Athletes in Trouble
We all have those moments in our life when we do monumentally stupid things.
Sometimes those things are things that we don’t even like to do. We do them because everybody was doing them and more truthfully, we do them because we can. My roommate in college, also a full-ticket jock, and I used to frequent this hang out spot. We used to go there most of the time because we heard our favorite words every time we were there.
Most people don’t understand the pressures that athletes deal with every day. These words are like kryptonite to an athlete.
These words are, “Your money is no good here.”
I was a rare drinker and drinking beer was an even a rarer occurrence. But on this night they handed us cups when we walked close to the bar and the manager pointed the bartender to us and told her, “Whatever they want, I got it!” By midnight or so, the number in our group was up to about 20 or so including a few of the local cleat chasers.
I think it is the most that I ever drank and I did it for no other reason other than the fact that it was free and it let me divorce myself from some of my own insecurities.
Now why did I tell you this story?
I told you that story because when I woke up the next morning, I had no idea how I got home that night. I do know that my car was out front though and judging by the parking job, I was sure I drove it. God only knows what kept me from killing myself or someone that late night in West Texas but I took a lot from that night.
With the weekend arrest of Sergio Kindle on a DWI charge, it got me thinking about the pitfalls, challenges and temptations heaped on athletes. Sure every person has his or her own struggles to manage, but for the athlete, it is on a different scale because the same people that judge you are the people that put you on the pedestal. Do everyday pressures affect athletes’ decisions? While having a full understanding of the need for these young men to make good choices, it would be remiss on our part if we didn’t recognize the complexity of the situation. It is almost baffling to most people that are not athletes.
The questions rise to the top every time an athlete gets in trouble. How can these athletes with so much on the table in front of them make these types of decisions? Don’t they understand that most people would give anything to be in their situation and would never mess it up?
Well, the short answer to that is that the non-athlete feels that way about them because they were never able to do it. That same love and adoration heaped on these athletes is what makes them think they are special as opposed to being blessed.
When athletes believe that they are special, they look at things as a birthright. When an athlete looks at things as a blessing, there’s an appreciation of the fact that to whom much is given, much is expected.
I will never forget what Vince Young said after the 2005 Rose Bowl that won Texas the National Championship - “I was thinking about the man upstairs. He could have chosen anybody to be in this moment but he chose to bless me to be a leader for this team and for my teammates.”That is a perspective that is refreshing and far too rare in not just athletes, but anybody who experiences a measure of success. The adoration heaped on athletes at every level many times starts as early as middle school, so you would think that insecurity would be the last thing on their mind. Many athletes exist and even thrive in an environment where their insecurities live themselves out for everyone to read or see. You let the love, adoration and thoughts that other people feel for you define how you feel about yourself. That is one of the reasons that athletes with strong men in their lives probably do better in sports and in life. The nurturing of a mother is so great that it can’t be measured, but it is not always good when it comes to athletics. These strong men – fathers, uncles, grandfathers, whoever - can be very corrective and grounding and that allows the athlete to be more realistic in his thinking and understand the ramifications of choices. The very nature of playing the game of football in college is part of that insecurity. It’s not a pure insecurity, but it is a life of questions and those questions being answered in public spaces like newspapers, message boards and in front of 90,000 people on a Saturday afternoon. Every player that finds himself on scholarship at The University of Texas was all-something in high school. He probably found himself on the finalist list for homecoming king. He probably was voted most likely to succeed or some other useless superlative. Often times he defines himself first through his sport.
Sports was always way down on the list for me even though football and track and field were paying for school. Maybe it was because I was never good enough, at football at least, to play at a place like Texas, let alone go to the NFL. Maybe it was because in football the thing I was best at was getting hurt. Honestly, it was really more about my parents’ desire to not have me define myself by something so fleeting.
Parents think they do their kids favors by nurturing this behavior when they define their kids as athletes before anything else. I was speaking in Atlanta this past spring to a group of about 200 high school juniors and their families. I spoke about making good choices, the NCAA recruiting process, attitude, avoiding pitfalls and using sports as a way to get an education to make a life for themselves.
After I spoke in Atlanta, a lady that looked to be in her 50s came up to me. She was holding the arm of a young man that she told me was a tight end. She also informed me that he was getting letters from Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern and Troy University. She introduced me to his mother and his two sisters who were both carrying babies. She thanked me for what I said and then asked me a question that I will never forget.
She asked, “How long he got to go to college before he can go to the NFL?” I did my best to give her a swift kick in the groin with some reality while still being encouraging to the young man. Instead of this family cheering for this young man to possibly get a free education and to make a life for himself and maybe change the course of a whole family, he is looked at to be a savior of the family and a way out of “the hood.”
Instead of building a network of support for him, this 17-year old is supposed to set mama and grand mama up in a house. If this young man is not talented enough to play in the NFL, not able to play in a system that shows his talent or not able to avoid injury, an education is not enough for his family.
If this young man goes to college and gets an education, a degree, and then gets a $75,000 per year on his job, then he is seen as a failure and will feel like one too. That is too much pressure to heap on to any one kid. Then people wonder why these young men, especially young men from urban depressed areas, find things that help them escape and sometimes lose focus on football. In many cases, football supplies all the pressure in this young man’s life.
The kid gets on campus as a freshman, finds himself at a position full of other All-Americans and in a matter of months he goes from head of the class to picking up the rear. This kid who has defined himself and been defined his whole life by a game now finds that game to be his biggest form of insecurity and it supplies him with the most questions.
So what does he do?
He goes out and finds security in something else.
That something else might be drinking, smoking, women, whatever. He finds security in anything that he can control and is not determined by someone else or in public space, when really he was wrong to define himself as special over a game in the first place. Athletes that define themselves by their sports will always have this problem because fame and money are fleeting and are not enough. It is something that I have deemed my personal battle and was one of the reasons that I wrote the book, Sports for life.
You would think that the problems of the off-season with Aaron Ross, Terrell Brown, Robert Joseph and Henry Melton would have hit this team like a rock, but Sergio Kindle still found his feet running into mischief. I get tired of kids making stupid decisions too, but since I’m 36 and still make them, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
I wish, ‘Joe Fan’ could live the real life of a college athlete one day and understand the pressures from school and home that come along with it. Judgment would not be so swift and understanding and teaching would become paramount. At some point, these young men need to know what a great gift they have been given and that the gift of football does not stop between the chalk.
We all need to appreciate what these young men do because they do it many times in spite of what we have created in them as fans and as media. That is what makes the “good guys” of sports so special and so rare. They were able to fight through us.