A SEASON OF HEARTACHE
icon1 admin | icon2 News & Events | icon4 08 31st, 2007| icon3Comments Off

Baltimore Sun – Aug 31, 2008 – Childs Walker, Jeff Barker and Jeff Zrebiec – Orioles and fans, once full of hope, likely find themselves mired again in a losing campaign.

Just 10 days ago, it felt pretty good – for the first time in a long time – to be an Orioles fan or player.

But in a sport that takes few breaks, that patch of sunshine now seems lost in a much longer run of dark days for the beloved Baltimore franchise.

The very afternoon that manager Dave Trembley’s hiring was announced last week, the Orioles became a national joke with a 30-3 loss to the Texas Rangers. That began a nine-game losing streak, replete with ugly errors and bullpen disasters. To make matters worse, 13 games against division powers Boston and New York loom over the next month.

So, what’s it like to be an Oriole these days? Veteran outfielder Jay Payton compared the streak to “running into a brick wall.”

“It has a snowballing effect,” he said yesterday. “For a while there, when we were playing well, you thought that we were going to get this out or get this hit. When you start losing, you’re like, ‘Man, what’s going to happen next?’”

So, what’s it like to be an Orioles fan these days?

“It’s very, very disgusting,” said Loyal Hartmann Jr., waving his arms in frustration as he stood in front of the Babe Ruth statue before last night’s game.

So, what can be done about it?

Trying to break a losing streak can be like trying to escape quicksand by flailing more violently, said John F. Murray, a Florida-based sports psychologist.

“Sometimes, the harder you struggle to get out, the deeper you get in,” he said. “Baseball is such a mental sport, where players need to be on autopilot most of the time, and that becomes hard.”

It’s the dawn of another September and all the Orioles and their fans have to look forward to is watching other teams compete in pennant races. It’s not so much the eight-game streak that sticks out. Heck, the Orioles lost nine in a row in June. They lost eight in a row twice in 2005. They lost the last 12 games in 2002. To say nothing of the 0-21 losing streak to open the 1988 season.

But Hartmann, a Canton retiree who grew up a Brooks Robinson fan, says he’s never experienced heartache like this season.

“Losing games in the seventh inning and beyond is just a tough way to lose,” Hartmann said. “I’d rather lose 30-3. Our bullpen comes in and it’s like batting practice. There’s balls flying all over the place.”

Josh Rogers, 22, of Dundalk, asked to be described as a “disgruntled fan.” He says he’s made a habit of watching games on television for as long as he can stand it.

“Usually around the seventh or eighth inning, I’ll change the channel, expecting the worst,” he said.

Asked why they continue coming to games, Hartmann and Rogers said they are die-hard fans and cannot imagine deserting their team.

Just when things might have been looking up, the brutal blowouts arrived to slap fans back to the reality of a likely 10th straight losing season.

Earlier in the summer, the club had hired a respected executive in Andy MacPhail. In the weeks that followed, the Orioles had played winning baseball and Trembley, the interim manager, was earning a full-time job. Erik Bedard had pitched his way into the Cy Young race. And the Orioles had completed difficult negotiations by signing No. 1 draft pick Matt Wieters to a club-record bonus.

But then came the ugly losses. Much like the Sisyphus legend of Greek mythology, Orioles fans now feel that whenever the team begins to move up the mountain, it will soon come crashing down.

Team officials are trying to keep the streak in perspective, saying they remain happier with the club’s talent than at this time last year.

“It’s all seemingly going back to that 30-3 loss,” said Vice President Jim Duquette of the skid. “You’re not quite sure how the team is going to react. You’re hoping that they’d be able to come out of that, but that seemed to set off a whole snowball effect. I haven’t been here, but, historically, this is the way things have gone for the last eight or nine years.”

Duquette added: “Until we win that next game, there’s still going to be searching going on.”

Brian Roberts, a veteran of six previous losing seasons, said the players take a measured view.

“It’s unfortunate that this has happened, because we were feeling like we had made some good strides,” he said. “This doesn’t necessarily take away from that. One week of games isn’t going to take away from that in the long haul. That’s the way you have to look at it. It’s not fun, we don’t like losing and we wish we weren’t in this situation. But it’s not the end of the process we are in.”

Murray, the sports psychologist, usually tells struggling clients to have fun and reach for the feelings they had when they were most successful. But that can be harder when a team or player has been losing for a longer period.

“Past results have an impact on how you set your expectations,” he said. “Some of these guys may have an assumption of failure and not even realize it.”

Murray said he would break the problem down player by player and work to remove impediments such as anxiety or low expectations – a process that can take months or years.

Players agreed that they must take individual responsibility for the rut.

“Each guy needs to look at himself in the mirror and say, ‘What can I do to make myself better and make this team better?’” Payton said. “You have to do it, especially going into the offseason. Everybody has to take a couple of steps back and say, ‘Hey, I wasn’t so good here, here and here. I really need to bust my butt this winter and come back with the right focus.’”

Fan negativity can contribute to a losing culture in the clubhouse, said Dr. Eric Morse, a North Carolina-based sports psychologist who has worked with University of Maryland athletes.

“Because of previous experience, the fans move to negativity more quickly, and the players hear that,” he said. “It has to spill over.”

Morse, an Orioles fan himself, said the best advice he can offer fellow rooters is to keep looking for positive glimmers on the horizon.

“It’s frustrating,” he said. “But you just have to pin your hopes on the overall direction of the team. The Orioles have made a lot of changes, so as a fan, you try to look past the results and hope the young players are learning how to win.”

Orioles reliever Jamie Walker said the players have to block fans out.

“You sign on for the good, the bad and the ugly, and it’s been … ugly this week,” he said. “To me, what it boils down to is, we are getting paid well to play this game. … It’s hard. But you know what, it could be a lot worse. That’s my motto. I’m not dodging bullets in Iraq. That’s how I look at it. I’m going to bring energy and enthusiasm.”

Jim Hannan knows all about the struggle to stay positive. He pitched on Washington Senators teams that lost more than 100 games in three straight seasons, ending in 1964. He recalls going through a progression of moods during long winless streaks.

