Personal Narratives of Elite College Athletes: Stories of
Career-Ending Injuries
Stephen C. Brock
Douglas A. Kleiber
Martha White
University of Georgia
That was the hardest year: from going from being a part
of the team ... to my sophomore year - not being
anything.
Interpretive Context:
Numberless are the traces in the records of the human
sciences of struggles to say something abstractly "true" about
human behavior. Our aim, however, is concrete and links us with
the world of physicians and patients where the guiding value is
"utility;" where something "true" but not useful is an unwelcome
guest. The urgency of "utility" is evident in the injury
narratives of elite college athletes - the informants in this
study. Injury shrinks the ill-one's universe; where once the
body was a gateway to a wide world, injured, it becomes the only
world. In this diminished universe, only that which is most
relevant to it has meaning.
The qualitative work discussed in this paper and the
quantitative work to which it relates were undertaken in order to
examine, extend, refine, and challenge the following proposition:
Medicine ought rightly be conceived as the practical expression
of the "sciences of persons," i.e. as requiring more than one
scientific approach. The 17th century - modern - view of the
"science of things" which undergirds biomedicine, has found
success by reducing "person" to "object" on the way to revealing
"mechanisms of action" of disease or injury, leading often to
prediction and beneficent control (Foss & Rothenberg, 1987).
"Narrative" (as it will come to be understood in the present
context) is concerned with illness and offers a needed
complementary science. Narrative is not a total stranger to
Medicine. In a small corner of Psychiatry where an existential
approach is embraced, a "life-story" approach to patients is
advocated as the "hermeneutic" complement to the "positivist"
perspective on psychiatric patients. Ours is an attempt to
"foreground" this perspective, to develop it as theory and
practice useful to all of medicine, - essential in primary care -
rather than leave it to those few psychiatrists whose
self-confidence permits them to look beyond the "disease" model
of illness. In a narrative approach, "illness" is conceived as a
threat to a life-narrative, rendering unlikely an assumed
future-self. While all future-selves are embodied, emphasis on
future embodied performance varies. A life-narrative of
successful parent differs in its detailed concern with embodied
performance with a life-narrative of professional linebacker. The
injured college athlete who shapes his/her life-narrative
exclusively around continuing (readily envisioned) embodied
performance in sport, offers a bold specific depiction of the
general experience of "illness".
A narrative approach is a practical expression of postmodern
scientific thinking (quantum mechanics and chaos theory apply) -
an outgrowth of phenomonology, philosophical anthropology,
literary criticism, philosophy of mind, cultural anthropology,
symbolic interactionism, folkloristics, narrative psychology,
existential psychiatry and more - it takes the "person" as
intentional being, capable of authoring and narrating a
life-story (influenced by culture), and capable of interpreting
life experience in such a fashion as to "re-story" a
life-narrative disrupted by illness. The assertion that a
narrative approach should complement the biomedical approach
evokes many questions. Some are theoretical, ie. How can
Narrative be construed as "scientific"? Others are pragmatic.
How is the physician to solicit an illness narrative? When? What
is the significance of the patient's commentary on his/her
illness narrative? Is it the patient's commentary that changes as
a result of therapy? Our initial approach to such
questions was inspired in part by findings form a quantitative
analysis of survey data comparing "reliable and valid" paper and
pencil measures of well-being of uninjured elite athletes with
those of seriously injured ones (Kleiber and Brock, 1992). Of
those who had been injured, only those who had been invested in
playing professional sport were likely to show relatively lower
self-esteem and life satisfaction five to ten years later. From
the perspective of illness as disruption of life-narrative, with
attended "symptoms" of identity confusion and loss of self
esteem, one could argue that some of the respondents were still
suffering "illness" long after the injury resolved. To adequately
address this proposition, and approach the questions raised above
as well, we needed a more qualitative approach to interpreting
the personal narratives of seriously injured elite athlete's?
For this pilot qualitative analysis of illness narratives, we
considered five interviews we had conducted face-to-face with
female injured athletes who were currently enrolled in university
and eight telephone interviews with males who had participated in
the earlier survey research project, whose careers as elite
athletes were ended almost two decades earlier. We asked each
informant to tell the "story" of their sport injury and any
probes were requests for elaboration. By first applying
Mishler's (1986) "core narrative" approach to interviews of 13
seriously injured elite college athletes and, then, by analyzing
these narratives from the perspective of "liminality" (in the
tradition of anthropology of initiation) and "stigma" (in the
tradition of sociology of deviance), we are able to address the
following "narrative" questions here: What are the effects of a
disrupted life narrative on the person's identity/self-esteem?
