On the Couch : By Dr. Richard Lustberg

An Analysis of Current Topics and Issues in Sport
September 30, 1997

With the football season here, there are vast changes in the households of many a player. The phone, as one wife puts it, keeps ringing incessantly as the requests for appearances and interviews begin to pile up. The pressures of the job begin to invade personal lives. In particular, the professional athlete’s wife and family are asked to sublimate their needs and desires for economic survival, the good of the team, and the ultimate goal: A Super Bowl ring. From the outside looking in, it all seems so glamorous, so appealing. One might even fantasize about being a wife of a professional athlete.

The obvious reality, of course, is that players and their families are really just everyday people much like us. They come from various regions of the country, from different social economic levels, as well as varied cultural and religious backgrounds. They experience the same vicissitudes and traumas of life that we do. But the point is they experience more. Somehow or the other athletes have taken on star personas. The difference, however, from movie star status is enormous. A movie star is made of celluloid and lives and dies behind his agent, his carefully crafted screen persona, and acts like himself only in the privacy of his home. The star football player does his job, by living and dying with touchdown catches or missed passes in front of an adoring or pandering public, a vociferous fan screaming adulation or profanities. Newspaper headlines, and a myriad of media coverage, proclaim icon or bum status based on 60 minutes of work each week. In fact, at times the pressures become so enormous that the divorce rate of professional football players is higher than it is for the rest of society. This appears to be in part due to the fact that players and their wives are unprepared for the stresses that their families face as they are placed in the public eye, as well as acquiring the status that comes with the newfound fame and money that accompanies it. Teams like the Jets and Giants have hired psychologists and other support personnel in order to assist the players in addressing these problems. Wives report great difficulty in their effort to protect their families from the glare of the spotlight and the public scrutiny that accompanies it. They find it almost impossible to do so.

The very nature of the job becomes more stressful as American sport has become increasingly a business allowing greater player movement, forcing relocation and involving the emotional adjustments that are needed when changing homes, and schools, often leaving behind relatives and friends. These changes are all rated as high psychological stresses and put tremendous pressures on the wives and children to adjust and "fit in" to new relationships. Many wives often find it difficult to make friendships knowing that they can often be temporary because their husbands might be traded. One player’s wife said she had great difficulty judging who truly were her friends, noting that people’s attitudes and actions changed drastically toward her once they knew that she was the wife of professional football player. She noted that she felt constrained at times to act herself in public due to the fact that people did not give her the same latitude that they give to themselves; thus holding her to a higher standard.

The wife of a professional sports star is interesting to analyze. Actually many have great difficulty establishing their own identities. It has become common practice during games to pan in on wives and families who attend games. Yet, the commentators’ statements are vapid catching their glee or their pain and depicting them as stereotyped objects. The umbrella comments begin and end with the"lovely wife" as well. Imagine sitting in the stands and hearing your husband berated in the most profane manner. Imagine your children coming home from school crying; upset about the things that were said about their father. It happens all the time to the athletes’ families. It is made all so easy by the fact that we do not always experience them as people but as objects and as places to dump our own projective and reactive feelings of betrayal over a lost game or missed field goal.

The stresses and strains of the wives families of football players and professional athletes in general are unique. All families rise and fall together. But those in the public eye are constantly seen in their fishbowls. Entertainers are household names and their lives become fodder for the media. Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s every move are familiar to anyone who follows Entertainment Tonight or the gossip pages of their newspaper. But the private lives of the majority of sports figures, except situations with some real notoriety such as the controversy surrounding the Mets’ Carl Everett, are not of great interest to the public. Only a real Jets buff knows whether Adrian Murrell is married or single.

While changes may be on the way, the average reader of the sports pages of any newspaper remains a die-hard male who generally finds little appeal in most human-interest stories unless it involves the player and management. Sometimes this is a blessing in disguise. Yet at the same time, many player’s wives who share similar experience: Laboring behind the scenes, supporting their husbands during excessively trying times, have trouble separating from their husbands’ notoriety and on-the-field performance. Giving way to a huge emotional psychological struggle to establish and retain their own identity.