Real Boys

by William Pollack

  After earning MVP awards for both football and baseball last year, Peter was forced to drop out of the football team this year after just two games. “I had hurt my knee during our first game, but I didn’t want to say anything to my mother or my coach. Yeah, it hurt during the warm-up before the second game, but I just hoped it would go away. I had to keep playing, and winning, to be the MVP again this year.”

  Midway through the first half, Peter reinjured the same knee, and had to be carried off the field. It will be a few months before the cast comes off. “I haven’t looked my mother in the eye since it happened,” Peter says. “How could I have done this to her? I ruined her life! My older brother and sister are on the other side of the country. My father’s been gone for years, and my mom’s never been out on a date or anything since then. The only thing she had to look forward to this fall was my football season.

  “My father came to see me in the hospital, but he hasn’t come to see me since. He says he’s busy at work, but I know he wanted me to get two MVPs again this year, or at least two letters like he did in his senior year.

  “Sometimes I have images in my mind of jumping in a deep pool so my cast will make me drown,” Peter admits. “Then I wouldn’t have to let my parents down ever again. And I wouldn’t have to worry about what college I’m going to get into, either.”

  As Peter’s story shows, boys can be overwhelmed with a feeling that they must do well at sports, that if they don’t maintain a certain level of accomplishment somehow they’ll suffer an intolerable loss. Peter, of course, had already had many losses in his life—the disabling injury, his parents’ divorce, the remote relationship with his father, the sense he wasn’t loved for himself at his own birth. All of these disappointments made him fear what it would mean if he also lost his one last way of feeling powerful and successful—by being a top athlete.

  When boys feel the pressure to do well at sports, they are capable not only of hiding injury the way Peter did, but also of actually harming their bodies. Brian’s story, which follows, suggests some of the problems boys can carry into early manhood when sports become all about succeeding, when sports stop being play. Despite positive success in wrestling, Brian came away so compulsive about succeeding as a wrestler, he no longer knew when and how much to eat.

  BRIAN: OBSESSED WITH HIS WEIGHT

  It was not until he was a college sophomore watching a made-for-television movie about a woman with an eating disorder that Brian recognized some of his own behavior. Brian had found himself on a continual eating binge since he finished high school. He hadn’t thought of himself as having a problem, because hadn’t he always been able to take off weight when he needed to? And, he asked himself, wasn’t it just girls who starved themselves who had a problem?

  In fact, Brian had been quite successful as a high school wrestler. He didn’t have the size for football or the hand-eye coordination to make the baseball team, but he liked the intellectual puzzles and the disciplined, strategic, one-on-one competition of wrestling.

  Brian’s coach gave him a consistent message: Stick with the daily workouts, learn the right moves, cut weight, and you will win your matches. The hardest part at first was cutting weight. In the peak of his growing years, Brian had to lose almost twenty pounds to compete in the ideal division for his height. He had then regained and relost the same ten pounds a dozen times each wrestling season.

  “I used to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in fifty bites, just to make the feeling of eating last as long as I could,” Brian told me. “I drank gallons of water a day. Then, the day of a match I’d go into the whirlpool bath for an hour to sweat the water out. I’d do anything to have a chance at winning in the one sport I could succeed in.

  “Guys who weren’t athletes were nerds. They got left out of everything. They hardly had friends, let alone girlfriends. I couldn’t let that happen to me.”

  After four wrestling seasons, Brian left for college and quit the sport. “I decided I couldn’t spare the time from my studies, and at first I was relieved that I didn’t have to go around thinking about how long I was going to have to stay in the whirlpool bath if I had a doughnut instead of a diet soda. But now I realize I’ve gone the other way—I went from being anorexic to serious problems with binge eating. Because of the craziness of wrestling, to this day I can’t stop gorging myself,” Brian told me. “I’m afraid I’ll never be able to eat normally again, and I’ll get huge.”

  While Brian’s story may seem unusual, statistics suggest that dozens of wrestlers of high school age injure themselves every year by either binging or stopping to eat normally. Because wrestling requires boys to compete against other boys in the same height and weight class, one of the strategies coaches use to win is to make smaller boys “beef up” (by eating a lot and lifting weights) so that they’ll be stronger, and make the bigger guys lose weight (by going on crash diets, doing aerobic exercise, and purging water through saunas and steam baths) so that they’ll end up wrestling against smaller, weaker boys. Some of the boys suffer only minor health problems while other actually become bulimic or anorexic. Even worse, it was recently publicized that in the United States each year as many as three high-school-age wrestlers actually die because of eating disorders. Apparently, an intense desire to do well and to be praised for their success as athletes lends many boys to become so obsessive that they actually do harm to themselves. Finally, in an emerging new era of research, much of which is being conducted by Dr. Harrison Pope and Roberto Olivardia, my colleagues at Harvard Medical School, there is growing evidence that many men (and thus probably many boys too) are becoming increasingly obsessed with their bodies, so concerned about whether they are large and muscular enough that they become exceedingly compulsive about weight lifting, dieting, and similar activities.

