12:30pm | We like to say it’s not all about winning. But I can’t recall a winner who cheated ever voluntarily giving up the spoils of victory.

It’s official: the Long Beach State men’s basketball team will not win the NCAA Tournament. That is news to exactly no one. But imagine things had gone differently. Imagine the 49ers had blown out New Mexico by 25, then did the same to Louisville. The analysts would have made big talk with the “upstart” stuff. A 14-point trouncing of Michigan State and pulling away from Marquette in the second half to win by 10, and it’s a Cinderella story, even though it’s about to strike midnight.

But when they beat North Carolina by 7, something seems amiss. Then, before you can say, “North Carolina State 1983 who?” the 49ers destroy Kentucky by 12, and Long Beach is hosting the most unlikely parade in city history.

During this magical run, the college basketball world couldn’t help but notice how much more athletic the 49ers looked than they did during the season. It wasn’t just that Casper Ware had slid noticeably closer to the Lebron James end of the physicality spectrum, but the entire team seemed to have more speed, more endurance, better quicks and hops. Their skill set wasn’t markedly different, but collectively they cranked it up to such a higher gear that they were just getting a lot more rebounds, out-muscling and -hustling their opponents. They didn’t win the title with skill so much as with physical domination — a domination that didn’t exist during the regular season.

An investigation was undertaken by the NCAA: nothing incriminating was found. All players tested negative for steroids, for HGH; blood doping was ruled out.

But deep in the laboratorial bowels of the Pyramid chemists had cooked up Code Name: “Victoria,” a little purple pill that gives you a big advantage. The players began ingesting it in mid February, and the rest was basketball history.

If we as a society really believed that it’s not whether you win or lose but rather how you play the game, we would expect that in such a scenario there would be at least some chance that the winners would get a crisis of conscience and confess, giving back the money, the trophy, all the rest 

But that never happens, does it?

Yes, cheaters who get caught usually do a mea culpa — often in an attempt to head off further punishment, it would seem — but even they hold on to their ill-gotten gains until their fingers are pried away from the prize.

Remember SoCal native Marion Jones? Her first husband was disqualified from taking part in the 2000 Olympic after testing positive for steroids, and Jones later said their marriage broke up party because of his steroid use. Turns out Jones was using steroids at the same time, but for the next seven years she went around denying — with vehemence and even indignation — ever doing so.

It was a lie so entrenched that it included perjury, for which she eventually went to jail. “[I]t is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you that I have betrayed your trust,” Jones said at the 2007 press conference where she did her mea culpa. “I have let my country down, and I have let myself down.”

Perhaps because no one in sports ever comes cleaner than (s)he has to, Jones portrayed herself as something of a victim vis-à-vis her use of performing-enhancing drugs, claiming her coach said only that she was taking a nutritional supplement, claiming she used it only for a couple of years. But this is a woman who was also involved in check fraud and lied to federal agents about that, too, so….

Track and field is rightfully hard on cheaters, and Jones was stripped of her Olympic medals and other awards, as well as having all of her pertinent results vacated. Sadly, her U.S. relay teammates from the 2000 Olympics fought — successfully, as it turned out — to hold onto their medals, wanting to keep the rewards their teams got by cheating, wanting to keep those awards away from the people who earned them justly.¹

Has the world shunned Marion Jones? No: the WNBA offered her a contract; she got a book deal; most shockingly (or laughably, depending on how you look at it), she works as a life coach. “Cheaters never prosper” is nothing but a fantasy. And Marion Jones is small fry. Barry Bonds, anybody? The New Orleans Saints and other NFL teams financially encouraging players to injure their opponents?

It’s not clear to me which is the bigger constraint on cheating: the percentage of people who would never consider such behavior, or the fear of getting caught. But I imagine if “Victoria” gets invented, somewhere players will take it. Maybe entire programs. And they’ll never admit doing so until they have no real choice.

It’s good that the 49ers are not going to win the national championship, because they would have needed to cheat to do so. Sometimes our competitors are just better than we are. If we play fairly and more or less realize our potential but still lose, the result may not be ideal for us, but it’s ideal for sport.

Now, if we can just get everybody on board with that ethos….
Footnotes:

¹There was one exception: Nanceen Perry, who was with Jones on the bronze-medal winning 4×100 relay team, did not join the appeal to get her medal back.