Are there patterns in the stories of illness? What role does
culture or the patient's "world" play in the
construction/presentation of illness narratives?
I. On identity and self-esteem: Depending on the character and
the life story of athletes, on the idiosyncratic way each
dreams of future sport attainment, the troubling effects on
identity and self-esteem of an injury which ends their sport
career are either severe or mild - but apparently unavoidable.
First the voices of women athletes:
Being out of swimming I had a chance to see myself as a
person and before I always saw myself as X___-the-athlete,
somebody who doesn't have to do anything else because she is
so good at swimming that she's got something that she's good
at and as long as she goes to practice everyday and works
hard she doesn't have to concentrate an anything else. And now
I have to concentrate on making myself a whole person and my
injury - it was good in that aspect - but -I mean going back
to being upset and everything - I - I still get real upset
allot because I feel -um- I don't have that to fall back on
-If somebody asks me, "What sorority are you in?", it was
always easy for me to say , "Oh I'm an athlete. Now its hard for
me to say I'm an athlete because I'm not really an athlete
anymore. You know and now its something I don't have.
I don't know what I am right now.
That was another part of my life that was just not existent
anymore. When I left track - not only did I leave the track
team - I left the athletes - I don't go in the training room
anymore - where I used to see baseball players, basketball
players, football players - tennis - etcetera... I don't go
into the weight room. I see none of the other athletes. I am - to
me - athletic, though no longer an athlete....I don't like
it. I liked being an athlete. I liked that closeness that to
me - you know - you get being an athlete. I mean there is a
bond between all athletes because its hard - its hard just
being an athlete.(DB)
...I think - mad, kind of, inside; angry at myself and at
just trying to blame everything, everyone, myself and
everyone else for how I felt and knots, kind of, still in my
stomach about it all. So it just didn't end the way I wanted
it to end. But now I think I gave it the best shot I could...
And a few of the comments from the men looking back at their
reactions to their career- ending sport injury:
I just - kind of - resigned myself to the fact that that was
the end of things. I was heart broken, let's face it. I
think anybody that's ever picked up a baseball or basketball
or football or had dreamed about playing professional -I
mean, you've always been led to believe that that's easy
street, you know. Big fat salary and fan adulation and summers
off or whatever... I was pretty much resigned to the fact
that I was going to be part of the other 99% that never
makes it. You know I got farther than most people ever got
anyway. I was pretty sick about it.
I was disappointed. One, because you're not in the spotlight
anymore and I think that whenever you're in the spotlight
and then it's shut off for you, I think there's always some
kind of identity crisis and I'm sure there was. I really
don't recall at this time because now I look back at it as a
positive aspect but I'm sure I had a problem with it at the
time.
II. The stories of these injured athletes are patterned:
* Prologue - a celebration of the athlete's gifts through
"recognition" of high school sport performance; for example,
I started playing basketball in 5th grade and I've always
been tall so and I guess I got my ability from my dad
because he played and he was good and so I kept playing and
I went to a high school that had a outstanding girls
basketball program... Our team went to the state tournament every
year I was in high school and I was highly recruited my
junior and senior years.
* Chapter one - choosing the university at which to best express
athletic gifts; usually preparing for a future-self as athlete,
sometimes pursuing education towards an additional possible
future-self; for example,
... I was a little late deciding what university to attend
and "State" (located in his home town) in the meantime had
signed quite a few players whose names I had recognized from
reading publications and things as good high school players
and I saw the potential to be part of a potentially good
football team and "State" expressed quite a bit of interest in me
more than some and less than some others so I just decided
to go ahead and attend there and I would be housed in a
dormitory on campus so I wouldn't be staying at home so it
would be more or less an away from home college experience
but I would still be in town and I was familiar with all the
surroundings and things like that.
* Chapter two - collegiate participation in sport and the injury
episode - either the injury is incremental and invisible or
sudden and apparent (with consequences for the themes of later
chapters); for example,
So they took me to a doctor but the doctor couldn't find
anything wrong with it because looking at it and feeling of
it he goes, "Ok, this is a cartilage problem." He goes, "But
it's nothing major, you know, you'll be fine." Well I go,
"Like that's fine". So a few months passed and it got to a
point where I couldn't walk, my knee would just hurt so bad that
if I put my foot down I could feel pain shooting all through
my leg and I finally told my trainer and she's, "Like just
stop." She said, "I knew there's something wrong, somehow I
will convince them something is wrong so just don't run
anymore".