“I think you go through a period of almost depression,” he said. “The team gets a psychological framework where it just thinks it’s always going to lose.”

After depression would often come sarcasm.

“We’d say, ‘Well, here we are again. Let’s go out and make another team happy,’” Hannan said. “When it got to the point of sarcasm, sometimes then we’d start winning – or at least enter a period where you win one and lose one – because we weren’t pressing anymore.”

Hannan believes there are lessons that can be derived from losing, a sentiment echoed by Cal Ripken Jr.

Ripken and his brother Billy were members of the Orioles team that began the 1988 season 0-21, the longest losing streak in club history. He has said he learned about playing hard in adversity and about maintaining faith in his teammates. He wrote a children’s book about the experience called The Longest Season.

Ripken also recalled that the season not much fun.

“I wouldn’t wish the 0-21 on anyone,” he said in speech last April to the National Press Club. “That was the most miserable time in our lives.”

Current players insist that they keep the tough times in perspective.

“It’s not hard for me to come to work and do something that I love to do,” Roberts said. “Would it be easier if we were two games out right now? Yeah, probably. But life isn’t always easy. You have to find ways to make an impact when circumstances aren’t what you’d like.”

Walker said the losses have gnawed at him.

“It’s been one of the roughest … weeks of my career,” Walker said. “If anybody says that they are getting sleep, they’re full of it. I ain’t had a good night’s sleep.”
Orioles by the numbers

During the Orioles’ nine-game losing streak:

Runs allowed: 98

Runs scored: 38

Worst loss: 30-3

Consecutive losing seasons: 9 (heading into 2007)

Record since 1997 (last winning season): 652-877

Longest losing streak: 21 games in 1988

Longest losing streak this season: 9 games in June and now

Record since Dave Trembley named manager for next season: 0-9

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.

FRANCHISE TAG APPLIES TO RUINED SPORTS CAR
icon1 admin | icon2 News & Events | icon4 08 28th, 2007| icon3Comments Off

Chicago Tribune – Aug 28, 2007 – Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz – Its 640 horsepower can be dangerous – The Lamborghini that Lance Briggs crashed on the Edens Expressway wasn’t just any old sports car.

The 2007 Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster LP640 is the top-of-the-line model of the hottest sports car currently on the market, according to Anthony Nuccio, sales manager at Fox Valley Motor Cars in West Chicago.

Nuccio said his dealership sells a couple of the cars per month, but mostly to businessmen or entertainers, not athletes.

Although some sports stars have come to the dealership inquiring about the Lamborghini, most players are simply too big to fit inside comfortably, Nuccio said. Briggs’ model was a convertible, so it offered a little more room, he said.

The car, at 640 horsepower, can be dangerous if the driver is inexperienced, said Nuccio. He said he always explains the shift patterns and makes sure customers are comfortable before he lets them take the model for a test spin.

But for some athletes, caution is not foremost — especially when they’re steeped in the macho environment of the NFL, said John Murray, a sports psychologist based in Palm Beach, Fla., who talked to RedEye on Monday about athletes in general.

While it’s anyone’s right to buy a fancy car, Murray said, risk-taking can be problematic for some young players who get to the NFL and find themselves making huge sums of money with neither the experience nor maturity to handle it wisely.

“These people are trained to dive across the line and hit people and run fast,” Murray said. “When you make it to the NFL, there’s something about you that’s bulletproof.

“It’s that sense that you’re going to live forever, that you’re never going to lose that position, that you’re always going to have that money.

“But the reality is that, for most people, it ends.”

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.

The State – Aug 23, 2007 – Ron Morris – WHEN IT COMES TO setting goals for their respective football teams, Steve Spurrier and Tommy Bowden are as different as garnet and orange. Spurrier prefers numerous end-of-season team goals. Bowden opts for in-season goals obtainable by various factions of his team with only one unified team goal of winning a conference championship.

Since both coaches have had highly successful careers, it is difficult to say one method or the other is right or wrong. It would be easier to say Spurries method has been more effective than Bowdens because his Duke and Florida teams won eight conference championships and one national title. Bowdens lone conference title was at Tulane.

Interestingly enough, John Murray, a Palm Beach, Fla.-based sports psychologist, says Bowdens method of goal-setting is much preferred from a psychological standpoint.

Murray says there are three types of goals: process, performance and outcome. A process goal would be for a lineman to perfect a blocking technique. A performance goal would be for a defense to shut out an opponent in one game. An outcome goal would be for a team to win a conference championship.

When youre setting goals for sports teams, you probably want to be deep into the nitty, gritty of the actual process goals and performance goals, Murray says. I am almost always emphasizing process and performance, and only about 5 percent is on outcome goals.

You dont really control outcome goals, the final score, or the outcome. Because of that, you dont invest a lot there. To focus your goals extensively on that can be out of your control and can lead to pressure, which is not necessarily a good thing.

I would rather a team go out there and execute on every play, a great strategy, a great performance … then let the chips fall where they may as far as a state championship or whatever.

Bowden apparently concurs. He and his assistant coaches list many board goals prior to each season that apply for each game. Those goals deal with scoring offense, scoring defense, yards allowed rushing, yards gained rushing, etc.

When asked whether he talks to his team about unified goals, Bowden responded, not so much, because he says the goal of winning an ACC championship is always there.

Everybody here understands thats the goal, Bowden says. Its pretty much an assumed. We don’t talk about it. We talk more about what it takes to achieve that, more so than that.

Even though Clemsons sole goal is pretty much unspoken, the Tigers break huddles during practice with a chant of ACC champs! and have done so for several seasons, according to Bowden.

As with just about everything, Spurrier deals with goals differently than most coaches. He sits down with his senior class of players and team leaders before the season and suggests goals to them. They mutually decide on six, seven or perhaps eight team goals.

During each of Spurriers first two seasons at USC, he said realistic goals were for the Gamecocks to win more games than they lose, defeat Clemson and win a bowl game. This season, he has asked his seniors to up the ante. Among USCs goals is to win the SEC East Division.

