When Losing the Game is Better than Losing Face

The Unwritten Rules of Sports and the Limits of Rational Self-Interest

Photo by Gonzalo Facello on Unsplash

I’m old enough to remember when the drop shot in tennis was a taboo. For those who are not tennis fans, a drop shot is when you hit the ball unexpectedly slow, short, and with a lot of underspin, ideally when your opponent is looking for you to hit the ball deep or with pace. In recreational tennis, it can still be a taboo to hit a winning drop shot, at least in the sense that your opponents will get angry and think dirty thoughts about you for doing it, especially if they are elderly. That would not happen if you hit any other winner.

In professional tennis, a certain kind of shot is a taboo if it is legal, and even a winning or ideal shot in certain circumstances, but other players or fans resent you, even ostracize you, for performing the technique. It is considered dishonorable, something no respectful player does. It is considered “dirty” play. You lose face if you perform a taboo move.

In the last decade or so, the taboo surrounding the drop shot disappeared. All of the cool kids, meaning the top players, the most stylish players, the most popular players, started doing them. Like every other tennis shot, fans and players now rank drop shots, like they do forehands or backhands. Lorenzo Musetti for instance has a lethal one. The quality of a drop shot does not only depend on technique and placement, but also timing and strategic wisdom, so to count as having a good drop shot is as multi-faceted and nuanced as having any other shot. The taboo, in hindsight, looks silly. Players now win on the quality of their drop shot, and are applauded for it. Its not a face-losing shot, it is a face-enhancing shot.

The underarm serve in tennis is still taboo. Any time a server uses an underarm serve, the reaction is worse than the reactions to drop shots used to be. Players who are the victim of an underarm ace or winner will never congratulate their opponent on the shot. Some will not shake their opponent’s hand at the end of a match, and two players very recently almost came to blows over an underarm serve on a big point. The taboo is odd from a strategic perspective. Adding an underarm serve into regular rotation increases the degree of difficulty in returning, and can help a server win more often, especially on big points. Guarding against an underarm serve would mean standing closer to the baseline, but that also makes you vulnerable to fast-paced serves. To execute a good underarm serve does not require nearly the amount of skill as a good drop shot, but it does require good disguise and the element of surprise. It is a risky shot if executed at the wrong time, as it can allow a returner to take control of a point. Yet underarm serving is considered dishonorable, you lose face, and if you do it too much, you’re most likely going to be ostracized in the locker room. The underarm serve is very rarely used.

In cage-fighting, oblique kicks to the knees are taboo. It is considered dirty fighting, even though its legal and quite effective. For a long time, defensive shifts in baseball were taboo; they were so taboo that no team did it for almost a hundred years. Then every team did it as a matter of regular play. It was so effective it became outlawed, because somewhere along the way baseball fans, players, and rule-makers decided it was hindering competition (that rule change was a big mistake, in my opinion). I am told that in cricket there is a practice called Mankading that is taboo, but I’ve never learned cricket nor watched a single match to know how to describe this practice accurately. In soccer, hanging out with the ball in a corner just meandering around wasting time is taboo, even if it can be a winning strategy. And don’t get me started on video gaming, where gamers know with elaborate and pedantic detail just what kind of play constitutes dishonorable forms of winning, and what constitutes honorable ones, when all such winning is consistent with the rules and programming of the video game. (To take one example I do know about, because I’m a 90s kid, there were ways of winning against an opponent in Street Fighter II, called “pattern fighting,” that was hugely effective but elicited groans and anger and sometimes actual fist-fighting between arcade players for being dirty play.)

The existence of commonly known, but taboo strategies in sports puts to the lie the idea that the sole aim in a sporting competition is winning. Somehow, within the system of rules and the playing field that define a sport, certain norms emerge concerning honor and face that supersede even the norm of competing to win, which is the whole purpose of a game. Even players that philosopher Thi Nguyen call “striving players”, people who aim in game-playing not to win, but to strive, achieve, and enjoy, have to assume the aim of winning in order to strive, achieve, and win.

But what every game player learns very quickly is that there are unwritten norms that constitute honor and face, and that violating these can mean victory without respect. You will not gain respect for being a good game player if you employ taboo moves no matter how much you win. It takes a lot for a player to disregard norms of face and honor during competition, no matter how high-stakes. I would hazard to say that in most sports, well over 99% of players, would sooner lose than to win dishonorably by violating a taboo. I have never seen Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, Wawrinka, Sinner, Alcaraz, the winners of pretty much every major in the past 20 years, use an underarm serve. It probably never occurred to any of them, and it would probably never occur to them to use it in a high-stakes moment like a set or match point.

Players in sports will sooner cheat, participate in gamesmanship, and even explicitly violate rules and be ejected as part of overall game play than they would use a taboo technique. Soccer and basketball players dive and flop, sometimes in very foolish-looking ways. Tennis players have been known to mock an opponent’s service motion or ticks to get in their heads, kick over their water bottles, and stall for time to get them out of a winning rhythm. Baseball players steal signs, cork their bats, hit batters with pitches, and even brawl. You would think that cheating or explicit rule violation would be more dishonorable than doing something that is both legal and helps you win, but it isn’t.

