Do the right thing

A story of Integrity

Integrity

It’s second in the list of Tae Kwon Do Tenets.  But it is by no means the second most important.  It’s one of five pillars that embody the principles of Tae Kwon Do. Knock a pillar out and the foundation becomes unstable.

When I started high school, the pervasive motto was ‘Do the right thing!’  It was intended to reinforce behavior that had integrity as its foundation.

Fourteen year old me, in all my wisdom at that point (I had so much life experience), thought that whoever had coined the motto and associated it with integrity, had gotten it wrong.

Somewhere along the way I had got it into my head that having good integrity really only meant that a person didn’t lie.  Telling the truth was what integrity was all about to me.

I wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I didn’t really have the whole understanding.

I really like the way wikipedia.com has it on their website:

‘Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity

So honesty is a part of it, but there’s more.  The ability to make the right choices , to do the right thing makes it so much more complex.

Integrity is an interesting thing.  It’s a thing we value, and we hold people who have it in high esteem.   In general, as a society we usually trust people to have good integrity.  We want to believe that there is basic good in people and that people can function amicably in society because of that good.

I think, however, that as a society, we are starting to trust less and less.  In some ways, we are turning into Missourians (residents of the Show-Me state).  We want proof of good intentions, proof that things are right and good.

Several years ago, I was one of the referees for the Illinois State Tae Kwon Do tournament and was involved in an interaction with one of the coaches.

The tournament was nearing its end.  Sparring was the remaining event that some were still waiting to participate in with the hopes of winning that 1st place medal and the right to be called a state champion.

Each sparring ring had 4 to 5 referees.  One of the referees was the center ref and followed the action up close and watched for penalties and good sportsmanlike conduct.  The remaining refs were tasked with following the match and marking down points as they saw them.  This was during the time where sparring was continuous except for necessary time stoppages and before electronic scoring, so we all had to rely on pen and paper.  At the end of each round, all the refs would compare notes and figure out what the score would be.  It wasn’t the most perfect system, but it worked at the time.

It was my turn to be center ref.  As a center ref I had to rely on the other referees to tally points.  It was a really good match.  The competitors went back and forth exchanging many kicks. Both were young, maybe 13 or 14.  As a center ref, sometimes you get the sense of who is winning without seeing the point tallies.  This wasn’t one of those matches.  Even after comparing notes with the other refs, the score was very close.

Until the final round, that is.  One of the kids was frustrated and had been since the round before.  They had both incurred small point deductions but nothing too major.  I could tell it was wearing the one kid a little thin.

Then the kid got a major point deduction.  I don’t remember specifically what it was for but his coach blew a gasket.

The match was basically over. Only a couple of seconds remained and time ran out.  The referees and I got together to compare the final count and found that the kid who had incurred the final penalty had lost.

But it wasn’t because of the penalty that he lost.  Even if he hadn’t incurred the penalty he still would have not won.

His coach didn’t see it that way.  I ended up on the receiving end of some choice words that I would never tolerate in our school and a promise from him that he was going to protest the result.

I did my best to calmly explain that the referees had all concurred and even showed him the individual score cards (which I wasn’t obligated to do) and how we had determined the winner.

He still wouldn’t accept it.

I don’t know what happened to the final result after that.  The pertinent information was given to those in charge of handling official protests of match results.

I think I was more upset at the fact that, here was this coach (who also turned out to be the kid’s father) who was questioning the integrity of all four of the referees who had agreed upon the outcome of the match.  Granted, we are all human. That’s why there is more than one referee to determine the outcome.  But even after considering it more, I felt bad for his son and the example his father was being.
Here was a kid who was being trained in Tae Kwon Do, a martial art that has a core tenet of Integrity and his father was turning that tenet upside down.

Now, because we are all human and we all make mistakes, I’d like to give the father the benefit of the doubt that his emotions were running rather hot because he didn’t agree with the outcome of the sparring match and he felt his son should have won.  I hope that what I had experienced with him was an isolated incident.  I’ll never know.

It’s another moment in my life where I was exposed to the antithesis of integrity and it hardened my resolve even more to strive to ‘Do the right thing.”

What about you?  Is there a time that you experienced something similar where someone questioned your integrity or maybe you were the one doing the questioning?

I hope that you can learn from it and continue to do the right thing.

photo credit: Tumisu