Its probably not very realistic when you look at where we are right now, Spurrier says of that goal. i just saying we need to believe were capable (of winning the SEC East), and if we get into position, lets believe we can do it. I want our players to believe they are good enough to do it.

Spurrier says he believes it is important to set many goals, in case some are found to be unattainable during the regular season. He points out his 1996 Florida team won the national championship, but failed to reach goals that included going unbeaten and defeating rival Florida State during the regular season.

Spurrier says he began setting team goals when he was coach at Duke in 1988. Prior to the 1989 season, he suggested to his Duke seniors that goals such as winning eight games, defeating rival North Carolina and winning a bowl game were realistic.

Bubba Metts, a senior center on that team, spoke up and said he believed the Blue Devils could win the ACC championship that season.

I said, wait a minute, I dont believe in setting unrealistic goals, Spurrier recalls saying. Lets dont do something foolish.

Spurrier relented, although only under the condition that no player told anyone outside the team about that goal. Duke, of course, achieved its goal by sharing the ACC championship with Virginia.

In the case of goal-setting for USC and Clemson, much of it has to do with expectations. It long has been realistic for Clemson to set a goal of winning the ACC championship, and Bowden has put the Tigers in position to challenge for the title just about every season.

USC has seldomly been in a position of believing it could win a conference championship. Maybe for the first time since it joined the SEC, the Gamecocks have at least a chance of challenging for an East Division championship.

If either Clemson or USC wins a conference championship, then that teams coach will have done the best job of goal-setting ” at least for this season.

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.

Aug 20, 2007 – Click Here for the Full Story in the Sydney Swans (Australian Football League) Official Publication.

http://www.smarttennis.com/brettkirkhonored.htm

The Daily Camera – Aug 19, 2007 – Kyle Ringo – Growing up in Salem, Ore., and later in Boise, Idaho, Cody Hawkins and his three siblings loved playing games with their father, Dan, when he would come home from his job as a college football coach.

Those games rarely involved the pigskin.

They played wiffle ball in the backyard. Sometimes it was basketball in the driveway, where Dan Hawkins earned the nickname “Shot Doctor” from his children during games of H-O-R-S-E or P-I-G.

Their favorite activity with dad was a living room rodeo.

“He would get on his hands and knees and all the kids would put their arms around him and he would try and buck us off,” Cody Hawkins said. “We used to call him ‘Bad Medicine.’

“We’d be at the dinner table and say, ‘Is Bad Medicine in town?’ If he was too tired, he’d be like, ‘No, Bad Medicine ain’t here.’ Other times he’d be like, ‘Oh, Bad Medicine is rolling in.’ Then the whole family would get in the living room and we’d get on Dad’s back and try to hang on for as long as we could.”

Cody Hawkins has always considered his dad his role model. So when Dan Hawkins decided to leave Boise State after five years as head coach there and take on a new challenge at Colorado, his son, an undefeated high school quarterback, followed after his senior year.

They both suffered through a 2-10 season last fall in Boulder, with Cody in a redshirt year as a true freshman while his father tried to change the culture and mentality of the program he inherited. Now two weeks from the start of their second season as Buffs, the father is poised to name his son the starting quarterback today.

Cody Hawkins entered the second scrimmage of preseason practices Saturday with a slight edge over junior college transfer Nick Nelson. Both quarterbacks’ performances were a mixed bag of good and bad decision-making in the scrimmage.

In short, nothing happened that would indicate Cody had lost his lead.

Dan Hawkins has said all along the final decision will be made by offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich after a meeting between all the coaches today.

If Helfrich does select Cody Hawkins, it will mark the sixth time in the modern history of major college football that a father-son tandem has led a program as head coach and starting quarterback, according to research done by the CU sports information department.

Some of those who have worked together in college football as father and son and coach and quarterback say it was one of the most treasured parts of their lives. But it also comes with tough challenges.

Unless they are fortunate enough to win every game — Cody Hawkins is 59-0 as a starting quarterback — the Hawkins tandem will probably take a few jabs from fans and critics along the way.

“People will be looking for favoritism,” said Dr. John Murray, a renowned sports-performance psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla. “It’s a huge potential burden to bear. I would think that if anything, coach will be harder on his son on the field and maybe softer on him in family situations away from the field to balance the equation.”

Previous case studies

Fan interference was a regular occurrence for Jim Dickey and son Darrell, who led the Kansas State program to its first bowl game in 1982 after several difficult seasons together. It even happened to Jim Sweeney and son Kevin, whose time together at Fresno State in the mid-1980s was much more successful.

“I’m so happy that I had the courage to do that at a young age — to make the commitment to go and put yourself in a little bit of a pressure cooker,” Kevin Sweeney said. “It is the greatest gift I’ve gotten because it allowed us to have a tremendous experience and go to battle together on the football field. Now I look at him as one of my very best friends in the whole, wide world.”

Kevin Sweeney left Fresno State after the 1986 season as the leading passer in the history of Division I football with 10,653 yards. He and his father led the Bulldogs to an 11-0-1 record and No. 16 national ranking in 1985.

Jim Sweeney, now 78 and retired after 200 wins in 34 seasons, said the first year was the most difficult because, though his son was highly recruited by nearly every program on the West Coast, he hadn’t proven himself at the college level.

Jim Sweeney recalled taking a phone call from a female caller on his radio show one night during his son’s redshirt freshman year, just after he had named his son the starter.

“She wanted to know, ‘Are we gonna be seeing anyone else besides Kevin Sweeney play?’” Jim Sweeney said. “I said, ‘He’ll be playing as long I’m sleeping with his mother.’”

Distancing themselves

Both Dan and Cody Hawkins have downplayed their father-son relationship since coming to Colorado. Cody Hawkins is the spitting image of his father, right down to the grimace when he gets a question he doesn’t like. He’s been asked about being the coach’s son often lately. Each time he politely muddles through it.

