In the history of sports, there have been many cheaters. 

Baseball players seem to be the worst. But chess masters cheat as well. Ice skater Tonya Harding wanted to win so bad she hired someone to whack Nancy Kerrigan’s leg.

And don’t get me started on the German women’s Olympic swim team. They took steroids for years until someone noticed they were built more like guys then girls.

What about Coach Bill Belichick? Under his watch, the New England Patriots deflated footballs and videotaped opposing coaches signals during games.

Who You Calling a Cheater?

I suppose I’ve come across a fair share of cheaters in the 30+ years I’ve been playing competitive USTA league tennis. People who intentionally distract their opponents or make an abnormal number of bad line calls during a match.

But I’m not one of those people.

So when someone called and my partner cheaters, as our opponent did in a memorable match in 2023, it pisseed me off. Here’s how it happened.

My partner called a ball out that our opponent thought was good. I was at the net and my partner was on the baseline. The sharply angled ball went behind me and I didn’t have time to turn around and see it land.

The woman who hit the shot erupted like Mount St. Helens, screaming that the ball was two feet in and repeatedly calling us cheaters. She was so loud and disruptive that our teammates stopped playing on the other courts.

What made it worse was that this same woman had already made two really bad calls on our serves during the course of the match. When I had questioned one of them, she firmly stated, “The ball was out. It’s my call.”

But she seemed to forget that the ball she thought was in was our call to make. To get her to stop yelling and get on with the match, my partner finally said, “Fine, you can have the point.”

I didn’t agree with this, but I wasn’t going to go against my partner. Despite the fact that we’d won the first set 6-0 and were up 4-2 in the second set, we fell apart and ended up losing the second set 4-6, and losing the match in a third set tiebreaker.

By yelling and berating us, our opponent achieved what she wanted. 

Cheating vs. Gamesmanship

Is that cheating or just gamesmanship? In USTA league tennis there are standards of conduct, fair play, and good sportsmanship that all players are supposed to follow.

This woman clearly violated all of them. But they are hard to enforce, as our matches are not officiated. So the only recourse is to file a grievance.

And I’m sad so say that more things like this are happening in women’s league tennis. Perhaps its a reflection of our current society where bad behavior seems to acceptable.

Even though I lost that match, I was till a winner. Because in the end, cheaters never win.