For the most part professional athletes know what they are
getting into when they enter their respective leagues. They are expected to
give their very best every day under the pressures of the fans and the media
for a large sum of money. Seems like a pretty good gig. Many of us play sports
and we would love to fill their shoes with their skills. They get all the
attention and a ton of money for what we do for fun. However not many of us
understand the extreme pressure they have every day of their lives.
We all know how pressure affects us. We get stressed out,
don’t sleep, don’t perform well, and even age faster. Do we face extreme
pressure in our lives? Yes some but I don’t believe on a daily basis it’s the
same. Mentally they have to be extremely resistant. As we have seen in the past
the mentally weak suffer. We often see high draft picks drop off the sports
world. Some examples of the fallen that often come to mind are Ryan Leaf (NFL),
Kwame Brown (NBA), Patrik Stefan (NHL) and Billie Beane (MLB). It takes a
certain amount of “mental toughness” to handle the pressures of professional
sports.
So now not only do you have to perform at your best everyday
of your career in front of millions but you also are trying to live up to the
fans and owners expectations and the “potential” that scouts put on you. As you
can see the pressure just keeps stacking up and you have to keep the stress
down to keep your mental stability high.
Burnout is a term that is used to explain what happens when
someone has had enough and just can not mentally handle the situation any more.
They start to experience depression, fatigue, boredom, and just general
disgust.
On top of all of these daily pressure comes once every
season that I am pretty sure almost every player dreads. I am talking about the
trade deadline. Most if not all of the leagues have a deadline where it is an
intense day of trade after trade that is fun for fans but unbelievably
stressful for the players.
Just think about this situation for a moment. You have been
with a team for several years. You have friends on the team and have grown to
like the city and the fans. You have a game on or before the day of the
deadline and start to wonder, will this be the last time I wear this uniform,
the last time I play with these guys, and the last time these fans cheer for
me? Its very possible and many players have these questions answered yes.
So now you start asking yourself how in the world do you
perform under the circumstances that you may be gone at any moment? Well it
depends on how “mentally tough” one would be. Can you shake off the fact that
one organization wants to get rid of you? Can you shake off moving in a matter
of hours to a new probably foreign city with players you don’t really know? For
the players with families, how are you going to tell your wife and how is your
kid going to feel being uprooted from their friends and school?
These are very tough questions to block out and just play
the game. Some can handle the pressure and some cant. It also may depend on
when you get traded. Some leave early in the process at a good time and some do
not. An example of this is Ubaldo Jimenez of the Cleveland Indians we traded 1
hour before he was supposed to start for the Colorado Rockies. He still went
out and pitched for the Rockies and went 1 inning and gave up 4 earned runs.
This was a very poor performance for a solid pitcher. You could question if he was just mad at the club that traded him and so he wanted them to lose. However, if you think about it professional athletes always have a drive to perform well and it impedes their desire for the team to suffer. Another reason this doesn't make sense is they are his stats and not the teams stats. The bad game will follow the player not the team!
“It was a complete surprise for me,” said Dave Steckel,
now a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. “I didn’t find out until like 3:30 and
the trade deadline ended at 3 (p.m. ET), so obviously it was a last-minute
deal. When I got the call from my agent, I thought ‘Hey, I didn’t get traded.
And then he’s like ‘Actually, you did.”
The other factor that greatly affects the pressure and the
mentality of the athletes is something that seems minute but has a big impact
on them. This new factor is media, especially twitter. Think about it, you get
fired from your job but you don’t find out from your boss nicely, but in fact
you are watching TV with your family and hear that you have been canned. Now
that is not realistic in our daily lives but for them it is very realistic.
Trades get leaked so often that they are more likely to come across it on
twitter or watching sportscenter before they get the call from their own team
or the team they were traded to. This has to be tough to hear such big news
from a random writer from ESPN or from the local paper.
“If you start paying attention to everything that’s
written on the Internet and said in the media, it’s going to make you crazy,”
said Winnipeg Jets defenceman Mark Stuart.
All of these factors add pressure to the already very
pressure filled life of the professional athlete. This is why it is so common
to see players burn out and have their performance falter. Its not a mystery
why this happens. However they need to understand if they can reach a point
that allows them to mentally block some of this out their mental toughness will
increase and will most likely have a longer better career.
No comments:
Post a Comment