“When I’m out on the practice field, I try to associate with him as little as possible,” he said. “I mean, basically the only time we ever talk is when I screw up. It’s not like he’s calling me out. I’m just one of the guys.”

The coach has repeatedly said his son will never be treated differently than any other player on the roster. And it seems Dan Hawkins is succeeding in this regard.

Nelson, the player with whom Cody Hawkins has been competing in training camp, has said he believes coaches have treated him and the coach’s son fairly and equally. That was Dan Hawkins’ vow on national signing day in 2006 when he was surprised by his son’s national letter of intent.

“From my standpoint it’s not a problem because of my coaching style,” Dan Hawkins said then. “I tend to coach all of my guys like they are my kids.

“He is a talented player, he’s a good kid and he’s a great guy to have around. I think the only drawback that happens is if we’re not playing well, then he is going to catch more criticism than the normal guy would. He’s had to shoulder that, growing up with that last name in Boise. So he’s kind of used to it.”

Good and bad

It took Darrell Dickey a while to get used to the scrutiny he received as the coach’s son when he played for his father, Jim, at Kansas State. His father didn’t make it any easier on him.

Prior to the 1981 season, Jim Dickey decided to make a bold move. He told 13 upperclassmen they would redshirt that season in order to get some of their teammates some experience. The plan was to combine all their experience the following year and see what happened.

The plan eventually propelled the Wildcats to the 1982 Independence Bowl, the first in the program’s history. But Darrell Dickey had to endure the previous season to get there.

“You know, I saw both sides of it,” he said. “I was a below-average quarterback on a very poor football team for a few years. So I caught a lot of flak. My father caught a lot of flak and my mom had to put up with quite a bit of stuff. Then my senior year, I was still a below-average player, but I was on a very good team and we went to the very first bowl game.”

“Everything you hear about the quarterback gets too much credit or too much blame is totally true, but then you just kind of double that because if you happen to be the coach’s son, it’s just more magnified or whatever you want to call it.

“There are those who will say the only reason he’s getting to play is because his dad’s the coach. But I think overall, there are some positives and negatives to doing that. It’s a great experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The positives far outweigh the negatives.”

The Sweeneys and the Dickeys will be paying close attention to the Buffs this season and pulling for the Hawkins family in particular. All of them say they believe Dan and Cody will enjoy the experience and learn a lot from it.

And they all offer one piece of similar advice.

“He’s got to ignore the public,” Jim Sweeney said of Dan Hawkins. “I know that group up in the stands there in Boulder. They’re a little tough on coaches. I just think he ought to obey his heart and do what he thinks is right.”

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.

South Florida Business Journal – August 17, 2007

See this article by Clicking Below:

http://www.smartproinsight.com/sfbj081707.htm

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida

NBC Sports – August 8, 2007 – Outside of San Francisco, where Barry Bonds enjoyed the home-field advantage of unconditional love, his pursuit and capture of one of sports’ most hallowed records was a mostly joyless affair.

The long ascent to No. 756 was awkward, and sometimes heartbreaking. Away from his kingdom of AT&T Park, Bonds was serenaded by full choirs of boos. Grown men taunted him with giant foam asterisks. Little children held up signs that said, “Cheater.”

So it was tempting to contrast Bonds, who falls between plaque and auto exhaust on the likability scale, with the greats of the game — the outsized personality of the cigar-chomping Babe Ruth, the steady, quiet excellence of Joe DiMaggio, the determination of Jackie Robinson.
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It may be that the heroes we locate in sports are not what they used to be.

Or maybe we aren’t.

“We have a very different expectation of our heroes than we used to,” says John Thorn.

“They have to somehow tickle us in the short term as well as provide sustenance for the long,” says Thorn, a sports historian who was senior creative consultant for Ken Burns’ PBS “Baseball” documentary. “They have to be clever. They have to do things on the field that amuse. It’s not enough to hit 756 home runs. We need to be entertained.”

Instead, we’ve been disoriented: It was possible one recent morning to turn on one of the sports channels and see highlights of Bonds at bat, bathed in popping flash bulbs, and also see the on-screen headline, “BALCO chemist says Bonds used steroids.”

Bonds, of course, has denied that he took knowingly performance-enhancing drugs. But the juxtaposition of heroic highlights and allegations of deceitful lowlights was consistently jarring.

The two previous home run records that Bonds surpassed on his way to 756 were attached to Ruth, arguably the best-known American sports figure of all time, and Hank Aaron, who was resanctified, including a Sports Illustrated cover, as Bonds closed in.

Each of the three men faced media attention, and thus fan scrutiny, that expanded by orders of magnitude. Ruth dealt with the New York papers. Aaron dealt with a media horde that included a traveling pack of television cameras.

But Bonds is a creature — an unwilling creature at that — of something else entirely, an era of blogs and reality television (including his own series, for a time) and a dozen airings of “SportsCenter” every day.

When Aaron eclipsed Ruth’s mark with his 715th home run in 1974, John F. Murray was just a boy, holding a tape recorder up to his television. He can still recite Curt Gowdy’s call on NBC.

“We didn’t have video games or computers,” says Murray, now a sports psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla. “We weren’t distracted by 200 channels. I think individuals need someone, some kind of role model to look up to. It’s just a more complex world.”

Then again, baseball is more popular than ever: More than 76 million fans attended games at its 30 major-league parks last year, beating by 1 million the previous record, set just a year earlier.

Perhaps more to the point, the line once observed by the press — that personal lives were mostly off limits, that reportage was limited to on-field performance and the occasional visit to hospital-bound child, has been obliterated.

“The heroes of past years were not scrutinized at all personally,” said author W.P. Kinsella, whose novel “Shoeless Joe” became the movie “Field of Dreams.”

Kinsella knows a thing or two about baseball and heroes. Take Ruth.

“He was drunk half the time,” he said. “He was a good-hearted, tough guy, but he probably would have been run out of the game today.”

Kinsella does draw a line between the personal flaws of athletes and the suspicion of steroid use that hovers over Bonds, whom the author calls a “narcissistic jerk” who “shouldn’t even be allowed to park cars at the Hall of Fame.”

