Understanding Our Sports Idols

Book Review of Stanley H. Teitelbaum, Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols: How Star Athletes Pursue Self-Destructive Paths & Jeopardize Their Careers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 283 pages. Index. ISBN 080324445, $29.95.

While preparing this review, I read in the sports pages that four Minnesota Vikings players were being charged with various misdemeanors. Allegedly, they hired two cruise ships and brought in strippers for a party that involved 30 other players and up to 90 guests. Besides inappropriate behavior with the lap dancers during this bacchanal, players had sex with the women in public areas of the boats, and crew members reported feeling threatened (Washington Post 16 Dec 05). Stanley Teitelbaum’s study of sports heroes could hardly be timelier.

His thoroughly documented and richly illustrated account develops intertwined themes: the first is the rise and fall of the athlete-hero, which follows a tragic trajectory of flawed character, overreaching through drugs, gambling, violence, or promiscuity, and the inevitable fall from grace; the second stems from a “hero-hungry public” that craves connections with sports icons, aided and abetted by a media which help create “larger than life” figures who are “expected to be perfect.” Along with the media, fans perform as enablers who send messages that the athletes “have a free pass to do whatever they want” (p. xi).

Here a psychohistorical note is sounded when Teitelbaum observes, “we tend to anoint our sports heroes as gods because we need the feelings of specialness we get from affiliating with outstanding athletes.” Although many future stars “come from dysfunctional or traumatic backgrounds,” and are thus ill-equipped to handle this kind of stress, “we need for our ‘invented supermen’ not to disillusion us” (pp. xi-xii).

In our interdisciplinary field geared to analyz-

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ing the dynamics of political leadership, most of us use the shorthand term “group-fantasy” for the public’s displaced desires onto a leader who then functions as “delegate” for their realization. Thus similarities between athletes and politicians come readily to mind. Both engage in adversarial contests with guaranteed winners and losers; their conduct is governed by rules and guidelines to ensure fairness (replays, recounts), while the high standards and ideals they aspire to are not always met.

But although athletes and politicians alike are viewed as potential role-models and exemplars of virtue, they also reveal differences. Political leaders in office who fall short of their hype and slip in the polls, embark on a quest for scapegoats, foreign or domestic, to take the heat lest they themselves be sacrificed. Fallen sports idols, like O.J. Simpson and Pete Rose, may be targets for a while of bitter recriminations, but they ultimately fade away because the fans and media have already found other delegates.

However, like the politician, the sports-hero serves to regulate the group’s self-esteem, to ward off feelings of depression, and to “cushion the sadness of what is missing in our lives or compensate for lost glory” (p. 8). For both types, a toxic nexus of entitlements comes into play. As in the Abramoff scandal, lobbyists flagrantly cater to the politician’s greed and vanity, but the athlete’s liabilities stem from a different history. From early on, he has usually been singled out for his potential skills and been taught to feel special ever after. He is encouraged to expect the best of everything and takes for granted the undying love and gratitude of his public. While his talents are being nourished, he is overdosing narcissistic supplies. Spectators, however, by dint of investing time and money for “herculean feats,” feel their vested interests empower them to broker their heroes’ fame. When the stars stumble or burn out, spectators do not recognize their complicity. They are blinded and driven by their shared fantasy—much like the political process—and are just as ambivalent, though their frustrations are alleviated by other options or moderated by team-loyalty, so that the process perpetuates itself.

The athlete’s Achilles heel, as exposed by Stanley Teitelbaum, is that the enormous love and esteem bestowed on him is never unconditional but rather linked to his performance and therefore both conditional and contingent. The athlete-hero’s failure to accept this limitation lurches from the disastrous to the farcical. Some blunder into other public arenas, e.g., Jimmy Connors’ fantasy about becoming a singer, John McEnroe’s foray into talk-TV (as well as Magic Johnson’s, if memory serves). A few enter midlevel politics, but more typically, athletes envision an afterlife in the reflected spotlight of coaches or sportscasters, reporting on their successors’ feats and flaws while awaiting an eventual embalming into the Hall of Fame. Thus, as athletes’ careers last but a few years—most are finished by their 30s—retirement can be traumatic. Expect a loss of self, increased antisocial behavior, and a sort of premature death (pp. 29-30).

It would be interesting to hear more on narcissistic issues from Teitelbaum, who has had clinical experience with sports figures, but he tends to apply the term in a general way as self-centeredness, i.e., as “self-absorption, an exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement, and an insensitivity to the needs and feelings of others” (p. 26). When their superlative feats gratify their adoring fans, one wonders if this transitory merger experience is ever transformative or just pathological in its illusory realization of grandiosity. Of course it depends on the individual, but Teitelbaum tilts toward the latter. In seeking a more rigorous psychoanalytic-basis, one is tempted to revisit the 1980s turf wars between the two superstars, Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, who staked out opposing narcissistic paradigms. Certainly, Kohut’s binary of grandiose self/idealized other, with significant others being rendered into insignificance (as self-objects) is promising; while Kernberg’s emphasis on later Oedipal-stage functioning always being present to some degree is also pertinent.

