Narcissistic Losses in Professional Athlete Retirement

There are many stories in the news about professional athletes who are reluctant to retire and seem to hang on long past their prime. It matters little that they willingly risk crippling injury or that they have millions in the bank. They just want to keep on playing. The last big player to show us just how tough it is to say goodbye was the tennis star Andre Agassi, who needed cortisone injections in the spine to get through his run for the U.S. Open tennis championship. Readers may recall him as the star who said the phrase “Image is Everything” in Canon Camera commercials.

Of course Agassi is not alone in this difficulty to say goodbye to a career. Muhammad Ali undoubtedly suffered brain damage thanks to a prolonged career in boxing. He has millions of dollars but suffers with Parkinson’s disease. Michael Jordan embarrassed himself by returning to the National Basketball Association (NBA) at the ripe old age of thirty-nine to try to compete with the younger set. Shaquille O’Neal, a great basketball player of the present generation, summed it up well when he said, “Hey, thirty-nine just ain’t twenty-nine.”

In my practice as a psychoanalyst and sport psychologist I am frequently engaged in conversation about the end of a sports career. It is very understandable that athletes resist the end. Invariably they are only in their thirties when they must confront this issue, far younger then the rest of us who must face these same issues a good thirty years later. An athlete’s career starts early, usually in his or her teens, and ends ten to twenty years later. They are young and yet they are “finished.”

Another problematic feature of professional sports is the massive competitive pressure that forces athletes to over-train and over-practice. All this invariably leads to injury of some sort. I have yet to work with a professional or elite amateur athlete who does not have a sports-related injury. They all have torn ligaments, concussions, asthma or other play-related problems. This means that an athlete’s career will be short indeed, often ending in the mid-thirties. The injuries may leave him with life-long physical problems. These considerations ought to prompt him to retire but he will resist, which will inevitably produce more serious injuries. Injured athletes enter a downward spiral which can be accompanied by depression, anger, and overuse of pain killers.

What makes the issue of professional athlete retirement so very difficult to manage is the narcissistic gratification they must give up. Sport is always played for a crowd, sometimes an audience in the millions. The narcissistic fulfillment this brings to the athlete can become quite addictive. It is almost inevitable that the cheering, the autograph requests, and the media attention produce the narcissistic entitlement often seen in professionals. There can be no doubt that for the guy or gal receiving all this glory it can become an addiction. I recall Gwyneth Paltrow’s remarking after her second Academy Award that the kind of attention she was constantly given was very unhealthy. She was right.

Those who make it to the pros have been at their craft six hours a day since at least their early teen years. This produces what we call identity foreclosure, or a truncated sense of self absorbed by their sport. If you had a chance to sit with Tiger Woods for an hour you would find that he talks about golf and nothing else. Such athletes are totally psychologically dependent upon their sport.

These athletes need and can benefit greatly from psychotherapy. In therapy they finally have a chance to work through their identity foreclosure and narcissistic addiction to the crowd. When they are helped to realize that there are intrinsically worthwhile they can come to see that they need not continue to risk life and limb for the smell of the grease paint and roar of the crowd. Applause and admiration can be a very seductive thing to deal with. Bob Dylan famously said that he never minded crowds that booed him and worried far more about the fans who loved him, “They can really kill you with kindness you know.” Athletes sometimes need a little help in easing their way out from the applause and into a peaceful and well-deserved retirement.

Many of us retire by sixty or so and ease into entertaining activities such as painting, exercise or

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volunteer work. The challenge of retirement is far different for the ex-athlete since they often have another forty productive years ahead of them with little chance of finding the kind of narcissistic gratification that greeted them before. This is the grave challenge they all must face when they retire from the playing field.

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