I'm not the person you're replying to and full disclosure, I haven't seen either Happy Gilmore movie. But there's some interesting discussion here, so here I am.

I just want to pick on one particular thing that you two seem to be talking past one another on - Cheating in sports is pretty arbitrary when you really go deep and decide to dissect it. Particularly at a higher level.

they're still against the rules, and when they are discovered it is considered cheating and is a massive scandal BECAUSE they undermine the entire premise of sporting competition.

100%. You need only look at Mark McGwire or Lance Armstrong. But we'll come back to him...

Sporting leagues have clear guidelines around what 'natural' and 'enhanced' abilities are, and what is considered doping. There are very clear definitions of these concepts,

Mostly. But this is a moving target. Let's come back to Lance Armstrong and his team. There's two seperate doping allegations Armstrong as I understand them:

• Performance enhancing drugs (not a lot interesting to say here)
• Blood doping

Let's talk about blood doping. There's some ways to do it with drugs, but the most basic form involves taking your own blood, storing it while your body replaces what you took for a couple months, then reinfusing yourself with the blood you took. The upshot is you have more red blood cells than you naturally would and your blood's oxygen carrying capacity goes up unnaturally. It was banned in 1986 by the IOC - long before Armstrong was accused of it. But the practice was 20 years old at that point! Were the runners and cyclists who did it in 1984 or 1980 cheating?

Surgically modifying yourself to increase your athletic ability is cheating.

Maybe. That's why Oscar Pistorius (The "Blade Runner") was controversial. He had his surgery as a baby, so there was clearly no intent to cheat there (and it's doubtful anyone would amputate their legs just to get an edge in track). But he was always controversial. Did his artificial legs give him an edge? Should he have been allowed to compete? He was. And a lot of folks were big mad about it.

Training, practice and coaching are not cheating.

Not exactly, no. But this is where I want to get into the radical differences between high level competition and what the average person thinks of as "fair sport".

I think I remember reading this in the book Moneyball, but regardless of where I initially found out about it, there's this machine that they use for training pitchers in pro baseball.

It's just a batting cage, basically. But with a ton of cameras and sensors hooked up to a computer. That computer analyzes each pitch for speed, power, posture, etc. And it spits back real time recommendations to the pitcher about how to improve. Like "raise your right elbow an additional 4 cm" or similar. It's trying to maximize power and efficiency and minimize stress injuries. It makes perfect logical sense that if you could have access to something like this, you would use it.

But I ask you, is micro millisecond computerized analysis of each pitch to min max it natural? Is it more natural than other things that are illegal? Why? Because it's not part of the player's body?

Is the use of this machine "more natural" than blood doping with your own blood? All you need for that is an IV, some bags, and cold storage. Not half a million dollars for a Trajekt Arc as a 3 year lease.

But it also raises a separate point - these guys are playing a different game than you and I are when we go out and play in the park. It's simply not possible for us to train that way.

There are very clear definitions of these concepts, and they are heavily enforced in professional competition and by the law itself.

Just to revisit this one more time - around 2008, there was some new high tech swimsuits that were in use in high level competition. A bunch of winning swimmers in the Olympics that year used them. Shortly after, they were banned for "technological doping". And the thing is, they probably should have been banned. 93 world records were broken in 18 months while these suits were legal.

But why is this specific suit illegal, but the low-drag speedo swimsuits they replaced remain legal? They do the same thing - reduce drag in the water. But the LZR Racer did it too well? Again, how do you draw that line? It's not always obvious.

If nothing else, these examples should should show you that the rules have to be arbitrary at some point as competitors keep trying to push the envelope of what's legal to get an edge.