In Praise of Wimping Out - New Yorker (blog)

Earlier this week, Kobe Bryant made an announcement: “I don’t take charges.” He’s not willing, he meant, to stand in the way of an onrushing opponent, even if doing so would mean provoking a foul and getting the ball back for his team. He had learned from others. “Pippen had a [messed] up back taking charges. Bird had a [messed] up back taking charges. I said, ‘I’m not taking charges.’ I figured that…out at an early age.” (Presumably Bryant said something stronger than [messed], but thanks to the Associated Press, which reported his comments, we can’t be sure.) Kobe had judged his abilities as a scorer, over a period of many years, to be more valuable for him and his team than allowing himself to be bowled over for the purposes of a single defensive stop. This was a surprising admission, not because the logic was flawedâ€"it isn’tâ€"but because Pippen and Bird and Jordan, the latter of whom rarely took charges, would have never admitted to such a thing. From childhood, all athletes make pacts with themselves and their sport: they will suffer pain, and they will play through it.

A few weeks back, playing in a rec-league basketball game, I found myself momentarily guarding the other team’s best player. He’s as close to Tim Duncan as this league gets, and when he received the ball and found that he had several inches and more than several pounds on his defenderâ€"meâ€"he put his head down and drove toward the basket. With no other good options, aside from supplication, I reacted from instinct, doing what I had been taught since grade school: I took the charge, and his shoulder crashed into my rib cage. My decision paid off just as it was supposed to. The ref called the foul on him, we got the ball, my teammates offered congratulations. And then some days later the pain in my chest got worse. It hurt to breathe. An X-ray revealed a small fracture in my rib cage. Nothing serious, but nothing to be done about it, either. And then my more rational friends got to me: “Why on Earth would you ever take a charge in a rec-league basketball game?”

Taking a charge is only one of the many self-sacrificial acts demanded of someone who plays a sport. Catchers stand fast in the face of charging base runners; the toughest of batters lean into, rather than away from, beanballs. Running backsâ€"comparatively small men, known for their speed and agilityâ€"are praised for standing in and protecting quarterbacks from the three-hundred-and-fifty-pound pass rushers bearing down on them, and lambasted when they don’t. I polled our Rink Rats on whether they had any experience stopping pucks with their bodies, one of the many body-sacrificing acts in hockey. One of them recalled a youth-league coach who held shot-blocking drills; another offered this:

This is what happens when you block a shot.

I try to avoid blocking shots, of course.

Only recently has the public paused even for a moment from celebrating shows of toughness and begun to show concern over the long-term health effects of athletic punishment. The more we think about it, the less clear it becomes that athletes should be sacrificing their bodies at allâ€"not just because of what it does to them after their careers are over, but because of the way it can affect their playing days, and their teams. Would the San Francisco Giants have been better off last year had promising young catcher Buster Posey allowed Scott Cousins to score? What good is it to save a single run by blocking the plate if the cost is a broken fibula and a missed season? And yet if he’d avoided the contact, Posey would have been criticized for it, just as Jeremy Lin was, from some corners, for announcing that his surgically repaired knee was at eighty-five per cent, but that he did not see the point in playing through the other fifteen with his team down 3-1 to the Miami Heat. We want athletes to take the pain, even when doing so might not be in anyone’s best interest.

In last week’s Sports Illustrated, Peter King wondered whether, in glorifying Junior Seau’s abilityâ€"and desireâ€"to play through pain, he had contributed in any way to the former N.F.L. linebacker’s suicide:

Since Junior Seau died, I’ve been wondering about our part in all of this. The media’s part, the hero-creating part, the Seau-as-superhero part. Did we lionize Seau for his toughness to the point where it was impossible for him to even consider asking for help? Superman never asks for help…

I don’t know what happened to Junior Seau. No one does, not yet. But I do know it bothers me that I helped create this image of a man incapable of feeling what you and I feel. In the end he must have felt more pain than any of us could imagine. And for that reason I know I’ll be a lot more cautious about praising men as heroes for playing with injuries they shouldn’t be playing with.

Is there a way to make athletes less tough? Should they be? I e-mailed Markus Koch, a retired N.F.L. defensive lineman who spoke to Ben McGrath for his article about concussions and football, who described three sources for the culture of playing through pain:

1. Immediate gratification (winning) without regard for long term cost (injury)
2. A myopic misunderstanding of one’s own well-being AND that of the opponent
3. A win at all cost approach that destroys the host (cancerous and out of balance)

Toughness is still a quality we value in our athletes over almost anything else. The thought that Seau shouldn’t play with a strained hamstring, or that a Rangers defenseman shouldn’t take a puck to the thigh, or that I shouldn’t take a charge, even in a rewardless rec-league game, is hard to fathom after years of being told to think otherwise. Only in looking back does it make perfect sense.

Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo