What I’ve Learned From Writing About Professional Athletes

There may be no better education in what annoying people call “the human condition” than spending years around high-level athletes.

From afar, professional athletes seem two-dimensional: They are superhuman, they are failures, they are greedy — they are living our dreams, so who cares about their nightmares? Top-level athletes don’t suffer the same banalities as the people who buy tickets to see them succeed or fail. They don’t make meager money writing memos all day, and it seems unlikely that they spend their weekends scrubbing their own baseboards.

But what I can say after spending a significant portion of the last decade around great players, mediocre players, and can’t-live-up-to-their-potential players is that the glamour and money that come with being a world-class professional athlete doesn’t wash away a person’s humanity.

Personally, that’s a tradeoff I would make without a second thought — if it were possible. What physical skill do I need to develop to no longer deal with insecurity, humiliation, and the buffoonery of my ego? Apparently, according to what I have observed up close (and through the limits my age puts on my ability to develop new skills), this perfect tradeoff is impossible.

When I began regularly interviewing professional athletes — baseball players, almost exclusively — I was frequently drawn to the origin of their motivation. What causes someone to chase the improbable dream? Where does this deep yearning for success come from? And what happens inside their minds when they fail?

Amongst the greats, there are a few key engines that I’ve observed. Some are in it for the money (because in our world, most of us have to trade labor for capital). Some are in it because of a deep emotional void that they can’t name and probably don’t even know is there. Some are driven by spite and the sensation of disrespect, both real and (very often) imagined. Many people, I believe, experience a core human desire to be exceptional.

The vehicle for that type of esteem is, I think, largely irrelevant. A person’s natural talents may make them the best in the world at hitting a baseball. Maybe they are more physically suited for success at table tennis. Some of us are stuck with cerebral pursuits like writing, the corniest form of creative expression there is.

Performance is all that matters when an athlete steps onto a field, court, or pitch, and nearly all of them know that most people who watch them do not-a-desk-job for a living do not want to hear about their struggles with their own interiority. But I have had the privilege of seeing those struggles up close. The person who has everything you want in life often still harbors doubts about their own value in this world — an infuriating reality for the rest of us, really.

It is this juxtaposition — performance versus humanity — that has created in me a ravenous interest in exploring the way this dichotomy shows up in artists and athletes of all varieties. It is not that I became bored with covering baseball or writing about ballplayers, but that the experience of being around them has made me ache for a broader range of subjects and topics where this combination of angst and victory may exist.

I need to know what drives the most exceptional amongst us. Why do they achieve what others cannot? The answers are often indescribable or unknown to the performers themselves, but it is a thrill to try to figure it out.