But his point applies to so many of the baseball players we hold up today as exemplars of some golden age. Ruth lived hard. Mickey Mantle was a raging alcoholic. Ty Cobb is almost celebrated now, in a tortured-soul way, for being surly.

And in “The Hero’s Life,” his 2000 biography of DiMaggio, Richard Ben Cramer portrayed a man who was paranoid, sensitive, insecure and generally difficult.

Aaron, who dealt with a racist swell of antipathy that included death threats, had the support of about three-fourths of the fans in the month before he beat Ruth’s mark of 714, according to a poll taken at the time.

But a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found fans about equally split between rooting for Bonds to break Aaron’s record and rooting against him. Fully one-fifth — startlingly high among self-identified active fans of the game — just didn’t care.

Thorn says he believes the steroid rumors swirling around Bonds are no more than a cover for “moralists” looking to savage him. The playing field has always been unlevel, he says — by segregation or amphetamines or game-fixing or who knows what else.

He says he has a “strange affection” for Bonds because he has decided not to chase what he can never have — the admiration of the fans, on the fans’ terms, by the fans’ script.

Anyway, the historian wonders, isn’t Bonds only giving us what we have a right to expect — sustained excellence on the diamond — as well as what we always believed we wanted — prodigious home runs?

He recalls Charles Barkley’s infamous ad for Nike: “I am not a role model.”

Of course, Barkley was viciously attacked, not least by the fans, for the suggestion. And a survey of sports columns from around the country from the past month or so shows they are overwhelmingly against Bonds.
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It may be that writers and fans are bitter because they felt burned by the home run race of 1998, during which Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased after Roger Maris’ single-season mark of 61 home runs. McGwire hit 70. (Bonds hit 73 three years later.)

At the time McGwire and Sosa were held up as paragons of dignity and as saviors of baseball itself, left in critical condition by a 1994 players strike.

“Where have all the heroes gone?” West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd demanded to know, speaking on the Senate floor in the depths of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

The answer, he said, was on the baseball diamond, in the persons of McGwire and Sosa.

Then McGwire and Sosa gave embarrassing, evasive performances before a congressional committee investigating steroid use in 2005. Sosa is still playing; McGwire failed by a long shot in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility.

It has been all downhill since.

Just in the past few weeks, a betting scandal shook the NBA to its foundations. One of the NFL’s star quarterbacks faced ghastly dogfighting charges. Doping scandals abounded on the Tour de France.

And Barry Bonds swung for the fences with heroic forearms and ran the bases with clay feet.

Maybe our sports heroes are not what they used to be. Or maybe what they used to be was only an illusion, a dream in soft focus. Vivid and real to us, just not true.

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.

Associated Press – Aug 7, 2007 – Erin McClam – AP National Writer – Outside of San Francisco, where Barry Bonds enjoyed the home-field advantage of unconditional love, his pursuit and capture of one of sports’ most hallowed records was a mostly joyless affair.

The long ascent to No. 756 was awkward, and sometimes heartbreaking. Away from his kingdom of AT&T Park, Bonds was serenaded by full choirs of boos. Grown men taunted him with giant foam asterisks. Little children held up signs that said, “Cheater.”

So it was tempting to contrast Bonds, who falls between plaque and auto exhaust on the likability scale, with the greats of the game — the outsized personality of the cigar-chomping Babe Ruth, the steady, quiet excellence of Joe DiMaggio, the determination of Jackie Robinson.

It may be that the heroes we locate in sports are not what they used to be.

Or maybe we aren’t.

“We have a very different expectation of our heroes than we used to,” says John Thorn.

“They have to somehow tickle us in the short term as well as provide sustenance for the long,” says Thorn, a sports historian who was senior creative consultant for Ken Burns’ PBS “Baseball” documentary. “They have to be clever. They have to do things on the field that amuse. It’s not enough to hit 756 home runs. We need to be entertained.”

Instead, we’ve been disoriented: It was possible one recent morning to turn on one of the sports channels and see highlights of Bonds at bat, bathed in popping flash bulbs, and also see the on-screen headline, “BALCO chemist says Bonds used steroids.”

Bonds, of course, has denied that he took performance-enhancing drugs. But the juxtaposition of heroic highlights and allegations of deceitful lowlights was consistently jarring.

The two previous home run records that Bonds surpassed on his way to 756 were attached to Ruth, arguably the best-known American sports figure of all time, and Hank Aaron, who was resanctified, including a Sports Illustrated cover, as Bonds closed in.

Each of the three men faced media attention, and thus fan scrutiny, that expanded by orders of magnitude. Ruth dealt with the New York papers. Aaron dealt with a media horde that included a traveling pack of television cameras.

But Bonds is a creature — an unwilling creature at that — of something else entirely, an era of blogs and reality television (including his own series, for a time) and a dozen airings of “SportsCenter” every day.

When Aaron eclipsed Ruth’s mark with his 715th home run in 1974, John F. Murray was just a boy, holding a tape recorder up to his television. He can still recite Curt Gowdy’s call on NBC.

“We didn’t have video games or computers,” says Murray, now a sports psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla. “We weren’t distracted by 200 channels. I think individuals need someone, some kind of role model to look up to. It’s just a more complex world.”

Then again, baseball is more popular than ever: More than 76 million fans attended games at its 30 major-league parks last year, beating by 1 million the previous record, set just a year earlier.

Perhaps more to the point, the line once observed by the press — that personal lives were mostly off limits, that reportage was limited to on-field performance and the occasional visit to hospital-bound child, has been obliterated.

“The heroes of past years were not scrutinized at all personally,” said author W.P. Kinsella, whose novel “Shoeless Joe” became the movie “Field of Dreams.”

Kinsella knows a thing or two about baseball and heroes. Take Ruth.

“He was drunk half the time,” he said. “He was a good-hearted, tough guy, but he probably would have been run out of the game today.”

Kinsella does draw a line between the personal flaws of athletes and the suspicion of steroid use that hovers over Bonds, whom the author calls a “narcissistic jerk” who “shouldn’t even be allowed to park cars at the Hall of Fame.”

