When is the punishment enough?

“Stand your ground. There is a way of doing that without having to be combative. There is a way of hanging on to your true self, and demonstrating it, without resorting to violence.” – Neale Donald Walsch.

The PBA came down on the players involved in the brawl between players of San Mig Coffee and Globalport last week. As is typical of on-court altercations, other players and team officials got involved. After a brief review of the incident, the league issued fines and suspensions. Fortunately, considering the size and strength of the players involved, nobody was seriously hurt.

In the judgment of PBA commissioner Chito Salud, the punishment fits the crime. But will it keep players from throwing punches when provoked in the future? If the mother team shoulders the fine, then the player is partially sheltered from the consequences. What would be enough to do it? How do you measure effectiveness of sanctions? What is the yardstick of what will stop a player from breaking the rules?

The first measure would obviously be the laws of the land. Obviously, you wouldn’t do anything on the playing court that would make you criminally liable. Assault is considered a crime by society’s standards. And if you are larger than average and are a professional athlete, striking another person could fall under the scope of assault, and you would be taken to court. But the established protocol is not to file any charges for what happens on the court.

On-court violence is a recurring theme in male-dominated team sports. The passion, competitiveness and pressure involved always inevitably spills over. Add to this the occasional threat of being benched by your coach, and the implied or even stated command to be more physical (using your own judgment of what is sufficient), and you could end up on the borderline of a fistfight. That formula apparently has no clear, lasting solution just yet.

But let us remember how bad things can get very quickly. On Dec. 9, 1977, Los Angeles Lakers forward Kermit Washington threw a reactionary punch that almost killed Houston Rockets All-Star forward Rudy Tomjanovich. Tomjanovich was left lying in a pool of blood, and later said he recalled tasting his own spinal fluid in his mouth. This was the result of his skull being dislocated. His injuries were described as being similar to having been thrown out of a car moving at 80 kilometers per hour. No court case was ever filed, but the NBA suspended Washington for 60 days and fined him $10,000. Both players did play after that, but were never the same, and their careers both gradually disintegrated. Any player anywhere who thinks about throwing a punch should bear that in mind.

That next question is whether or not there is a suitable deterrent after the fact for other offenses. For example, being found guilty of using steroids and similar chemical enhancements may result in anything from a two-year suspension to a lifetime ban in basketball leagues around the world. But so far, it hasn’t reduced the commission of the offense down to zero. There are still going to be people trying to find a way to get around it. And in succeeding generations, there will always be people who don’t remember the last time someone was severely punished for it.

When Salud’s father Rudy was commissioner of the PBA, he once fined Ginebra San Miguel for walking out of a game against Shell in the early 1990’s. This became the standard, even copied by the Metropolitan Basketball Association, and it worked for close to two decades. But by today’s standards, also given the size of multinational companies backing PBA teams, would it still be enough?

In over 40 years of research by psychologists and other scientists, it has been established that the reward-punishment cycle is antiquated and not as effective as we believed it to be. External motivations such as reward and punishment, as reinforced by recent writings of author Daniel Pink simply reinforce long-term studies by Dr. Edward Deci and Dr. Richard Ryan. The two scientists crafted the theory of three psychological needs, a form of internal motivation. 

According to all this research, rewards such as big paydays and bonuses only produce a short-term spike in performance, followed by a sharp drop-off. It’s similar to being exempted from your exams for reaching a target grade. Obviously, you see no need to keep studying since the goal was to be exempted in the first place. In the real world, that basically translates to reaching a quota, then producing nothing afterwards. 

But that’s the positive side of the research on external motivation.

Internally, we do have a mechanism for self-regulation. In the time between the upsurge in emotion and the action of retaliation, there is a space wherein you can decide not to act in violence.

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez is now incarcerated and being accused of murder as well as various weapons charges. Investigators are also looking at possible links between Hernandez and a couple of other drive-by shootings. He’s not the first – or last – professional athlete to demonstrate such reprehensible behavior.

The Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun, for his part, apologized to fans after his Major League Baseball suspension for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, personally calling season-ticket holders. The 29-year-old outfielder denied the accusations for a year and a half before finally copping to it. But it does not absolve him of his offense. The question is, didn’t either of them know better than to do all of that in the first place?

Demographically, most pro athletes in the Philippines use sports as a way out of poverty, and many of them don’t think of what would happen beyond their careers. This places disproportionate pressure on them to keep playing, or at least stay in their coach’s good graces, no matter what. Any threat to that status quo can push them over the brink.

The answer lies in education, that they can control their impulses, and standing your ground does not necessarily equal hitting back.