Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols

By Stanley H. Teitelbaum

Book Overview

On the court and on the field, they are the world's winners, exhibiting a natural grace and prowess their adoring fans can only dream about. Yet so often, when off the field, our sports heroes lose: their perspective, their balance, their place. In a work as timely as the latest fracas on the basketball court or the most recent drug-induced scandal in the dugout, Stanley H. Teitelbaum looks into the circumstances behind so many star athletes' precipitous fall from grace. Why, he asks, do these sports heroes who seem to have it all also seem, increasingly, to have a superhuman proclivity for self-destruction? In his psychotherapy practice, Teitelbaum has worked extensively with professional athletes and sports agents--work he draws on here for insight into the psyche of sports figures as well as the off-the-field challenges they face. Considering both historical and current cases, he shows how, in many instances, the very factors that elevate athletes to superstardom can contribute to their downfall: the adulation of fans and obsessive attention of the media and the distorted self-image and personal demons that often accompany a headlong drive to succeed. An evenhanded and honest look at athletes who have faltered, Teitelbaum's work helps us see past our sports stars' exalted image into what that image--and its frailty--says about our society and ourselves.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803244452
• ISBN13: 9780803244450
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

It didn't start with Barry Bonds or the Duke lacrosse players

This book is one of my favorites, though I wouldn't recommend you sit down with it if you want mindless chuckles about what kooks athletes are. Teitelbaum spares none of them, not even the good ones, for as he points out, some have estimated that 40 per cent of major league ballplayers have tried cocaine at least once, and when you go through this book and recall that most of these felons were among the highest paid "entertainers" in the world, and you figure that for every one that gets caught, there's probably at least one or two who didn't, well, your respect for professional sports sinks to an alltime low. I'm expecting next for there to be a sequel showing the crimes and misdemeanours committed by animal athletes like Seabiscuit or Man o' War. They can't have been the sweet, innocent go-getters they've been cracked up to be. Speaking of crack, your eyes will pop when you read Teitelbaum's facts about crack cocaine and the men (it's mostly men) in professional athletics who abuse it, often striking out and attacking the women in their lives. Stanley Teitelbaum, you know where all the bodies are buried and you dig up scandals that I had only forgotten by great willpower, as well as some that will live in infamy for the rest of our days, like the 1919 Black Sox scandal. "Say it ain't so, Joe." But nowadays, do boys and girls have any role models to look up to? It must be plain as pitch that athletes are gods and they can do whatever they please, plus the huge sums athletes earn now make the salaries of troubled stars like Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle seem pathetic as they were (as human beings). But sports gambling, even by those in denial like Pete Rose, who took 14 years to confess to something he didn't even consider a crime, then he whines about he'll never be elected into the Hall of Fame (for what, for making a bundle off his teammates' backs), sports gambling doesn't seem as bad as some of the other crimes. Pervasive violence against women is endemic in the sports world, and just plain vehicular homicide is rampant. In a bit of devil's advocacy, Teitelbaum argues that sometimes athletes have bad things happen to THEM, and he rehearses the case that inspired the movie MUNICH, the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes by terrorists at the Munich Olympics (1972). What came to be called "Black September" was--so far--the "most violent assault ever inflicted on athletes." But as he shows, the culture of athletes is thoroughly embroiled in violence so you almost feel that this is the reductio ad absurdam of the whole spectacle. It's gripping, but, at the end off the day, perhaps there's not enough meat here to make a whole book. Soon enough it just descends into a Homeric litany of "once he was the brightest star of the Yankees" (or whatever) "then he went to the dark side." Maybe it should have been a magazine article or two. As it is, it feels endless, and some won't mind that. You get your money's worth of self-destru