Troublesome Athletes

Review of Stanley H. Teitelbaum, Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark Side: Sex, Drugs, and Cover-Ups (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), ISBN 978-0-313-37756-3, 179 pages, Hardcover, $44.95.

Stanley Teitelbaum’s Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark Side: Sex, Drugs, and Cover Ups is a very frustrating book to read. While the book’s subject is interesting, the author is not able to deliver on the promise of providing a compelling psychological explanation of the athletes’ self-defeating behaviors. The book includes vignettes about many accomplished athletes, especially athletes who play baseball, basketball, and football. The vignettes emphasize various incidents where the subjects abuse steroids, cheat in sports and in their private lives, commit murder, gamble, and indulge in a variety of other unsavory activities. Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, Kobe Bryant, Denny McLain, Mark McGuire, Roger Clemons, and Alex Rodriguez are but a few of the prominent professional baseball players scrutinized in this book. As a reader, I had hoped to learn more about the specific motivations that lay behind the behavior of each of the aforementioned players, but none were forthcoming. Instead,

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we are given facile generalizations about various players’ narcissism, impulsivity, impaired judgment, self-destructiveness, and stupidity.

Teitelbaum has read all the requisite newspaper accounts, biographies, and autobiographies about the players he includes in Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark Side, but he has not interviewed any of them, nor has he interviewed any people who know the athletes intimately. His failure to incorporate primary sources is one of the book’s major deficits because without primary resource materials, the best the author can do is to rely on platitudes like, “Simply put, they do it [indulge their dark side] because they feel they can!” Phrases like “unbridled hubris,” “their acquired distorted self image,” “the toxic athlete profile of grandiosity, arrogance, and entitlement,” “suffering from a delusional disorder,” “a supreme narcissist,” “his grandiose sense of invulnerability,” “an empathy chip was clearly missing,” “self destructive arrogance at its finest,” and “if you are consistently treated as someone special, you begin to think of yourself in those terms” are offered without any personal substantiation from the subjects being described and diagnosed. In order for the reader to learn more about the specific psychological dynamics of each athlete and to learn more about why he/she did what he/she did and others with similar experiences did not do it, the author would have needed to obtain more privileged information than he presents in the book. The personal context and the personal psychodynamics of the athletes described in this book are missing; without each of these, the portraits and the explanations for their transgressions is unsatisfying and inadequate.

By way of self-disclosure, I was a college basketball player and a professional baseball player before I became a historian and a psychoanalyst. I knew players in each sport who were narcissistic and some who were self-defeating. I have worked clinically with professional athletes, but the

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psychodynamics of each player is always unique and specific to that person. The specifics can inform the general, but the general can throw only a very limited light on the specific actions of each athlete. The book would have been enhanced had the author tried to explain how some athletes excel in the performance of their sport while not being self-defeating in other areas of their lives. What experiences promote personal wellness and wholesomeness, and what factors impede the development of the same?

Taken from another perspective, there may be some utility in looking at neuroscience when trying to understand an athlete’s self indulgence. Jonah Lehrer has written about Tiger Woods (who is not mentioned in the book under review), “Self control…is a limited mental resource, a feeble cortical muscle…we can only resist [indulgence] for so long; the defining feature of human willpower is its weakness.” This hypothesis raises a crucial issue that potentially could strengthen the explanatory power of any effort to analyze an athlete’s self-defeating behavior.

I wish the author had utilized primary resources and had been able to interview some of the athletes he wrote about. I was hoping there was going to be more emphasis placed on trying to link the context of various players’ transgressions to their personal life. It would have been good if some space had been devoted to analyzing some athletes who did not “indulge their dark side,” so that we could have something to compare. Perhaps another author will be able to fulfill the promise that eludes Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark Side.

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