MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Rockets playing mind games
Royce White is a rookie NBA player, probably someone you’ve never heard of, but he may become very famous indeed.
Not for his rebounding or his outside shot, but for a stand he’s taking which has nothing to do with basketball but everything to do with sport.
The short version: White is at loggerheads with his team, the Houston Rockets, because he has mental health issues, specifically an anxiety disorder, and he wants them to agree to a mental health protocol which would mean his psychiatrist deciding when White is fit to play and when he isn’t.
This isn’t a case of an indulged athlete deciding to be vexatious. The player articulates his position well. In an interview with Chuck Klosterman of the website Grantland, White said that the term ‘mental illness’ was a broad church. People who had a marijuana habit, or who were addicted to gambling, had mental illnesses, said White, who went on to add that the question people in the US were afraid to ask was this one: “How many people don’t have a mental illness?”
When Klosterman asked why people wouldn’t want to raise that issue, White said: “Because that would mean the majority is mentally ill, and that we should base all our policies around the idea of supporting the mentally ill because they’re the majority of people. But if we keep thinking of them as a minority, we can say, “You stay over there and deal with your problems over there”. . . The problem is growing, and it’s growing because there’s a subtle war — in America, and in the world — between business and health.”
Not quite a sportsman saying: “It’s 50/50 this weekend, but we’re confident we can get the job done.”
White’s situation raises any number of interesting questions, among them the duty of care owed by sporting organisations to their participants, though in fairness, the Houston Rockets aren’t comic-book villains in this situation, pointing to various steps they’ve taken to facilitate the player.
Just because he’s a relatively obscure American shouldn’t hide his potential significance on this side of the Atlantic, either. In a world where you can YouTube the goings-on in practically any dressing-room in any sport in the world, Irish sport should pay close attention to how this matter progresses.
For instance, how many teams and individuals in Irish sport employ the services of a sports psychologist? Yet instead of ladling out bromides about positivity or second-hand Vince Lombardi quotes, would teams be better served with a psychotherapist, someone qualified to address specific problems on a case-by-case basis? Top sportspeople aren’t immune from mental health problems, and they’re not all professionals either.
At least one late withdrawal from a high-profile GAA championship game in recent years was down to a player finding the prospect of performing in front of thousands to be simply too much of a stress for him; when he told the management his non-appearance was put down to an injury for public consumption.
If that happened in a few years time the environment could be different, and the team manager might be able to say what had really happened.
I hear what you’re saying: this is ridiculous. And maybe it is right, but the outlandish has a habit of coming true.
Many remember, say, when thousands of people felt it was appropriate to chant racist abuse at football games, when it would have been a laughable to envisage a time when individuals resorting to such abuse would be identified and punished.
Or a time when cigarette companies sponsored All Star awards.
Sport doesn’t always keep exact pace with society, but sooner or later it catches up. There are constant efforts to show that mental health is like physical health – something you have to work to maintain , and even then there are times when illness strikes you no matter what you do to prevent it.
Royce White has been pilloried by many, in America, by the way, which is simultaneously depressing and unsurprising, but if he has opened this matter up to serious debate, he deserves all our thanks.
In Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms, a book of short stories so well-written that it would make anybody else earning a living from their pen want to take up ice sculpture or particle physics instead, there’s a story which opens on a stunning observation.
In a small town it only takes three alcoholics to keep a pub in business.
I was reminded of that watching Ballymun Kickhams celebrating their victory in the All-Ireland club semi-final on Saturday in Thurles.
No, that doesn’t imply that the members of the Dublin GAA club are any fonder of a drink than anyone else, but the modest number of people spilling out onto the turf put it in my head that sports organisations all over the country — not just in GAA terms — depend, ultimately, on a handful of people to keep the show on the road.
In fact, one could almost pick out the essential facilitators in the TV coverage. Apart from the eye-catching guy in the Teletubbies plus Ballymun jersey, nearly everybody on the Thurles field was delirious with happiness, but every now and then you glimpsed someone in a club jacket or hoodie, and whose smile was slightly diluted by a furrowed brow.
Does this mean new tracksuits for the players? Will we have to have another fundraiser for that? What should we organise for the club that night, win, lose or draw?
This is why you see the same numbers on club committee lists and so forth: it’s not a matter of self-aggrandisement or hanging onto power as much as a realisation among those people that if they don’t do these jobs, then nobody will.
It would be an interesting day’s work to sit down and work out how many absolutely essential officials operate in your own sports club: I would be inclined to have a small wager that it wouldn’t exceed the number of alcoholics Barry reckoned was necessary to keep a small-town bar in the black.
I was also reminded of my previous Saturday’s work, which consisted of reporting on Kilcormac-Killoughey beating Thurles Sarsfields in the All-Ireland club, and the subtle distinction in reactions I saw afterwards. While there was a good Offaly crowd in Portlaoise for the game, it was noticeable that the overwhelming majority of those who invaded the field at the final whistle were in green and white: Kilcormac-Killoughey members.
The other Offaly people had tipped down the road to see a good game — which they did — and a victory for their county — which they did. But the pitch invasion was an occasion for club members only.
And going out onto the field in Portlaoise afterwards, once the photographs of the players with their families were taken and the team started for the dressing-room, you saw it once again — knots of two and three people discussing not the late scoring burst that had put them into the big show on St Patrick’s Day, but how they were going to organise it all.
A headache they were happy to have, no doubt. A burden they were delighted to share with one or two others.
We said goodbye to Johnny Murphy on Saturday in Dungarvan, where memories of the great man rippled through the large attendance.
One of his daughters recounted the story of Johnny filing a match report by phone many years ago. This was traditionally done by his beloved wife Eileen, but for some reason she was unavailable for duty on this occasion, and Johnny had to ring through to the office himself.
When he made contact he had a copy-taker on the end of the phone who wasn’t used to the man from Cashel, so it was hardly surprising that the exchange ended as it did.
Tipperary had won the game in question and Johnny was giving full vent to their superiority: he was describing how the Premier had stretched their lead by saying ‘By now Tipperary were well on top’ when he noticed an odd lack of reaction on the other end of the line. In fact, on closer examination, all that was coming down the line from Cork was a dial tone.
When the copy-taker heard what he understood to be ‘Bye now’, he’d hung up.
There was no shortage of reaction last week to Jerry Kiernan’s comments about GAA players and their fitness.
It was the classic provocation which produces a “well, not that I care myself what the man said but . . .” response, a retort in which you spent so much time protesting your lack of interest in the original comment that you prove the opposite. The question from this corner of the paper has nothing to do with the relative fitness of GAA players and middle- or long-distance runners. It has nothing to do with the appropriateness or otherwise of player grants awarded to elite GAA players, or those awarded to elite runners, come to that.
It has nothing to do with amateurism or professionalism, whether GAA players should complain less about the sacrifices or whether swimmers and other sportspeople should whine more.
No, For fans of Mad Men, though, there can be only one kind of response, particularly when one considers the starburst of publicity given to recent noises being made in the Kingdom about drink-driving licences.
When is the public relations firm of Kiernan and Healy-Rae opening up?
