Why do some of sports' greatest of all time cheat?

In a 2015 interview with ESPN one of the greatest athletes in the history of American sports did something that's since been mostly forgotten, but was remarkable then and even now: He publicly admitted to breaking the rules.

Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice's admission in 2015 to using stickum, a substance popularized in the 1970s by Oakland Raiders players Fred Biletnikoff and Lester Hayes and banned by the NFL in the early 1980s, actually intersected with another cheating scandal: the New England Patriots and Deflategate.

Rice's use of the substance would spark a question then that remains relevant today. Why do the greatest athletes cheat when they don't need to?

Rice, whose spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY Sports, had some of the best hands, maybe the best hands, the sport has seen. Few who know NFL history well would rank any wide receiver ahead of him. There are football historians who insist he's not just the best receiver ever, but the best football player ever. He played for 20 years, won three Super Bowls (he was MVP of Super Bowl 23), made 13 Pro Bowls, is a member of the 75th and 100th anniversary teams, and when he left the game in 2005 held essentially every significant receiving record.

So why did Rice use stickum, which was illegal, despite clearly not needing it? A similar question could be asked of Lance Armstrong, who would have likely been the greatest cyclist in history without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Why did he cheat? Bill Belichick and the Patriots still would have been one of the greatest dynasties ever without deflating footballs or taping practices. So why do it?

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"Part of this is you have super competitive, focused people who are at the top of their profession," said Sam Sommers, a professor of psychology at Tufts University, who also co-authored "This is Your Brain on Sports" with Jon Wertheim. "Huge contracts are at stake. Their legacy is also at stake. They feel the pressure to be even greater than they already are."

'Then you're a real schmuck'

Is Rice in the same category as a mega-cheater like Armstrong or even Belichick? No, of course not. But his reasons may have been the same. Despite how stratospheric a talent he was, Rice still looked for that edge.

One of the most fascinating pieces of this particular cheating story is that sometimes it's done even when the people doing it know it won't help. That was the case with the Patriots and Spygate. Belichick, in 2007, was accused of secretly videotaping coaches' signals during games. After an investigation by the NFL, Belichick was fined $500,000, the team $250,000 and the Patriots also were docked a first-round pick.

Kraft, according to one report, asked Belichick a question after the accusations became public.

"How much did this help us on a scale of 1 to 100?" Kraft asked Belichick.

"One," Belichick said.

"Then you're a real schmuck," Kraft said.

Some of the greats cheat because they feel if they don't, with sports being an arms race of cheating, if you're not doing it, the people trying to catch you (sometimes literally) will. That was definitely the case with Armstrong. He was banned from sport for life in 2012 after the United States Anti-Doping Agency stripped him of the seven Tour de France wins between 1999 and 2005. So much of Armstrong's defense was that all cyclists cheated.

Sommers said the explanation that some great athletes give — everyone cheats — is less about "athlete mentality" and more about "human mentality."

If you're caught driving 65 mph in an area where the speed limit is 55, you might tell the officer that everyone drives slightly over the limit, Sommers said.

"An athlete that cheats, even a great one," Sommers said, "might justify what they're doing by saying others are doing the same thing."

In fact Sommers, in writing a story for Fortune magazine in 2020 about the Houston Astros cheating scandal, said cheaters like them aren't so different from the rest of us.

"These Astros are a cadre of deplorables, according to conventional wisdom," he wrote. "Root out the bad apples, therefore, and we can remediate the problem. Or can we? A more sobering possibility is that the Houston Astros aren’t such an aberration, within baseball or society more generally. Indeed, research on the psychology of cheating suggests that bad behavior is about much more than bad people or bad organizations—that in many respects, there’s a potential Astro in all of us, circumstances permitting."

There's also, in some circumstances, a sort of cosmic question: What exactly is cheating? In Armstrong's case, he didn't just cheat, he ran almost a cheating industrial complex. His case is clear.