How deep do these taboos run? As far as I can tell, there are taboos that are solely aesthetic, that have nothing to do with the idea that you’re “playing dirty” against an opponent, but employing them is equally dishonorable or effacing. Famously, in basketball, the granny shot is mechanically and technically a far more accurate way to hit free throws. If low-percentage free throw shooters adopted the granny, they would contribute far more points to their team’s victory. They might even score decisive points in playoff games. Certain unconventional stances when putting a golf ball are like this too. There’s are ways of standing while hitting a golf ball with a putter that you’d only see in an Adam Sandler movie that, if you just looked at balance and control, the unconventional stance could prove more efficient and effective movement for some players. But golfers would never use them, not because of any sense of wronging opponents. The mere use of a non-standard motion would make someone lose face simply by being ugly. Aesthetic taboos are all over sports in any game that requires “proper form.”

So we know there is a kind of ugly whereby players would rather lose pretty than win ugly, and a kind of dishonor whereby players would rather lose honorably than win dishonorably. None of these are codified in sporting rules, and in fact many ways of winning ugly and dishonorably are done with far more frequency than the violation of sporting taboos.

What might we learn about life generally from the existence and persistence of sporting taboos? Here’s are a few speculations.

(1) There are unwritten rules of any activity, no matter how much that activity is rule-governed. The unwritten rules are generated by norms that are as strong if not even stronger that the norms generated by rules and competition to win. These are norms of honor and face. Honor and face are for a large part and in most contexts more important than rational self-interested pursuit of victory in a game.

One general lesson from this is that no matter how you structure someones’ practical choices by tailoring penalties and rewards, there may well be some actions they will not perform even if it is within their rational self-interest to perform. Honor and face norms generated in whatever way they are generated to produce taboos are incredibly powerful.

(2) At the same time that these extra-legal reason-generated norms are incredibly robust, they are also incredibly fragile, as evidenced by the drop shot, and the defensive shift. Once a sufficient number of defectors start using the strategy, the norm just melts away unless rules are imposed to prohibit it. It isn’t that the norm that honor and face are more important than winning disappears, its that it is incredibly fragile what counts as dishonorable or effacing. The underarm serve taboo survives even when the drop shot taboo went away. So there will always be honor and face norms, even if particular taboos are fragile.

One general lesson from this is that no matter how powerful a taboo appears to be, if it is indeed to everyone’s rational self-interest to violate it, everyone will violate it when there is common knowledge that a critical mass of others will violate it. Taboos are simultaneously robust and fragile.

(3) Its is an open question whether there is a “moral reality” to the particular taboos that exist in sport, or if they are entirely a matter of convention and only convention. The taboo against oblique kicking of the knees in cage-fighting arises from the idea that knee injuries can be career-threatening or ending. But it is controversial whether oblique kicks to the knees really are uniquely injurious, as compared to for instance head kicks, heel hooks, or neck cranks. It is incredibly hard to justify the underarm serve taboo in a way that does not also make the drop shot a taboo. The underarm serve is simply a drop shot done when serving. If anything, the underarm serve looks more like the granny shot and the nontraditional golf stance in being an aesthetic violation.

Why there are aesthetic violations is somewhat of a mystery. One hypothesis it that the use of a technique by a professional or skilled player that is typically used only by a beginner or amateur is dishonorable, because it shows that you are winning but in a way no more skilled than a beginner. Another hypothesis I like is that many taboos are generated by norms of masculinity. Male players actually say things that verify this hypothesis, saying that these kinds of techniques are “girly” or “sissy.” I like this hypothesis because it explains why brawling is not dishonorable but granny shots are. But it doesn’t explain why female players also abide by such taboos, nor does it explain what even in men’s soccer or basketball, flopping is so prevalent, which should be a “sissy” move par excellence.

The lesson here seems to be that, while it is possible that honor and face norms track something genuinely morally bad about particular sports taboos, it is also possible that what counts as an inviolable taboo so as to separate out honorable and dishonorable play is entirely conventional. If it is entirely conventional, it could just be that humans need some kind of taboo to play the role of honor and face constraints on our relentless pursuit of winning, and what that taboo happens to be can be anything. Once we establish the taboo, we might tell ourselves a story about why that taboo arises for moral reasons.

If there is anything to the ideas I’m exploring in this post, there have to be implications for how we think about higher-stakes activity and the relentless pursuit of victory we see people engaged in toward their goals of winning; in business, politics, and war. For the single-minded competitor, taboos represent a strategic weak point you are in a position to exploit for victory. For those who believe in the moral reality thesis, taboos represent holes in the rules that require informal enforcement because the taboo represents a real constraint on playing to win. There really needs to be regular social sanctioning and reprimanding of players who violate taboos in order to keep the taboos a robust constraint.