Invoking celebrity analysts reminds us of features athletes and politicians share with other popular celebrities, which is all the more pertinent as we become dominated by celebrity culture. The careers of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger show how all three categories can mischievously overlap and blur perceptions. In the political sphere, both men enhanced their image from other areas. Reagan had been a lifeguard as well as a sportscaster, and when he struggled for re-election he evoked his movie-persona as Notre Dame’s immortal Knute Rockne, bidding the electorate to deliver “one more

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for the Gipper.” Arnold’s macho past as a body-builder was parlayed into the on-screen Terminator and then into the hyper-masculine governor who cast scorn on the legislature’s “girly men.” (Hubris kicks in here also, as his vaunted package of initiatives failed in the fall of 2005.)

However, a psychohistorical contrast shows up in the pure celebrity group. While it’s true that fans worship their stars—may even feel they own a piece of them—and also true that together they may enjoy merger experiences, movie-idols and other entertainers do not offer magical opportunities for rebirth and renewal proffered by political leaders and athletes, nor, on the downside, do depressive affects accrue from their flops and decline. This may be explained by the stage, the field, and the forum each having distinct histories. The Olympic games were tied into seasonal renewal: the victors draped with garlands of flowers, crowned with laurel wreathes, and honored with fruitful cornucopias from the goddess. Political contests in the US are waged in the fall during the dying year and, when the embodiment of the old year is banished at the precincts, the new year’s god is inaugurated in early January, the month for the State of the Union and the Super Bowl—correlative rituals of renewal. The Oscar ceremonies in March are indeed an orgy of narcissism but otherwise anti-climactic, and the awards lead more frequently to oblivion (anyone remember Helen Hunt?) than to group or individual renewal. No doubt the adversarial aspect of games, political or athletic, retains archaic notions of seasonal sacrifice and renewal. Whereas actors only play tragic characters, Teitelbaum’s Sports-hero/Fallen-idol figures actually become real-life tragic characters.

The author thus inscribes his athlete-heroes’ trajectory after classical tragedy–relying on a moralizing diction of flaw, hubris, overreaching, downfall–all consistent with the male-model of a tragic hero. This connection seems so obvious that when the generic terms athletes/heroes (e.g., the media “create heroes,” we “anoint our sports heroes as gods,” or the implied masculine gender in “we often invent supermen”) are used, readers reflexively factor in the exclusion of women athletes and spectators. Is this composition style a problem? It depends. No one would expect Sports Illustrated to be called Men’s Sports Illustrated, yet after flipping through a dozen recent covers, I found only Alpha-males splashed garishly over every issue. A few covers must be reserved for the token women who excel in tennis or soccer, but the focus is not on the disciplined bodies of female athletes but on the slender curves of the models posing for the swimsuit issue–heroes being entitled to their trophies. Conceivably, there may be the rare woman who peruses the magazine or even subscribes, but a male demographic is overwhelmingly serviced. Add in the peripheral phenomena of sports bars, tailgate parties, betting parlors, Monday morning buzz at the construction site or around the water-cooler, and you have a pretty exclusive male domain. Women are not welcome, and gatekeepers man their positions. One recalls Andy Rooney’s tirade on 60 Minutes about the presence of women reporters along the NFL sidelines, which he insisted he did not mind if only they knew what they were talking about—as though Howard Cosell were an expert—but, hey, he’s one of the guys. All of this touches on the extensive realm of male-bonding, discussed extensively by cultural theorists and first named “homosocial” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick–a fascinating interface between hetero- and homoerotic. Though the more severe academics might construe the text as replicating, however critically, these male-centered discourses, one need not succumb to political correctness to wish the author were more attuned to them. Still, he deftly explores the deeper implications of this androcentric world with candor and insight.

At the end of the chapter on “Self-Destructive Athletes,” a few pages are devoted to whether female athletes “also have self-destructive tendencies.” If so, he rightly surmises these are expressed differently from men. Studies show female athletes displaying a higher incidence of “eating disorders, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis than the general population” (p. 134). There have been a few instances of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in women’s track-and-field. Jennifer Capriati is touted for having overcome her drug problems and for making an impressive, if short lived, comeback in women’s tennis; the wildcat figure-skater Tanya Harding is seen as a rare case of female “acting-out” (p. 136). None of this coheres into a pattern for female athletes, and so the likelihood of their displaying a different dynamic must await separate study. Meanwhile, it is no small achievement that, by putting male sports-heroes in their place, Stanley Teitelbaum has serendipitously cleared a space for women.

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