Court or Sport?

I am in a three-way horse race for the regular season title in my fantasy football league. College basketball season is almost upon us, and with it a new and glorious Duke Blue Devil dynasty ascends. With these potent distractions weighing down my productivity, I thought I should write a short post about a particular type of attitude I sometimes encounter as a divorce attorney - the divorce jock.
Divorce Jock is usually a nice enough man or woman. Someone I would like to have a beer with. Most of the time, when I root through the details of their story, I find it really easy to root for Divorce Jock and, by extension, easy to develop legal strategies to meet his/her goals. Divorce Jock has only one fatal flaw - a unquenchable competitive instinct.
Did you know that child support is based upon your gross income from any source? Wages, commissions, gifts, bonuses, lottery winnings, quetionable "loans" from relatives that you never really pay back, fringe and in-kind work benefits, all fit the definitation of gross income. A recent North Carolina Court of Appeals case adopted the standard that if you receive money or some other benefit that in effect reduces your present living expenses, or could be used without penalty to reduce you present living expenses, it should be included as part of your gross income for child support purposes.
I more or less knew this to be the standard before this case. In fact, every divorce lawyer I know would pretty much say "Duh!" if you showed them a copy of this new case. Why, then, would a well-seasoned divorce lawyer take such a case to the Court of Appeals? The answer is Divorce Jock.
Divorce Jock might be the most ethical, fair-minded human being you will ever meet, but when someone faces him/her on the other side of the big "V." Divorce Jock loses sight of everything but the competition. The other party must be vanquished! Suddenly questions of equity and right & wrong get distorted. Maybe it's because a byproduct of all the rules, both express and implied, that govern divorces.
Over time, I have decided it's not really that Divorce Jock loses his/her morality; it's that Divorce Jock gets overwhelmed by all the intrcacies of the legal process, many of which they don't understand. In response, Divorce Jock adopts the attitude that if any rule or technicality can be spun to their advantage, it would be wrong not to spin it. It's similar to a baseball player who gets the benefit of a bad call; imagine if Derek Jeter refused to take his base if the umpire called a ball on a clear strike!
Looking at divorce as a quasi-sport can be a alternative to getting depressed and demoralized by the process. If you think you may be a Divorce Jock, don't beat yourself up about it. Just make sure that from time to time you look at your child, look at the opposing lawyer, and yes, look at your soon-to-be ex-spouse for what they are, not trophies to be won or members of the opposing team, but people who are a part of your real life. If you do that, I promise all those funky rules I'm explaining to you as your lawyer will make a little more sense in the long run.