But in other examples it's not. In the early 1990s some NFL kickers would put footballs just out of the box inside ovens and saunas to soften them because they were so firm. Newer footballs often hampered both accuracy and distance. The league eventually made it illegal but some kickers still did it.

Violating that rule is of course still cheating but the rule was so unreasonable, and stupid, is violating it actually cheating? The technical answer is yes but the practical one, including the moral one, isn't as clear. Because rules, like in this case, can often be arbitrary and even inefficient.

A deflating admission

Rice is one of the best examples (and perhaps most forgotten) of how cheating is a complex maneuver and in some cases, especially his, it can be a complete waste of time, but in the moment, the athlete doesn't realize that.

Rice's admission actually begins with the Patriots being accused of cheating by deflating footballs. In an interview with Jim Rome in 2015, Rice said the Patriots were cheaters because deflating footballs gave them an illegal advantage.

"I’m going to be point blank, I feel like it's cheating," Rice told Rome of the 2014 AFC championship game, when the Patriots beat the Colts. "Because you have an edge up on your opponent and it's unfortunate that it happened. I'm not saying the outcome of the game would have been different or anything like that because they got beat 45-7, but they still had an edge."

Rice added: "I’ve played in cold weather, I know how hard the football is and you can grip the leather [if deflated] just a little bit better."

Patriots fans, angered by the fact that Rice was saying their team cheated, surfaced the video where Rice himself admitted to cheating. Rice was interviewed by ESPN about a story on the evolution of gloves in a post-stickum world and how glove technology was evolving. Rice admitted he cheated using stickum.

“I know this might be a little illegal, guys, but you put a little spray, a little stickum on them, to make sure that texture is a little sticky,” Rice said, laughing.

The use of stickum and the evolution of gloves receivers use are intertwined. Once stickum was banned some receivers turned to gloves to help assist them with catching footballs, particularly in bad weather. In many ways, the end of stickum led to a rapid evolution in glove technology.

Some receivers took it a step further and combined using gloves and stickum. This is what Rice was admitting to.

Rice later took to social media to address the issue after his admission became more widely known. “I apologize ppl after doing my research about stickum!,” Rice said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The NFL banned this in 1981. All players did it! #equalplayingfield.”

The site ProFootballTalk.com wrote at the time: "With or without the stickum or the gloves, Rice still would have been the greatest receiver of all time. But, as he said regarding the Patriots, he still had an edge."

Rice's claim that all players used stickum angered some receivers including Hall of Famers Michael Irvin and Cris Carter, who felt that Rice saying everyone did it, cheapened their careers.

"I love Jerry Rice, but that's what everybody says. 'Oh, everybody did it.' That's the oldest defense in the world," Irvin said. "I didn't use stickum. I never used stickum, didn't need stickum, didn't believe in stickum. I wouldn't do it. Troy (Aikman) would go off on me if I put stickum on his footballs. You see what I'm saying? Stop asking me this junk. I didn't feel like I should answer it. I have not answered one (tweet) on it."

Carter said at the time that if Rice was using stickum he was cheating.

Rice, seeing the criticism, later reversed course. “Never been investigated for stickum!” Rice said. “Mistakenly used that word and dealing with consequences! But I don’t have a problem taking a Polygraph!"

How he "mistakenly" used such a specific word like stickum was baffling. Later that year Rice was asked directly if he ever used stickum and he didn't directly answer.

“You know the thing is, the way I worked and my work ethic and stuff like that it really speaks for itself,” Rice said. “I’m not even going to address that anymore. When people think about me they think about the time I put in on the field. And even with the situation with the New England Patriots. The Patriots, they really deserve what they got by winning the Super Bowl, you know, that’s fantastic. I look at the Patriots and I think about the San Francisco 49ers and what they were able to accomplish. And I look at Tom Brady — you know what? — he was able to accomplish winning four Super Bowls. So you know those are the things I’m focusing on right now and you know my work ethic was everything during my entire career and I think it speaks for itself.”

He's right. Of course. All of it.

But it doesn't answer the question ...

Why?

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Mike Freeman on social media @mikefreemanNFL