporting income or overstating deductions. 52% think at least one in four of their fellow taxpayers is cheating too, and that cheating is becoming more prevalent. 63% say it is fear of getting caught that keeps people from cheating.

William Giese, Homemade, pp. 1-86.

A recent poll of 5,000 students concluded that 46 percent of them would cheat on an important test. Thirty-six percent said they would cover for a friend who vandalized school property, while only 24 percent would tell the truth. Five percent would steal money from their parents if given the opportunity.

Moody Monthly, June, 1990, p. 8

Two baseball teams had battled to a five-all deadlock as darkness enveloped the diamond. In the last half of the ninth inning with the bases loaded and the count three and two, the pitcher called for a conference with the catcher. “I’ll wind up and pretend to throw the next pitch. You wham your fist into your mitt like you’d caught a strike, and maybe the ump will call it that way.

It might work.” The catcher nodded. In the interim, though, the opposing coach cooked up his own strategem, quickly relaying it to the batter. When play resumed, the pitcher wound up and apparently let fly. The batsman swung mightily and the crack of ball against bat (the coach’s work) echoed through the park. The batter circuited the bases for a grand slam, and the game ended, 9 to 5. Sullenly the pitcher walked from the mound. Had he confessed that he’d failed to throw the ball, the runner on third would have scored on a walk.

Source unknown

During a runoff Senate primary fight with former Texas Governor Stevenson, early indications were that Congressman Johnson had lost. Six days later, however, Precinct 13 in the border town of Alice, Texas, showed a very interesting result. Exactly 203 people had voted at the last minute—in the order they were listed on the tax rolls—and 202 of them had voted for Johnson.

While Stevenson protested, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black upheld the result, and Johnson squeaked by with an 87-vote victory. For this feat, columnist Drew Pearson gave Johnson the sobriquet Landslide Lyndon. It was not until July 30, 1977, that Luis Salas, the election judge in Alice, admitted that he and southern Texas political boss George Parr (who had killed himself in 1975) had rigged the election.

Source unknown

Baseball player Al Schacht slid into second base and felt a low-thrown ball land under him. Under cover of the dust, Al quickly slipped the ball into his hip pocket. The opposing infielder vainly looked for the ball and finally figured it must have rolled into center field. As he and his teammates frantically searched for the ball, Al completed the circuit of the bases for a home run. But all good things must come to an end—and they did when Al trounced onto home plate and the ball dropped from his pocket. One $50 fine later and Al’s laughter was tempered a little.

Source unknown

Lying, cheating, and stealing are becoming an "acceptable norm? among high-school and college students, says Ralph Wexler, speaking for the Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics. In a recent survey, the Institute reported that 61 percent of the high-school and 32 percent of the college students polled admitted to having cheated on an exam during the past year; 33 percent of the high-school and 16 percent of college students said they'd stolen something in the last year; and 16 percent of the high-school and 32 percent of the college students said they'd lied on a resume or job application.

National and International Religion Report, quoted in Signs of the Times, June, 1993, p. 6

What does the cheating scandal at the U.S. Naval Academy say about military honor?

Last week, Navy investigators reported that 81 midshipmen had obtained a copy of a 1992 engineering exam before exam day and that many of them then lied during an internal investigation, some to protect classmates. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, who chaired a review of the academy's honor code, blames the widespread cheating on the Navy's emphasis on skills like technical proficiency over character development.

A 1967 Annapolis graduate, Armitage notes that one point of honor is still pounded into all midshipmen from Day 1: "Never bilge (endanger) a shipmate.? That credo cuts two ways, says James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense. It explains why some midshipmen betrayed their personal honor by lying to protect their classmates; but, says Wilson, those same people will never let their buddies down during times of war. He adds, "I wouldn't worry that this indicates a decaying moral fabric of the next generation of military officers.'

U.S. News & World Report, February 7, 1994, Page 12