Hitting a guy when he is down is not an unwritten rule; in boxing, in fact, it is carefully mandated.
In a sport that is so violent that its participants have been known to be killed in the ring, the rules of boxing have been written so severely that if you hit your opponent while he is going down (but before actually being down), the referee can disqualify the offender.
The term “hitting a guy when he is down” though, has become one of those cliché phrases that is ubiquitous in the world of sports (and perhaps beyond). Basically, this one means that it is considered bad form to take further advantage of an opponent when there is already a huge advantage.
Indeed, the notion is so strong that there are a host of unwritten rules about not trying to run up the score on an opponent – or even trying to press too strong an advantage.
At one point in the early nineties, the NY Knicks had a promotion in conjunction with Pizza Hut that gave attending fans a free pizza if the Knicks held their opponents to below 80 points in a game in a winning effort. Needless to say, if in any particular game, there were the possibility of that happening, the fans started screaming, “Pete-ZAH! Pete-ZAH!” so zealously that the players on both teams were affected.
Eventually (actually, it didn’t take long), the league outlawed such promotions because they felt that in addition to altering the play on the field, it promoted behavior that could be interpreted as bad sportsmanship.
In basketball, football, hockey and other sports with a clock, there is, in fact, a point at which an opponent can no longer come back and further scoring is a kind of slap in the face. But what about sports without a timekeeper, like baseball, tennis… and squash? When is it considered bad form to press an advantage?
I remember when I first was attempting to become one of the top amateurs in softball squash in the country. I was trying to play in a tournament every weekend, and I was somewhat self-conscious in many of those tournaments because I knew that my game was at a higher standard than most of the other participants. Frank Satterthwaite used a term in his book The Three-Wall Nick and Other Angles that referred to people who enter tournaments below their standard as “trophy hunters”, and I was uncomfortable with the notion that the term could be applied to me.
With that thought already in my head, I found myself also nervous about looking like I was trying to run up the score on my opponents in the early rounds of tournaments. And I remember puzzling over the question of what to do – should I play nicely and make sure that the opponent got in some good rallies or should I just play hard and try to win 9-0, 9-0, 9-0?
I love the fact that in racquet sports, one is never out of a match until the last point is over. I have never forgotten reading about Manuel Orantes’ semi-final match in tennis’ 1975 US Open against Guillermo Vilas. Orantes was down two sets to zero, 5-0 in games and 40-0. He fought off a total of five match points and came back to win (and then went on to beat Jimmy Connors in the finals the next day).
And yet, even in non-clocked sports, the attitude about rubbing-it-in persists. This past summer in baseball, there was national news when Davey Lopes became livid after Ricky Henderson stole second base in the seventh inning of a game in which his San Diego Padres led Lopes’ Milwaukee Brewers 12-5. Davey went ballistic to the national press because “you just don’t do that to a team when they are down!”
Of course, Lopes’ comments beg the question: how big a lead do you need before you stop trying to score more? In baseball, a seven-run lead seems like a lot. Twelve runs seem like even more. On August 5th, however, the Seattle Mariners (then baseball’s hottest team) led the Cleveland Indians by 12 runs after two innings. You know the rest: despite still being behind by five runs in the ninth inning, the Indians did, in fact, tie the game and go on to win it 16-15 in the eleventh inning to end a three-game losing streak.
Twelve runs is a heck of a lead. And you can’t have a bigger lead in tennis than Vilas did over Orantes. That is as far as it can go – and he still lost. So how to judge?
Joe Torre was asked for his take on the Henderson incident and he said that, “you have to judge the intent and not just the score.” That is perhaps the best point anyone could make.
So what did I decide to do? Well, first I realized that I was not as good as my dilemma made me seem; with me, any big lead was still in jeopardy of being overcome. So I made up my mind to try to win as decisively as possible to try to prevent any choking. As my father once said, “win big and buy your opponent a drink afterward.” Not only is it nice to actually do it, but it also is perhaps squash’s best unwritten rule of all.
