engleski

It's All About Winning - Intentional Rule-Breaking and Professional Players in ABA Basketball League

Intentional rule-breaking (IRB) was debated extensively in philosophy of sport with putting the accent on different instances of this complex issue: cheating (Fraleigh, Pearson, Loland), fair play (Butcher and Schneider, Simon), ethos (D'Agostino, Leamen, Tamburrini) and internalism (Morgan, Russell, Simon), 'Clock-stoping' strategic fouling in basketball became sort of exemplar for the discussion. In this paper, we intend to confront the philosophical and ethical theoretical discussion to the empirical data or the 'inner' perspective of professional basketball players in ABA Basketball League. For that purpose, we created questionnaire with 12 questions that are seeking in which amount players break the rules intentionally, precisely how (in which way), when (in which situations) and why (with which rationales). Questionnaire took 66 professional basketball players from different clubs: Cedevita from Slovenia ; Cibona from Croatia ; Igokea from Bosnia ; and FMP, Mega, and Partizan from Serbia. Empirical results show that winning is the most important trigger, as well as justification enough for intentional rule- breaking. Also, when players do break the rule, only a few (3%) feel guilty by conscience, while only a little more than half (56%) think that it is not morally right. Furthermore, not one of them finds fair play or preserving the spirit of the game (sport) as a reason for not stopping the opponent in the easy scoring situation. On the other hand, almost 90% admit to doing IBR, while 70% are doing it in every game they play. Thus, we argue that the results show that Simon's justification fails when comes to actual players which use rather low-minded 'practical reason' (Flyn, 2017) in approaching the sport and competition, and they use IRB in a way they find convenient and useful (see Imbrišević, 2019).

competition, winning, intentional rule breaking, ABA League players,

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