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Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols | 
 enlarge | Author: Stanley H. Teitelbaum
Publisher: Bison Books
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy New: $10.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1361292
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0803216440
Dewey Decimal Number: 306
EAN: 9780803216440
ASIN: 0803216440
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Condition: Brand new trade soft cover with no remainder marks. We ship daily!
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Product Description
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, off the field our sports heroes lose their perspective, their balance, and ultimately 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 many star athletes’ precipitous fall from grace. 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 and 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 contribute to their downfall. An evenhanded and honest look at athletes who have faltered, Teitelbaum’s work helps us see past our sports stars’ exalted images into what those images—and their frailty—say about our society and ourselves.
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It didn't start with Barry Bonds or the Duke lacrosse players July 9, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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-destruction.
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