But his point applies to so many of the baseball players we hold up today as exemplars of some golden age. Ruth lived hard. Mickey Mantle was a raging alcoholic. Ty Cobb is almost celebrated now, in a tortured-soul way, for being surly.

And in “The Hero’s Life,” his 2000 biography of DiMaggio, Richard Ben Cramer portrayed a man who was paranoid, sensitive, insecure and generally difficult.

Aaron, who dealt with a racist swell of antipathy that included death threats, had the support of about three-fourths of the fans in the month before he beat Ruth’s mark of 714, according to a poll taken at the time.

But a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found fans about equally split between rooting for Bonds to break Aaron’s record and rooting against him. Fully one-fifth — startlingly high among self-identified active fans of the game — just didn’t care.

(Baseball commissioner Bud Selig didn’t seem to care much, either, sending executive vice president Jimmie Lee Solomon to San Francisco to represent baseball.)

Thorn says he believes the steroid rumors swirling around Bonds are no more than a cover for “moralists” looking to savage him. The playing field has always been unlevel, he says — by segregation or amphetamines or game-fixing or who knows what else.

He says he has a “strange affection” for Bonds because he has decided not to chase what he can never have — the admiration of the fans, on the fans’ terms, by the fans’ script.

“It’s dignified,” he says. “What Barry does is, he rubs our noses in the distancing. No, we don’t know him. He doesn’t want to know us. Is that so terrible?”

Anyway, the historian wonders, isn’t Bonds only giving us what we have a right to expect — sustained excellence on the diamond — as well as what we always believed we wanted — prodigious home runs?

He recalls Charles Barkley’s infamous ad for Nike: “I am not a role model.”

Of course, Barkley was viciously attacked, not least by the fans, for the suggestion. And a survey of sports columns from around the country from the past month or so shows they are overwhelmingly against Bonds.

It may be that writers and fans are bitter because they felt burned by the home run race of 1998, during which Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased after Roger Maris’ single-season mark of 61 home runs. McGwire hit 70. (Bonds hit 73 three years later.)

At the time McGwire and Sosa were held up as paragons of dignity and as saviors of baseball itself, left in critical condition by a 1994 players strike.

“Where have all the heroes gone?” West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd demanded to know, speaking on the Senate floor in the depths of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

The answer, he said, was on the baseball diamond, in the persons of McGwire and Sosa.

Then McGwire and Sosa gave embarrassing, evasive performances before a congressional committee investigating steroid use in 2005. Sosa is still playing; McGwire failed by a long shot in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility.

It has been all downhill since.

Just in the past few weeks, a betting scandal shook the NBA to its foundations. One of the NFL’s star quarterbacks faced ghastly dogfighting charges. Doping scandals abounded on the Tour de France.

And Barry Bonds swung for the fences with heroic forearms and ran the bases with clay feet.

Maybe our sports heroes are not what they used to be. Or maybe what they used to be was only an illusion, a dream in soft focus. Vivid and real to us, just not true.

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.

KICKING THE HABIT
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Golf Course Management Magazine – Aug 1, 2007 – Seth Jones – Whats your vice? Food? Alcohol? Tobacco? Four superintendents tell how they beat their bad habits, and experts advise how you can, too.

Being a superintendent means dealing with problems: staffing shortages, water restrictions, turf disease. Superintendents
discuss these problems with their peers, systematically find a solution, and overcome the problem. It’s simply what a superintendent does.

But what about personal problems, like obesity or alcoholism? How is it possible that a superintendent can let his or her own health slip out of control while obsessing over the health of a plant? It happens every day in this industry.

But superintendents are fighters who love a challenge, and many are fighting back against their bad habits.

‘I had had enough’
Following the 2006 GCSAA Strategic Communications committee meeting, Teron Bay left Lawrence, Kan., and headed to the airport. He was not looking forward to the packed flight back to Cincinnati.

If Bay wasn’t looking forward to it, imagine how the traveler seated next to him felt. Bay was 6 feet 4½ inches tall and weighed 432 pounds.

“The plane was packed, and I was halfway over into this guy’s seat,” Bay remembers. “I had had enough.”

Bay, the CGCS at The Willows at Kenton County in Independence, Ky., rarely cooked for himself. The last thing he wanted to do after working long, exhausting hours at the golf course was go home and make a mess in the kitchen and spend the time it took to prepare a meal. Bay, single and living alone, allowed a diet of fast food to get the better of him.

“McDonalds and Wendy’s did all my cooking,” Bay says. Now he avoids those places “like the plague.”

Bay went on a physician-monitored weight loss program at a Cincinnati weight loss clinic. He started the program, which required him to go on an all-liquid diet of six 8-ounce shakes a day, on June 1, 2006. He recently went off the diet, on June 1, 2007.

Craig Weyandt chose a healthy diet and exercise over medication for high blood pressure. Now he runs more than 30 miles every week. Photo courtesy of Craig Weyandt

Jack MacKenzie, CGCS, hid his alcohol consumption from his family and friends until it sent him into treatment and AA. Photo by Tyler MacKenzie

Teron Bay’s weight loss allows him to fit comfortably behind the wheel of his golf course equipment. Photo courtesy of Teron Bay

Joel McKnight, CGCS, gave up his 35-year habit — chewing tobacco — cold turkey. Photo courtesy of Joel McKnight

In that year, Bay lost 172 pounds — about the same weight as a Jacobsen PGM 22 walking greensmower.

The benefits have been numerous. Bay can walk farther. He doesn’t run out of breath so quickly when digging irrigation lines. His knees feel better. His body doesn’t ache. He sleeps better. He feels sharper mentally.

And it may not seem like a big reward, but for Bay, it is — he can now operate any piece of machinery at The Willows, part of a 54-hole, county owned and operated facility.

“I used to always have a steering wheel shoved in my belly,” says the 12-year GCSAA member.