It happened on Christmas of my freshman year and we had a
(gymnastics) meet in 14 days. And ___ (a coach) was sitting
right there watching and he heard it pop out the side and it
just like rolled over and I couldn't stop because I was
still going and so I finished the time pass and I just kindof
like "jelloed" to the ground and I squeezed my ankle as hard as I
could and when I was down at ____ (a training program) we
were always taught that if you can get up and walk you
better and you don't cry and you work with injuries, that's
just the way that life is. So I squeezed my ankle as hard as I
could to make the pain go away. And ___ was trying to pry my
fingers away going, "Let me look, let me look." I had this
big old ball on the side of my ankle and I went and iced it
and went home and iced it ...
* Chapter three - rehabilitation and the decision about, and
attempts to return to active sport participation; for example,
I mean this thing (scar from surgery) has to be 12-14 inches
long and you it was all hard and itches and everything and I
thought, "Oh my gosh what have I done here?" you know. But
I hung in there and I worked diligently and would go once or
twice a day and I would start with whirlpool treatments to
loosen things up and then I would try to catch somebody
around there that would help me bend my leg back to stretch it,
to loosen it up so that I could regain mobility... And the
whole time you know one of the trainers there... he wasn't
real confident I'd be able to come back and he kindof would
drop hints here and there and I was determined that I was
going to beat the thing Well, you know I had been a winner all my
life and the team that I went in with was a good team and I
was going into my senior year and we were ranked number one.
I figured we could win the national championship and I ... I
wanted to be a part of this success that I knew this team
was going to have and I worked and worked and I decided that
that's what I wanted.
* Chapter four - the recognition of the "career ending" nature of
the injury/disease and the decision to stop; for example,
I knew then that I wasn't going to be the athlete that I
was...I kindof knew as I went through the season and I
didn't say anything to anyone because - like I talked with
my family and Dr.___ and I didn't say anything to (the
coaches). They knew that I was going to be limited to one event
the rest of my time here... That went without saying and I
went to (the head coach) at the end of the season, you know,
after everything we had two weeks off before we start
working out again and I went out to her house and... I was
sitting in this rocking chair and ...I said, "Just wait a second
I've got to catch my breath." and it was the hardest thing I
had done. I just said, "This is not fair to me or to you or
to the team. I can't do this. Here I'm risking injury
every time I land a bar dismount. This is not fair to
me..." I said, "I don't feel I can give the team as much
participating as maybe I used to... it's not fair and she
understood and we had a long talk...
* Chapter five - the experience of loss - with feelings of
confusion, isolation, guilt, anger, bitterness, disconnectedness
(in various combinations and degrees) along with the feeling
of relief for some. These reactions will be documented fully
later in this paper. (The stories told by those currently in
college ends with Chapter five, leaving to the reader/listener to
imagine a future resolution.)
* Chapter six (in stories told from the distance of nearly 20
years from the injury episode) places the injury in a context,
and addresses how this disruption to their then- life-narrative
has influenced its authorship since; for example, Well, I
think it's a lot like being fired from a job. I mean, I was
with... when I first got out of graduate school I was with a
company for 10 years and we were bought and sold and bought
and sold and I finally told my wife you know one of these
Fridays I'm going to come home and I'm going to have all my
stuff with me and sure enough about six weeks later - and it
was a similar feeling. I mean it was some place that you had
gone to for 10 years straight. You knew everybody, you had
good relationships with, you know, normal corporate culture
may be intense and all of a sudden you don't go there
anymore and it (the experience of his sport injury) was the
same kindof a feeling.
III. On the effects of culture (the athlete's world) on the
injury narrative: Having asserted that a pattern of injury
stories exists and that a key element of that pattern is a
threat to self-esteem and identity, what is the status of our
third question? What do we learn from inquiring about the
role of the patient's "world" or culture in shaping these
particular patterned expressions of illness-as-
disruption-of-life-narrative? We find the "mechanism of action"
which gives rise to a pattern. Recall the quote which
introduced the paper: That was the hardest year: from going
from being a part of the team ... to my sophomore year - not
being anything.