  But what is perhaps more common is for boys simply to overdo it when it comes to playing sports. Sixteen-year-old Scott reported that when he finally found a sport he was good at—running track—he felt he had to do just about whatever it took to succeed:

  “Most days I get up between four-thirty and five in the morning to go running. I usually do about five miles and then head home. During the track season, after doing sprints with the team, I run about ten to twelve miles. Off season, I go home each afternoon, get changed, and run around ten miles. On the weekends, I go running about ten to fifteen miles a day. I’ve always wanted to be good at a sport. Now that I’ve got one I can do well at, I’m going to keep on going—maybe even try for the Boston marathon.”

  Seventeen-year-old Adam, who competed in boxing and wrestling and who had a black belt in karate, shared the followed: “I pretty much eat, drink, and sleep with wrestling, and sometimes karate. During the wrestling season, I’m really busy at practice and doing meets. But all year round, I lift weights about three hours a day. I also watch professional wrestling as much as I can. My mother’s always telling me to turn off the TV. She hates wrestling.”

  On the surface, these may seem to be boys who have simply become very involved with a sport. The fact that they feel devoted to a particular sport in and of itself may be something to be encouraged, since it suggests they are motivated, hardworking, and destined for success. But I believe it’s important for those of us who mentor and coach boys to be vigilant about distinguishing between a boy’s healthy devotion to learning a sport and an all-consuming, self-destructive obsession—a loss of balance and a lack of respect for human limitations. Ideally, playing a sport should enable a boy to develop new skills and build his self-confidence as he hones them. But when playing that sport becomes the sole source of a child’s self-esteem—to the point where the child is devoting all of his waking hours to training for and performing that sport—there is some risk that the boy will end up harming himself or others.

  He can hurt himself through bodily deprivation (for instance, by not eating or by continuing to work out following an injury), through exhaustion (by exercising or practicing beyond his capabilities
), or by setting himself up for severe emotional distress (for instance, by allowing a limitation in his game to become an intense source of self-hate). He can hurt others by going overboard in playing a game (pushing, checking, or tackling too hard), verbally attacking team members or opponents (by cussing at rivals or “telling off” team members when they make mistakes), or by actually injuring others (for instance, by starting a fight during a hockey game or by throwing a baseball at somebody with the intention of hitting him).

  These kinds of damaging behavior are rare when we teach boys that a game is a game, that sports are a kind of play. But when we allow them to think of sports as a vitally important measure of their self-worth—when they become too wrapped up in how well they perform a sport at any particular game on any particular day—boys can end up seriously injuring themselves or others. So much of what affects the sports experience for our sons is how we guide them through it and how well we supervise the other adults who do so.

  SYLVIA: A MOTHER’S PLACE

  I met Sylvia Stanton in her second-story walk-up apartment in San Francisco. She was a diminutive woman, then in early middle age with the look in her soft brown eyes of a person who has seen her share of heartbreak. We were surrounded by an elderly but affectionate poodle and beautiful parrots.

  “It’s just the animals, Andrew, and me now,” she said, with just a hint of sadness in her voice, “since Jonathan died.” Her husband, a popular schoolteacher, had a family history of heart disease, and despite all efforts and precautions had died of a massive and sudden heart attack three years earlier, at age forty-nine. That was when Andrew was only twelve, but he had been bearing up well under the strain, Sylvia thought.

  Andrew was a scholar-athlete who played varsity soccer, tennis, and football on his middle school teams, and continued to letter in high school. We were focusing on an incident in a special football summer camp Andrew had attended only two months after his father’s death. Andrew had wanted to have the opportunity to go to this camp run by a series of well-known high school and college coaches, and his father had wanted him to go as well. Sylvia thought that it would be important not to let Jonathan’s death deter Andrew from this goal, and agreed to drive him the thirty miles every day so that he could attend.

  As you might imagine, the workouts at the football camp were grueling, and each day after the last scrimmage, Andrew would look more and more like a limp dishrag, ready for supper and bed. “He never complained,” she said, “It’s just not his nature, although that summer he clearly had diminished energy, what with the sadness we all were still feeling about his dad’s untimely death.”

  Then, one Friday afternoon, when Sylvia arrived to bring him home, Andrew was nowhere to be found. Sylvia finally traced him to the infirmary, where he was sitting curled into a little ball, holding ice to his leg and barely choking back tears. “Come on, Mom, let’s get out of here,” he sighed. It wasn’t until near the end of the long ride home that Sylvia pieced together the entire story.

  Sylvia was incensed. It seemed that Mr. Biaggi, head coach at the camp, had been pushing Andrew quite hard. Andrew continued to do the prescribed push-ups, but he began to tear up and cry. He was still fragile from his father’s death. At that point, “Mr. Big,” as the boys called him, started to taunt Andrew, calling him a “girl,” a “pansy” who “couldn’t take it.” “If you’re going to be a little faggot, you can go sit on the bench,” he apparently screamed in front of the other kids. Andrew refused to give in, and continued the routine. But all of a sudden he heard his ankle pop—he had sprained it the previous summer—and it seemed to be pulling out of the joint again. Andrew crimped his leg and fell to the ground.

  “Stanton, what the hell is stopping you?” Coach Biaggi blared.