Even the equipment at the Willows didn’t seem to like what Teron Bay weighed. A steering wheel in the belly was one problem, but an engine that struggled to push along 432 pounds from one green to the next was quite another. Frankly, there were pieces of equipment in the shop that Bay knew he couldn’t get on.

Now, there isn’t a single piece of equipment in the shop that he can’t operate.

“It’s hard to put it into words,” he says, “but now, I almost feel like Superman.”

Choose a new life
“It boils down to choice,” says Jack MacKenzie, CGCS, now sober for 12 years and four months. “Choose to continue drinking, or choose to become sober and begin a new life.”

That was the decision MacKenzie made.

Before he made that choice, MacKenzie would regularly have one innocent beer with his crew after a hard day’s work at North Oaks (Minn.) Country Club, where MacKenzie has served as superintendent for the last 22 years.

He’d then hop in his truck and head to his next destination. Not home, where a wife and two children waited. Instead, MacKenzie went to one of six liquor stores that he had built into his regular rotation.

The shopping list was always the same: a pint of vodka and a six-pack of beer. MacKenzie would finish the pint of vodka during the drive home, and the six-pack would be partly gone. MacKenzie would then nonchalantly drink the remaining beer or two at home.

His family didn’t realize that the one or two beers at home were actually more like No. 6 or No. 7, along with that pint of vodka.

“I kept it well hidden,” the 26-year GCSAA member recalls. “I was a classic closet drinker.”

MacKenzie’s alcoholism was his private burden to bear. He started drinking in high school. By age 35, his alcohol consumption was driving him crazy. Battling irrational behavior and delusions, MacKenzie went to a psychologist. She suggested he go a week without drinking.

A week without drinking … I hadn’t done that since before college, MacKenzie says.

Indeed, a week proved too long.

The psychologist recommended MacKenzie be evaluated by a physician. He followed her orders, and ended up in an out-patient treatment program and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. That was March of 1995. MacKenzie now privately celebrates the fact that he hasn’t had a drink in more than 12 years.

MacKenzie overcame his habit, and says others in his position can, too.

Superintendents, we all fell out of the same mold, perfectionists who strive to be the best they can be, at work and play, MacKenzie says. “That in and of itself can be a curse and cure. And I think any superintendent can overcome anything.”

The new and improved MacKenzie looks back at his old self and relishes the person he is today over the person he was. He no longer has to lie about his drinking, to others or to himself. He lost 57 pounds. He doesn’t have to worry about hangovers anymore. He thinks he has better working relationships with his staff now. He feels great, physically and spiritually.

“I suppose I replaced drinking with introspective thought,” MacKenzie says. “I was trying to catch up on the things I missed out on. When you start compulsively drinking, you stop growing emotionally. I had a lot of growing to do.”

‘You have to want to’
Growing up in a rural setting, chewing tobacco was just what the cool kids seemed to do. And Joel McKnight, CGCS and a 22-year GCSAA member, wanted to be one of the cool kids.

So at age 13, McKnight started chewing tobacco. It was a habit he held onto for 35 years, until he quit for good three years ago.

Learning to live without the rush of tobacco was not a pleasant time for McKnight or for the people around him.

“With my personality anyway, I turned into an absolute ogre,” McKnight says. “I can look back and wonder how people could stand me — the foul mood! Looking back, it was unbelievable.”

McKnight was between jobs, having been laid off from Club Corp., when he decided to give up chewing tobacco. He admits that it was a tough time to try to kick his habit, but a necessary time, as the price of two bags of chew every week was something he needed to cut out of his budget. He didn’t use the nicotine patch or gum, but quit cold turkey.

“I decided the cost was ridiculous, especially for something that was bad for you,” McKnight recalls.

The benefits of giving up his 35-year habit have been immense. He’s already seen improvement in his dental checkups — his teeth and gums are no longer deteriorating. He’s had fewer problems with ulcers, something he never believed could be attributed to chewing in the first place, but now knows better. His health in general has improved, including a lot fewer headaches. He doesn’t feel the need to hide that bag of tobacco anymore, or to sneak out of a meeting for a quick fix, which has made him a better business person.

McKnight’s wife and two sons made his transition to a tobacco-free lifestyle much more bearable, he says.

“I chose to quit at one of the most stressful times in my life — I was in-between jobs,” says McKnight, who is now the park operations manager for the city of Lancaster, Texas. “You have to decide you want to… and I’m so glad I made that decision.”

McKnight says the key for him was that he really wanted to quit and he had support.

“You have to have the support of the people around you. They have to understand that clearing out your system makes you grouchy.” McKnight says. “You have to want to, you can’t just say you want to.”

Make sure you can have fun
Craig Weyandt was sitting on his bathroom floor in the middle of the night, and he didn’t know why.

He had gotten up to let the dog out and go to the bathroom. So why was he on the floor now? Confused, Weyandt went back to bed and shoved the incident to the back of his mind.

A year later, the same thing happened again — waking up on the bathroom floor, not sure why or how long he had been there.

This time Weyandt went to the doctor to investigate. It turns out Weyandt was simply blacking out. He underwent a slew of tests — cardiac ultrasound, EKG, CAT scan — but they found nothing. But doctors did tell him he had high blood pressure, which may have accounted for his fainting spells. Their prescription was simple — blood pressure medication.

“I’ve heard that once you’re on blood pressure medicine, you never stop,” says Weyandt, the Class A superintendent at the Moorings Club in Vero Beach, Fla., and a 17-year member of GCSAA. “I never want to be on pills for the rest of my life. It’ll probably happen, someday, but I want to postpone it as long as possible.”

He decided he’d take his own approach to dealing with high blood pressure.

Weyandt told the doctor to hold off on prescribing the pills. He wanted to see if he could lower his blood pressure on his own, with exercise and a better diet. His doctor was happy to put away his notepad.
Weyandt gave up his poor diet of fast food and processed breakfast sandwiches. And he took up running — serious running. Weyandt puts 30 to 35 miles on his shoes every week.

