Look at it this way: the average athlete trains for roughly six hours a day. That is the time spent purely on the playing field or court. Add to this another hour or two for travel, another hour or two for meals. There’s also public appearances, team meetings, video sessions, taking care of the wife and children, out of town trips, endorsement commitments, personal charities, autograph sessions, fans club gatherings, birthdays of teammates’ children or wives, and other duties. That leaves about twenty minutes to sleep, unless you decide to go to the bathroom.
Everybody knows the most well-crafted public image in all of sports belongs to Michael Jordan. His personal mythology, ranging from being cut from the Laney high school basketball team to the tragic and violent death of his father, have been used to mold the clay of public perception in his favor. But nobody really knows what kind of a man, teammate, husband or father Jordan is. The great demands on his time and physical ability have all but devastated his marriage, and it shocked many when his wife Juanita filed for divorce. The couple soon issued a joint retraction and announced they would try to reconcile.
Marvin Hagler was world middleweight champion for seven years, a truly impressive record. But aside from the physical toll his being on top of the world took, he also had family problems. Soon, he was legally restrained from being within a certain distance of his family, and took off to star in a series of action movies in Italy. And we all know about the domestic problems of Philadelphia 76ers guard Allen Iverson.
The biggest spin of them all was put on the acquisition of Los Angeles Lakers guard Magic Johnson of the HIV virus. Much as they could, Hollywood’s spins doctors could allay public fears of catching the disease. True, Johnson returned with ablaze of glory, even becoming the MVP of the 1996 NBA All-Star game. But, in the end, sanity prevailed, as a growing number of NBA players, silently or publicly fretted that the physical contact in the sport would leave them open to getting the virus from Johnson, and destroying their lives. An ad campaign centering around the theme "You can hug a person with AIDS" was launched. But you don’t hug each other in a basketball game. Johnson retired again.
It takes a special kind of grace to be able to handle the constant demands of media. This writer’s experience with the Dream Team, multiple Olympic medallist Nadia Comaneci, wrestler Hulk Hogan and others also shows how much these performers are swamped with attention, and they can’t always handle it with diplomacy and warmth. They do occasionally get testy, nasty and even hostile. As Charles Barkley insists, athletes aren’t role models; parents should be.
Sports fans are also people who have been conditioned to watching movies, videos and TV programs over and over again, and are used to getting consistently high-quality performance. But an athlete is not a videotape; he has bad days, he gets tired, he gets hurt, he has problems. That’s why some of them appear "antipatiko" on cold. That’s why they skip personal appearances imposed on them by teams, or decline All-Star game appearances.
But wait. The fans reason: you’re getting paid twenty times I am. You should perform well all the time. but we only see the output. We never see the input. We’re not there when they get curse at by their coaches, push themselves beyond our own physical limits, interminably immerse themselves in ice just to take some of the pain away. We don’t grant them the leeway for the times when they have a fight with their wife, have a sick child or a parent on their deathbed. All we need for them is one good performance, because we paid for it. Sometimes, not even.
Perhaps we should walk a few steps in their shoes..