If you know how to cheat, start now.

 — Earl Weaver

It’s summertime and a man’s thoughts turn to baseball and the cinquecento.

Gerolamo Cardano was a gifted 16th-century mathematician, physician, inventor and astrologer and, like his friend, Leonardo da Vinci, a giant of the Italian Renaissance. You and I benefit daily from the harvest of his genius. Cardano was the first to diagnose several diseases and laid the groundwork for the education of the deaf; he invented the combination lock and devised the central element of the drive train of our automobiles – the eponymous “cardan shaft.”

But Cardano not only gave us a shaft, he got one too.

How else to explain his obscurity when, in addition to all of his other achievements, Cardano actually predicted, years in advance, the exact day of his death at the age of 75 years and one week? And still no one’s ever heard of him. Why?

Well, only because he cheated. Awaking on the appointed day of his demise in the pink of health, Cardano was distraught with disappointment. So he killed himself.

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but cheating seems to be getting a really bad rap these days. Tampering with the natural succession of events, the way Cardano did, or tilting the playing field to your advantage, like an athlete using performance-enhancing drugs, or stacking the deck in your business dealings, like an investor trading on insider information, is met with cataracts of criticism. Maybe cheating’s due for a makeover.

After all, it was a scant dozen years ago, almost to the day, that Ivan Boesky offered the advice to the graduating class of a premier business school that his celluloid Doppelgänger, Gordon Gekko, distilled to the cultural catchphrase for an entire decade: “Greed is good.” Boesky later went to prison and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for fraudulent financial dealings — essentially, for cheating. But at that commencement, Boesky’s audience cheered.

Tonight I just returned from a commencement of a different sort. W.W. Samuell High School graduated its Class of ’08 at the Dallas Convention Center. There was cheering, but not in response to any encomiums for greed. Instead, the speakers offered solid advice about maintaining your decency and keeping your promises.

Scattered among those graduates was the handful of students who inaugurated the DBA’s E‑Mentoring, Esq. Program when 2003 President Brian Melton began it their freshman year. They had been drawn from a Dallas ISD program known by the acronym AVID — Advancement Via Individual Determination — geared toward students facing an atypically high risk of dropping out of a system that heroically struggles to graduate just 60% of its typical students. No one in their families has gone to college and few, if any, finished high school. I was there to watch my “e-mentee” — the young man I’ve been e-mailing throughout his high school career — graduate 30th in his class of 345. The four scholarships he earned will carry him to college in the fall.

He is utterly extraordinary, but hardly distinctive. E-Mentoring students score 30 to 50 percentage points higher than the remainder of their class on the TAKS test. Every Samuell E-Mentoring student who graduated today will be at college next year. Could E-Mentoring have made that kind of difference in these students’ lives?

I don’t see how. The investment of time and effort required of an e-mentor is pin money in the great scheme of things. Just a few e-mails a month — answering questions, sharing experiences, and offering encouragement. But at the three E-Mentoring Celebration Banquets held at the Belo in May, the students seemed to feel quite differently about the subject.

In her presentation to the group, one young woman from Spruce High School literally thanked God for her mentor — or at least tried to, until she choked on her tears. As two students from Woodrow Wilson High School signed their remarks, a teacher gave voice to their gratitude for a program that enables them to communicate fully unrestrained by their deafness, just like any other kid. When they finished, their fellow Woodrow students sat silently and signed their applause. One student called his mentor “my inspiration”; a senior e-mailed one e-mentor to ask that they continue their correspondence “as long as they lived”; another closed his e-mails with “Your Mentee, Buddy, and Best Friend.”

But the e-mentee comment that still shakes me is the one I shared at my Inaugural speech in January in which an e-mentor was told:

“You were the first person who ever acted like I was supposed to succeed.”

Wouldn’t you like to receive an e-mail like that?

Today there are roughly 600 e-mentors, with some taking up to four students; they have to.

From only 45 students at one school in 2003, the E-Mentoring program has grown to nearly 800 students at nine schools. That success is due to Brian Melton’s insight, as well as the extraordinary efforts of many DBA members, including Mary Goodrich Nix and Everett New, who led the program this year, Alissa Brackin, Allen Butler, Sheri Crosby, Kirstin Dietel, Kim Harrell, Sarah Kownacki, Richard Luke, Tanja Martini, Bria Lauren Smith, Elizabeth Stanley, Holland Sullivan, Van Van Bebber, Tracy Wolf, and Stephanie Zaleskin

But none of the program’s success could have been achieved without cheating. That’s right, cheating. And the DBA’s fingerprints are all over it.

Certainly none of our e-mentees cheated in the bad sense alleged against Barry Bonds or proved against Boesky. But with help from E-Mentoring, those students have cheated the traps and snares that snuff the hopes of too many of our children.

Our e-mentees cheated poverty and staggering dropout rates. They cheated families broken by abandonment or incarceration. They cheated the ho-hum ubiquity of drugs, crime, violence and hopelessness. They cheated the natural succession of events, the tilted playing field, the stacked deck — all the things that predicted failure. They cheated and we helped.

And that’s the best kind of cheating.

Earl Weaver, elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame just weeks before Boesky’s infamous commencement speech, once rallied his Orioles with, “If you know how to cheat, start now.”

There is no evidence that Weaver ever cheated in the bad sense of the word. Still, he sure cheated defeat; during his 17 years as manager, his Baltimore team suffered just a single losing season. Predictably, Weaver was never resigned to the natural succession of events; 22 years after his retirement, his 97 ejections remains an AL record.

At the induction in Cooperstown, the late Elrod Hendricks, an Orioles catcher and later coach, tried to explain Weaver’s greatness. Hendricks, whose feet had been crushed in a childhood accident, sounded a lot like the e-mentee I quoted last January:

“He was the only person in the world who believed I could play in the big leagues ... everything I have, I owe to him.”

Carried by that confidence, Hendricks cheated the traps laid in his path and wore an Orioles uniform for a club-record 37 years.

Separated by only weeks, the remarks of a grateful ballplayer and a disgraced arbitrager limn the difference between the best kind of cheating and the worst. Weaver apparently cheated defeat the same way E-Mentoring does: simply by believing in people.

“History,” George Malcolm Young remarked, “is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening.” Maybe Hendricks owed everything to Weaver or maybe he didn’t. But one way or the other, Hendricks certainly felt that way when it was happening. And so, that’s how history will forever recount the contribution one man (Weaver) made to the life of another (Hendricks).

Maybe the same is true for Samuell’s E-Mentoring students who walked across the convention center’s stage this afternoon. Whether their e-mentors made an inestimable difference or not, those students apparently felt they did. And so, that’s how history will recall what your Dallas Bar contributed to lives of the first class to graduate from Brian Melton’s fine program.

Yes, the Dallas Bar knows how to cheat. And it’s the best kind of cheating. That’s fortunate, since today a new class of AVID freshmen advances to fill the place of those who graduated just hours ago.

For these new e-mentees, the natural succession of events consigns them to failure; the playing field’s tilted and the deck is stacked. For the e-mentors, then, there’s no time to waste.

Since we know how to cheat, we’d better start now.