  “I sprained my ankle, Coach—this time, I just can’t finish.”

  “That’s your choice, kid. But a man plays out the game. You can do five more. You can finish the last five push-ups, or get off the field—and don’t bother coming back.”

  Andrew, who was not ordinarily easily intimidated, began to cry. He didn’t want to be kicked out of practice, and so, despite the pain and resentment, he finished the push-ups, and then reported immediately to the infirmary.

  By the time they got home, Andrew’s foot was quite swollen. Sylvia took him to the pediatrician, who wrapped it and suggested that the boy skip camp for a couple of days. On the way home from the doctor’s office, mother and son began to talk again. Andrew was as angry as his mother was, but he was worried about what his mom might do. Sylvia felt hurt by this, and was also pained to see Andrew injured and upset as well. She was confused about how to respond. She knew Andrew needed to navigate his own world by himself and fight his own battles. “I always try to give him space, but this was different. It went beyond Andrew’s personal struggle to the whole principle of how, in just a small way, do you change the world these kids have to grow up in? Andrew is a sensitive kid, still close to me. At home, he can still put his head on my shoulder, and we cry together about his dad. OK, I know it’s still different for boys in a public space, but no one should be allowed to treat someone like that, without even knowing him.”

  Sylvia and Andrew talked. Andrew was upset and angry at first, but then realized his mom was right. Something had to be done. Andrew reluctantly agreed to let his mother speak to the director of the camp.

  Sam Donnatuck had spent many years coaching boys and young men in the sport he loved best, indeed loved more than anything else in the world—football. So Sylvia had a real task before her. But the meeting with Sam was strange—neither the struggle she expected, nor the agency for change she had dared to imagine. The head coach didn’t share Sylvia’s sense of outrage or horror about what had been done to her son, but he immediately agreed that Coach Biaggi had “gone overboard.” Sam would talk with Coach Biaggi, and Andrew would never be treated that way again. “You’ve got to understand, Mrs. Stanton, that unlike your son, some boys do need a kick in the pants to get motivated. It’s the nature of the business, we can’t be letting them get too soft on us. We coaches are there to push them beyond what they thought they could do, and that’s a lesson they can carry forward in life.”

  Sylvia heard this, but said, “I don’t agree, Sam. I believe strongly we can motivate our boys positively, without harshness, without hurting their feelings or mistreating them.”

  That was the day Sylvia Stanton joined the governing board of her local boy’s football association, and her son, Andrew, began the certification process to become an assistant coach for the junior division. “You’ve got to start somewhere, and why not here,” Sylvia explained.

  In telling Sylvia’s story, I mean to remind us of the power parents have to step in, to make a difference in how boys experience sports. While some parents might not feel comfortable being as assertive as Sylvia was, I have found that most of us have the ability to participate in one way or another to “coach our coaches.” Some parents may do this just by showing up at a game and offering encouraging remarks from the sidelines. Some may do this by attending team practices and perhaps volunteering to assist in aspects of training or coaching the team. And some may do this by being advocates for caring, thoughtful coaches—for men and women who will make our sons feel like important members of the team, who will urge these boys on in positive, confidence-building ways, and who will help them learn to accept winning or losing as an inevitable part of life.

  COACHING THE COACHES: HOW PARENTS CAN ENSURE

  THAT SPORTS ARE TRANSFORMATIVE

  Given the amazingly transformative experience that sports can be, I have found that it is critically important for parents to stay involved in their sons’ athletic activities. All of the positive attributes of sports militate in favor of parents intervening to make sure that this philosophy remain in the forefront of boys’ athletic activities. The overly competitive, brutal, obsessive aspects of sports—the aspects that lead boys to be injured both physically and emotionally—
can be avoided if parents pay close attention to how their sons’ activities are being directed.

  I have found that parents can intervene in all of the following ways:

  Participate directly in your son’s sports activities. By doing so, you can help model the positive approach to sports discussed in this chapter. Whether you join in as a teammate, serve as a coach, or just cheer from the sidelines in an upbeat, nonshaming way, your direct participation can make a world of difference in setting the right tone and making sure your son’s experience is a good one.

  Monitor your son’s coaches. Even if you do not have the time or inclination to stay directly involved in your son’s athletic activities, you can also help him by monitoring the coaches he plays under—what I call “coaching the coaches.” Just as no parent would tolerate a schoolteacher who was doing a poor job of teaching his or her children, no parent, I believe, should tolerate a coach who isn’t doing an effective job at leading boys in their sports activities.

  Teach sports in the same way you would teach other areas of learning. Indeed, I believe that sports should be taught to boys with the same patience and thoughtfulness with which most other areas of learning are taught. And so boys who make mistakes or have trouble learning when they’re involved in certain sports should be treated no differently than students who struggle with mastering math, reading, or writing.

  Accordingly, if you are coaching boys in sports (or “coaching a coach”), make sure every boy is given patient appropriate feedback and has the chance to develop his skills at a comfortable pace. As you supervise boys playing sports, you may find it helpful to try to model yourself after a teacher you admired when you were growing up—somebody who was thoughtful and encouraging, someone who actually helped you learn and grow.