Fallen idols: their special allure

Sport catapults a few to stratospheric heights and then brings some of the best of them back down to the slush and struggle of everyday life with a huge thud.

March 05, 2016 12:46 am | Updated November 17, 2021 02:04 am IST

Few things are quite as intriguing in the world of sport as the fascination that many sports lovers display regarding men and women whose private lives are nowhere as orderly and awe-inspiring in their simplicity as are their professional careers.

Nirmal Shekar

This is something that struck me as an interesting contradiction; but one that is all too human. For squeaky clean heroes — at least a majority of them — are often nothing but that; there is no ‘other side’ to them, no secret lives and no skeletons in the cupboard.

There are plenty of examples of such men and women >who are all-time greats, players such as Roger Federer , the greatest of golfers, Jack Nicklaus, a whole generation of Australian tennis players led by Rod Laver and quite a number of >legendary cricketers from Don Bradman down to Rahul Dravid; these are men who dominate our sporting consciousness for the right reasons but the maverick more than has his moments.

Probably this is because of our own longing for athletes who look like they might pull off the humanly impossible — something that is transcendental. This is the key to our love of the Uber-men athletes who are anything but out of the ordinary in their lives off the field of play.

But the point is not only about this curious phenomenon and a glaring paradox. For, many of us believe that sport is as big a deal in our lives because it has tens of thousands of heroes — men, women and even children — who make us believe that the best of us can rise above our species’ biological limitations.

In actual fact, the contrary may be true. We follow sport because it catapults a choice few to stratospheric heights and then brings some of the best of them back down to the slush and struggle of everyday life with a huge thud.

When this happens, in a kind of way, the few fallen idols are even more susceptible when it comes to day-to-day foibles and imperfections and frailties as the ordinary folk are.

“You know, this guy is even worse than me. So here falls yet another hero. I am thrilled because these icons are not as hot as we thought they were. They are worse than you and I and make the wrong choices all the time,” a friend said the other day after reading a piece on >Tiger Woods which appeared to suggest that the American great will never again win a Major event in his career.

In the event, it is often the sportsmen who go through — or have gone through — the vertiginous fall from great heights who hold our attention and make for melodrama and trigger endless fascination with their lives.

One-dimensional But then, in sport as in life, it is only when everything goes right that something seems set to go wrong. For when everything is not perfect, we spend time fixing a few flaws. Otherwise we not only get one-dimensional but begin to blithely believe that nothing can go wrong.

All this is precisely why it doesn’t require Einstein’s brain to understand why we are ready to pardon great athletes for not being model citizens so long as they can keep us glued to our television sets when they make an appearance.

Viewed from this perspective it is also easy to understand why many sportsmen are not good at being good off the field and cannot look beyond their glittering overblown images as athletes. In his wonderfully readable book, Sports, Heroes, Fallen Idols , Stanley Teitelbaum, a practising psychotherapist in New York, points to “an erosion of morality and ethical behaviour in the public sector.”

Many sportspersons are narcissists all their lives; and we love them and worship them for it, says Teitelbaum. What this means is that their many failures on the moral front seem to simply disappear from the public and private sphere. There may be the odd bunch of critics who might point to this flawed view but they are conveniently ignored. For the fans are in love with their sports heroes, however flawed, more than with the sports they excel in.

The point is, the moment big money and celebrity culture gate-crashed into the world of sport, nothing was ever the same again.

A song by the American heavy metal group’s W. A. S. P. in “The idol” goes like this:

“If only I could stand and stare in the mirror, could I see

One fallen hero with a face like me?

And I scream, could anybody hear me?

If you smash the silence, you’d see what fame has done to me.”

The problem is, many top athletes lack emotional intelligence. Few have stepped inside a college and their book cupboards are strikingly bare. Only a handful of them live up to our expectations on and off the field.

And boom to bust is not as long a journey in sport as you might think. It happens even sooner than in many other areas of human activity.

“If it weren’t for baseball, I’d be in a penitentiary or cemetery,” said Babe Ruth, the first great American baseball icon. While his candid statement is perhaps a little too dramatic, it is indeed true of many athletes.

Many of them lose not just their reputation as idols but also the millions they earned. >Mike Tyson made $300 million and then declared bankruptcy in 2003.

“Lots of players have financial troubles. But they don’t talk about it,” wrote NBA star Adonal Foyle in “Winning the money game: Lessons learned from the financial fouls of pro athletes.”

Then again, lots of fans have a lot of reservations about supporting this or that superstar but they seldom talk about it in public because they are secretly in love with the so-called icons. Deep inside, they might even believe that the higher someone soars, the harder he falls.

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