Harness: Integrity requires people to follow the rules

Integrity is not our problem. It is our excuse.

The world has become filled with finger-pointers and Harness Racing has its share, you can be certain. As we slowly go through the worst pandemic of our lives, hardly a day passes that we do not see rules applied and being broken at the same time. Sometimes even by the same people.

To say the least, rules do not get broken without individuals finding justification for their actions. Whether a mask makes one look funny or not, or whether admitting one is wrong makes one weak, is a matter for discussion. Yet in times like these, when life and death may hang in the balance, there is a higher level of expectation for near uniform adherence to the law.

We have seen time and time again that those expectations are rarely met with 100 percent uniformity. The rule I see being broken every day is speeding on our nation's highways. There are posted signs everywhere, yet even when the Interstate posts 65 MPH as a limit, police rarely stop anyone not going 15 MPH faster for citation.

What it says about integrity is that there are many who will follow the law willingly, not just their safety but for others as well. Then there are those who will routinely look to go faster than the limit with little concern for the potential harm they may cause others in the form of an accident. The justification is always easy, as the speeder believes that not getting caught is all that matters.

Integrity is not the problem we face in Harness Racing and it never has been. It is an excuse so we can look away from our own failures as a gambling sport to compete.

Pointing the finger in one direction is something we witness every day, whether it is blaming a country, a state or an individual. It has an incredible impact, as people tend to follow what they are being told in mass quantity and act out accordingly.

Yet when we talk about integrity in this sport, it is more of an internal conversation with the misguided implication that those outside the sport should repair the damage we blame on those who share the stage with us.

What appears to be lost on us as a collection of people is that the behavior of some and not others in our closed society is fairly normal, even if troublesome to a share of our population.

I too believed in rule of law and right and wrong from an early age, but some 50 years ago, I found out in a very strange way that the world doesn’t work like that all the time and rules are not always rules for everyone.

It was this time of year and the New York Knicks had made the NBA Finals. As a rabid Knicks fan who was lucky enough to walk to the window with no line and get playoff tickets when the team faced the Baltimore Bullets in the opening round, I had to be at the finals.

In order to get tickets that were in much higher demand, a then 14-year-old with three friends, oldest 16, slept overnight in an orderly line that circled the Madison Square Garden arena. That experience in itself was exhilarating, being in the company of so many different yet like-minded people, a large majority older than our group. Things were orderly for most of the night, then with about two hours before the ticket booths would open, one of my friends decided to start moving through the line to get a closer position near the front. I was asked to follow along but it didn’t seem right. Others like myself had waited and I had a valid place on line that would surely get me the tickets I came to purchase. My friend did continue to sneak ahead of others and inevitably made his purchase about 30 minutes ahead of me.

No one was caught and no fights broke out during that time, but there was certainly potential for that.

My friends saw a business opportunity and we all purchased two sets of tickets to each of the Knicks-Lakers championship series home games with the idea that we would sell (scalp) one set of tickets and keep the others for ourselves.

For the first three home games everything went well. I was too young and too law-abiding to participate in any part of this because I knew it was illegal. Two of my friends did the dirty work selling their extra set and mine in the process.

When it came to the final game of the series, the prices and interest had gone way up. My guess is so did law enforcement, as one of my friends was caught selling his tickets to an undercover cop. He received a citation and had his pair of tickets taken from him.

At the moment I was convinced I had taken the right path and stayed away from involving myself in something I knew was against the law. Yet later that night, I found out something that would forever change my perception of integrity. While we went into the Garden to take our seats, we all expected that the two-seat tickets that were confiscated by the undercover officers would spend the night vacant since they were taken out of circulation. When we saw two people sitting in those seats, it became rather apparent that those police officers were not just doing their jobs but moonlighting themselves.

We could have spent the night angry that there was no justice in the world, but we didn't, as Willis Reed and Walt Frazier wouldn't let that happen.

From that point forward, I understood what human nature was about. Rules will be made for many to follow and most people will. To suggest that the only way to fix a problem is to get everyone to follow the rules 100 percent of the time is a road to nowhere.

Integrity can only be about a percentage of the people following the rules.

In society and our sport, most often do.