Robert said:
Both I want to see solved by a more carefully codified relation between rules of play and sportsmanlike behaviour.
I think again this shows an unwillingness or inability to understand English-defined sportsmanship. One point about sportsmanship is that it is spontaneous. It can even involve flouting the rules. There is, when you get down to it, no meaningful relationship, which is the point.
I think some of the difficulty here is in setting up a dichotomy between rules and sportsmanship. The necessary division is a trichotomy at least.
First there are the codified rules. Robert is right to maintain that clear rules are a boon. Rules that can overcome cultural biases are especially valuable. But it's also important to realise that rules cannot cover every eventuality, that it is bad a idea even to try to cover every eventuality (ends up as information overload) and that rules can be overridden for reasons of e.g. humanity or sportsmanship.
Sportsmanship is at the other end of the spectrum. I am convinced that every native speaker understands the English meaning perfectly, and that all bar a couple of non-native speakers do as well, so I don't think we really need to set about trying to define it. Since it is spontaneous, it is to a degree undefinable anyway.
Maybe the most interesting category at the moment is the ignored one in-between. For want of a better name I will call it the "professional foul" category. This where an action is legal but the intent is to gain an advantage not intended by the spirit of the game. In soccer, a trip is, in one sense, illegal - against the rules - but it attracts a sanction also defined in the rules, so that it is possible for a player or manager to make a cost-benefit analysis to exploit this fact to gain an unfair advantage. We have had an example this week of Mourinho and Real Madrid players committing fouls deliberately so as to get sent off, and thus erase a pending yellow card before a high level cup match.
This middle category does not have to be rule bound, though. In baseball there is "The Code". If a batter gloats as he trots round the bases after hitting a home run, The Code requires that the pitcher throws at that batter's head the next time he's up, even if it means getting thrown out of the game. The "offence" of disrespect can also be carried over to be dealt with in later games where the other participants may not have even been involved the first time round.
The common elements in this middle category seem, to me, to be a willingness by players to manipulate the rules and/or to try to police the game with another set of hazy rules of their own making. Further, it seems to be the case that the players themselves often tolerate these excesses while fans and administrators usually condemn them.
Now if we look at the Asian Games example in that light, it seems plausibe that the pairgo incident was within the bounds of the professional foul. It may just have crept into that category, because the players thought, hey we are pros, this is what pros are supposed to do (especially if they felt they were obliged to win for Korean fans). It may, however, been slap bang in the middle of the category because The Code was being applied. There had been a recent ruckus at the Samsung involving a Chinese complaint against a Korean lady. Was this payback time? Were the players prepared to be disqualified so long as they upheld the honour of Korea and sent a message to Chinese players about the future?
It may, of course, just be that they were idiots who didn't read the rules - applies to most of us who go to tournaments, and how many people read Terms and Conditions before hitting the I Accept button? But it would be naive in the extreme to believe the professional foul category does not exist in go. Since manipulation or over-exploitation of rules for gain outside the spirit of the game is involved, there must be event rules to enforce punishments in such cases, which in turn implies, as Robert says, as much clarity as possible about the basic rules and their intent.
The best start in my view is a neglected one (except perhaps in the Japanese rules): a clear statement of what is meant by the spirit of the game, and separately a clear statement of what is meant by the ethos of a tournament. E.g. before every sudden-death event is there a clear statement that the idea of such time limits is to help the event run on schedule, not to provide abnormal ways to win? That seems, more or less, to have happened in the Asian Games, but they didn't come up with a good definition of abnormal.
If I understand Robert correctly, he wants to take the approach of eliminating abnormality by refining the ordinary rules as much as possible and then insisting that ANY application of those rules counts as normal. It's a worthy goal, but it's also pie in the sky. I think a more fruitful approach would be to address the "professional foul" category of go plays, using the sportsmanship category as a guide, so that we may tolerate some things to some degree, or give the benefit of the doubt, but we come down hard once the threshold of our our sportsmanship sensiblities has been crossed. It may be, of course, that people used to Anglo-Saxon case law find that easier than people used to European Napoleonic law, but either way we need to remember that the oriental countries are used to even more different law codes which influence their own stances on go rules.