This sentiment took many forms in these athletes' stories, for
example: As practice wore on I could see they weren't going
to give me the opportunity (-) to regain my position. I was
- kind of -pushed off to the side as a - what we termed back
then as a AYO - All You Others - there was the first and
second string and,(-) and the rest of the team. You know -
they referred to them as the AYOs and that's where I ended up.
How can we understand this reaction to the loss of place in
the world of sports? The concepts of LIMINALITY and STIGMA which
have illuminated the life-world of disabled persons (eg. Murphy,
1990) are useful to exploring the athletes's experience of loss
and the threat to identity which occurs when the decision to end
the sport career is taken.
"Liminality", was first coined at the turn of the century by
anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1960) and then refined in the
work of Victor Turner (1967). Writing of "rites of passage" in
societies "less civilized" than his own - where, in contrast to
his modern secular "world", much of human affairs was sacred -
van Gennep observed that a move from a "secular" to "sacred"
condition (or vice versa) called for a transitional state: the
liminal state. Neophytes in the liminal state are neither what
they were nor what they will become; their ambiguous status as
undefined individuals makes them socially invisible. The injured
athlete, who no longer has the defining role of athlete, can be
understood to experience such an ambiguous, undefined and
invisible condition. We will consider the liminal state of the
injured athlete as a transition from a "sacred" to a "profane"
condition momentarily when we look more directly at the patient's
"world". "Stigma", derived from the sociology of deviance,
made prominent by Erving Goffman, originally referred to signs
which signal "something unusual and bad about the moral status of
the signifier...but is [currently] applied more to the disgrace
itself than to the bodily evidence of it." (Goffman, 1963, p.1)
Historical evidence points to the persistent association of
disease with moral corruption (eg. Duby, 1988). Medical
sociologists have shown that many sickness conditions are
stigmatizing (eg. Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and produce dynamics
of "management of a spoiled identity" (Goffman's phrase) common
to those who are stigmatized. In addition, Hynman (1970) found
that feeling stigmatized by one's sickness can adversely affect
physical improvement as well as create psychological problems.
Murphy (1990) offers a glimpse of the dynamics of guilt and shame
associated with stigma in physical disability:
Shame and guilt are one in that both lower self-esteem and
undercut the facade of dignity we present to the world.
Moreover, in our culture they tend to stimulate each other.
The usual formula is that a wrongful act leads to a guilty
conscience; if the guilt becomes publicly known, then shame
must be added to the sequence, followed by punishment. There is a
causal chain that goes from wrongful act to guilt to shame
to punishment. A fascinating aspect of disability is that it
diametrically and completely reverses this progression,
while preserving every step. The sequence of the person
damaged in body goes from punishment (impairment) to shame to
guilt and, finally to the crime. This is not a real crime but a
self-delusion that lurks in our fears and fantasies, in the
haunting, never articulated question; What did I do to
deserve this." (Murphy, 1990, pp.92-93)
One of the injured athletes ponders culpability for his situation
as follows: Oh, it was devastating. It was like the rug had
been pulled out from under me. I had... I was one of these
guys... I didn't drink and smoke, I used to... It was a big
joke around my fraternity house that the guys would come to
me on Sunday morning to find out what they'd done the night
before because they knew that I wouldn't be drinking or
smoking so that I'd be the only one that could remember what
everybody else did so... I played it pretty straight and I
never tried drugs, never... you know I realized that I had
an opportunity here that I didn't want to mess up and I really
felt in many respects that I had been cheated that I had
abided by supposedly all the rules and it really hurt
emotionally that a lot of teammates that I had, that I know
had not been as strict with themselves and disciplined as I had
been, the next fall especially, to see them going out on the
field and playing and to have myself standing there on the
sidelines. I felt like I had been cheated.