Now, the blood pressure problem has disappeared. In fact, it’s almost the opposite — Weyandt’s resting heart rate has dropped to 35 beats per minute. A normal resting heart rate is between 60 and 80 beats per minute. Weyandt’s running regimen has him in such good shape that his heart borders on beating too slow now.

But his running has made him a more productive person. These days, he’s like the Energizer Bunny of turf.

“On Monday, I worked all day. When I got off, I played in an employee golf tournament,” Weyandt explains. “After that, we had dinner. Then I went home and mowed the yard. That’s a full day — I wouldn’t have been able to do that before.”

Weyandt says that for him, the exercise has been addictive. He’s lost 10 pounds, two pants sizes, and competed in multiple marathons. Now he’s eyeing triathlons.

“Make sure (you replace your bad habits with) something you can have fun with,” Weyandt suggests. “Unfortunately, I’m in an area without racquetball courts. Otherwise, I’d play until my arms fell off. It’s a game I love; the exercise is secondary.”

Teron Bay poses in front of the soft drink vending machine in his shop on June 1, 2006 (right), and June 1, 2007, when he completed his liquid diet. Photos courtesy of Teron Bay

The power to change
Superintendents deal with challenges everyday, from an irrigation head that keeps getting stuck to a greens committee that won’t allow a positive change. Dealing with challenges is a specialty of the superintendent.

Robert Bjork, Ph.D., chair of the psychology department at UCLA, says that’s why all these men succeeded — because they were experienced and willing to take on their challenges.

“Some people can embrace these challenges, and that makes their problems interesting,” Bjork says. “Then, it’s an upbeat challenge in their life — not a helpless challenge.”

Sports psychologist John F. Murray, Ph.D., says a person with confidence also is more likely to overcome his or her bad habits.

“Confidence is a huge part; it’s easy to get discouraged,” Murray says. “A lot of people don’t think they have control over their mental skills. But they have the power to change.”

“The only serious mistake you can make is to give up on your ability to change,” says James Prochaska, Ph.D., professor of clinical health psychology at the University of Rhode Island, as well as the author of “Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Method for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively Forward.”

Prochaska, who has been in the psychology field since 1969, created his six stages in the 1980s while studying ordinary people who were trying to quit smoking.

Six stages for making change
People who are not planning to take action, even if it’s only because they lack awareness, are members of Prochaska’s first stage, “pre-contemplation.” “One of the things that can help them the most is to become aware of the benefits of breaking their bad habit,” Prochaska says.

For example, most couch potatoes can think of only five or six benefits to becoming active. Prochaska has identified 60 benefits — losing weight, a better mood, more self-esteem and a better sex life, just to name a few.

People who are thinking of making a change in the next six months are in the second stage, “contemplation.”

“They weigh the pros and cons equally, and are ambivalent. When in doubt, they don’t act,” Prochaska says. “The majority of Americans don’t exercise. The No. 1 barrier is time. Only five or six benefits aren’t as motivating as 60. Sixty benefits just to exercising — that’s a bargain.”

People ready to take action are in the “preparation” stage. They have a plan to join a health club or try Weight Watchers. Their biggest obstacle is the question, “When am I going to fail?”

“We tell them, the more prepared they are, the more likely they are to succeed,” Prochaska says. “Do some work before you try to take on the habit. One way to do that is to find multiple reasons for succeeding. For example, walk one week for your weight, the next week for your heart and the next week for better sleep.

“One reason I work out is for my grandkids — so I can keep up.”

The busiest stage is “action.” In this stage, Prochaska asks people to make a concerted effort to kick their bad habits for a full six months. “Think of beating this habit as life-saving surgery,” Prochaska says. “If you had life-saving surgery, wouldn’t you give yourself six months to recover? And wouldn’t you take the time to look for support?”

The next stage is when a person is actively beating his habit and working to make sure he doesn’t relapse. Prochaska calls this “maintenance.” The hardest part of holding off the bad habit is when distresses come along, whether that is anger, boredom, stress, etc.

“We try to give them something to counter their distress,” Prochaska says. “Maybe talking — for men, that’s harder. Exercise, even relaxation, can counter distress. Frankly, I very much use golf in some regards, to counter distress.”

Some people may spend the rest of their lives in the maintenance stage, which is acceptable — the bad habit is beaten. But ideally, a person will advance to the sixth and final stage of beating a bad habit, “termination.” In this stage, a person has the confidence, whether angry, bored, etc., to not return to the bottle, or smoking, or whatever the habit was.

Some make it, some don’t. Those who make it are conditioned, like a person who automatically puts on a seat belt every time he gets into a car.

Prochaska believes people can overcome any bad habit if they follow his steps and seek out the support they need along the way. Lastly, he wants people to know that during this time of breaking a bad habit, they will most likely suffer a relapse.

“I want to encourage people not to think of that relapse as a failure,” Prochaska says. “Rather, think of it as a learning experience — what did you do right, what did you do wrong — so that next time you can succeed.”

Success stories
MacKenzie says he knew he could fix his drinking problem because he was determined and motivated.

“It’s fairly empowering when you realize, ‘Yup, I have a problem,’” MacKenzie says. “If you deny it, that’s when you stumble. The step you have to take is doing something. You have to tell yourself, ‘I have a problem and I’ve got to do something about it.’ My life has changed so dramatically.”

Bay also understands the dramatic changes.

“I had been on diets before, but I never really followed through with them,” Bay recalls. “I’d get bored and I’d start going back to my old ways. For me, there was a switch thrown in my head — bam! This is what you have to do.”

Even though he is off the liquid diet, Bay still watches very carefully what he eats. He still has one of the diet milkshakes every morning because he likes them and they’re convenient. On the day he spoke to GCM, he ate grilled tilapia, green beans and broccoli for dinner. Not bad for a guy who used to regularly eat almost 6,000 calories a day.

“People I don’t see very often absolutely dont recognize me anymore,Bay says with a chuckle. “This college kid worked for me for three years — we literally bumped shoulders in the pro shop and he didnt recognize me. But then he heard my voice and he looked at me and said, ˜Teron? Youve lost a lot of weight! And that makes me feel so good.

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.