Something that happened in a tennis tournament half a world away actually forced me to jot down some questions for an ethicist yesterday, but when I phoned him, he had a question for me.

"Was it Vince Lombardi who said, 'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing?' "

A simple 'yes' would have been perfectly acceptable, but instead I spastically bored Dr. Bruce Weinstein (right, CNN's "The Ethics Guy") on a matter of context, a condition that flares if you've read more about Lombardi than is probably healthy.

Lombardi didn't say that exactly, as we learn from David Maraniss' excellent biography, "When Pride Still Mattered" and from various other works. What he said was either "Winning isn't everything, but it's the only thing worth striving for," (which isn't terribly different, is it?) or "Winning isn't everything, but making the effort to win is."

Nonetheless, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" are the words that got tattooed to the coaching legend, and they appeared exactly that way on a wall in the Green Bay Packers' locker room for a time. Lombardi, in his own Jesuit humility, likely never imagined his own social impact as profound enough that he should distance himself from those words, and probably didn't foresee the potential damage critics have since assigned to them.

In too many dark pockets of a culture that worships success, measures it with money, and festoons it with power, those seven words became mantra. As Maraniss points out, it was likely no coincidence that Richard Nixon's dirty tricks squad at the Committee to Re-Elect The President (CREEP) worked from a campaign headquarters where a sign read, "Winning at Politics Isn't Everything, It's the Only Thing."

More than 30 years later, what Maraniss referred to as "a competitive pathology" is now such that Nicholls State, a tiny Division I-AA school in Thibodaux, La., has gone on probation for four years after an assistant football coach and an academic advisor were caught doing correspondence course work for more than two dozen athletes.

Nicholls State?

If they've convinced themselves at Nicholls State that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, what has the pathology done where the stakes are insanely greater?

But the great American hunger for victory, money, and power momentarily vanished last week on the clay courts of Rome's Il Foro Italico, where Florida's Andy Roddick and Spain's Fernando Verdasco were competing for a spot in the quarterfinals of the Italian Open. Roddick appeared to have won the match on Verdasco's double fault, but just as chair umpire Fergus Murphy was saying, "game, set, and ... ," Roddick interrupted because he saw that the mark Verdasco's second serve made on the clay was in, not out, as the chair had ruled. Play continued, and Roddick eventually lost the match, at least $22,000 in prize money, and a shot at the $440,000 top prize.

"I don't think it's anything extraordinary," Roddick told the Boston Globe's Bud Collins. "Verdasco hit the serve and everybody went nuts, but I thought it was closer. So I went up and checked it, looked, and couldn't tell. Then I looked again, and it was in. I don't think it was anything spectacular on my part."

Ex-squeeze me?

The match was over. It was his. The chair had ruled. The crowd had validated it. But he looked at the mark anyway. And then, when he couldn't really tell, he looked at the ball's indentation again to make sure he'd won honestly, and then reported that he had not!

"What does it say about the rest of us if you're a hero just for doing the right thing?" asked Weinstein on the phone from New York.

It was not a rhetorical question, but I couldn't answer because I'm still trying to imagine such a thing, for example, on an NFL Sunday. A player helping an official to make the right call when the result would cost his team the game? He'd be killed on his own sideline.

"If his teammates kill him, what does that say, they would rather win for the wrong reason?" asked Weinstein, whose new book posits that taking the high road is not only the right thing to do, but that it has profound personal and professional benefits. "This idea of winning at all costs is what's going to drive pro sports into the ground. Winning is important, but it's not the only thing. It's almost never the case that there's only one value involved. Even in ethics, telling the truth is important, but not only are there some times when you can tell a lie, you should tell a lie. If you're hiding Jews in a basement during the Holocaust ... "

"Life Principles: Feeling Good by Doing Good" will be published May 31, and though it's hardly specific to sports, the principles are overdue a sports application. Too many sports administrators, for example, see steroid use as a medical issue rather than an ethical one.

"The interesting question with steroids is not, is it wrong to take them," the Ethics Guy said. "The tougher question comes when you know your buddy is taking them. The most pressing and most common ethical questions today involve the ethics of observing wrongdoing. When you know that a friend or a colleague or a family member is doing something wrong with the potential to cause great harm, what is the right thing to do? The business scandals -- Enron, Adelphia, etc. -- all boil down to this. People knew it was going on. They didn't know what to do. But it comes down to the quote by Edmund Burke: 'All that's necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.' "

So thank you Andy Roddick, a good man who once upon a time did something rather than nothing.