Current writers on physical disability point to problems in
using "stigma" for depicting the experience of the disabled. For
example, they point out that "stigma" lumps together those who
choose to deviate from moral standards (eg. prostitutes) with
those whose stigmatizing condition is given rather than chosen
(eg. African Americans and blind people). We leave to another
paper a detailed explication of the debate about stigma and its
applicability to understanding disability in general. If we
return to our initial question about the role of the injured
athlete's "world" in shaping the illness experience and if we
conceive the world of athletics as, in someway, "sacred"
(Giamatti, 1989), then LIMINALITY makes sense in its original
reference to a transition state for the individual who crosses
the boundaries between the "sacred" and "profane". The idea of
sport's sacredness opens the experience of injured elite athletes
to a unique application of STIGMA. Usually the stigmatized person
loses his/her ordinary state and acquires a socially devalued
one. The athlete's stigma, however, is the loss of a celebrated
state and acquisition of ordinariness. "Chapter five" of the
injured athletes' stories all consider the question of guilt as
the loss of their former celebrity threatens their self-esteem -
What did I do to deserve this? Consider the voices of the
injured athletes as they speak of their liminal experience, their
transition to being more of the profane world than the sacred
world: ... I guess I'm kind of bitter - probably sports
writers - when things were going good they're knocking the
door down or stopping you in the hall for interviews and
stuff like that, then when things went the other way, then
they aren't interested in you. They just look the other way or
pretend they don't see you and so I guess maybe that's just
being realistic.
You know when you go through a season you got all the
preparation. You can see people - if you're not a part of it
- all the sudden you're standing on the outside looking in.
You feel kind of lost for a while. And I felt that way for a
long time - I mean a long time being that whole following
year...It wasn't so much a loss of self esteem as maybe - I
always felt like people were looking at me differently like
I was something less than I was before... those are still
things that I can feel pretty readily...All the
relationships I had before that (career end) were kind of cut or
altered in some way because I wasn't that - I don't want to
say "special" person - but that special quality that I had
before was gone.
I think people fail to realize the adulation and the
feeling, the tremendous satisfaction that you get from
playing sports and people add to that by writing about it
and by talking about it and having it on TV and people
recognize you for something that you do on a Saturday afternoon
and really in every other way you're just exactly like them
except for something that you do better and so much
attention comes to that, that when you have to give it up
it's very, very difficult and it's very ego deflating in a
sense that people don't recognize you, people don't care about
you, they don't have the same affection or the same
intensity in a relationship is not there...
Discussion:
In this paper we have centered attention on the athlete's
illness experiences; emotional responses to the loss of a
"gloried self" (Adler & Adler, 1989). The illness experience
differs markedly from the injury experience as reported in these
patterned narratives. The sport injury is an experience for
many, engaging the athlete with physicians, trainers, and
coaches. These stories depict detailed attention of significant
others to the rupture of physiology (the injury) and to its
treatment. The illness, on the other hand, - the rupture in the
athlete's life-narrative - is described in these illness
narratives as an experience for the former athlete alone. Our
efforts to shed light on the dynamics of illness, here, is a
small first step in developing an approach to "re-storying" the
injured athlete.
References
Adler, P. A., & Adler, P. (1989). The Gloried Self: The
Aggrandizement and the Constriction of Self. Social
Psychology Quarterly, 52(4), 299-310.
Duby, G. (1988). The Aristocratic Households of Feudal France.
In Aries, P. and Duby, G. (eds.) A History of Private Life
vol.2, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Foss, L., & Rothenberg, K. (1987). The Second Medical
Revolution: From Biomedicine to Infomedicine. Boston:
Shambhala, New Science Library.
Giamatti, A. B. (1989). Take Time for Paradise: Americans and
their Games. New York: Summit Books.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled
Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Guttman, A. (1978). From Ritual to Record. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Heyman, M. D. (1971). The Stigma of Stroke. Geriatrics, 26,
132-141.
Kleiber, D. A., & Brock, S. C. (1992, March). The Effect of
Career-Ending Injuries on the Subsequent Well-Being of Elite
College Athletes. Sociology of Sport Journal, 9(1).
Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Mischler, E. G. (1986). The Analysis of Interview-Narratives.
In Sarbin, T. A. (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied
Nature of Human Conduct, New York: Praeger Publishers.
Murphy, R. F. (1990). The Body Silent. New York: W. W. Norton.
Riessman, C. K. (1990). Strategic Uses of Narrative in the
Presentation of Self and Illness: A Research Note. Soc.
Sci. Med., 30(11), 1195-1200.
Schneider, J. W., & Conrad, P. (1983). Having Epilepsy.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Schwartz, M. A., & Wiggins, O. P. (1988, May/June).
Perspectivism and the Methods of Psychiatry. Comprehensive
Psychiatry, 29(3), pp. 237-251.
Slavney, P. R. (1985, January). The Life-Story Method in
Psychotherapy and Psychiatric Education: The Development of
Confidence. American Journal of Psychotherapy, XXXIX(1),
pp. 57-67.
Turner, V. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. University of
Chicago Press: Chicago.