I should first say that I’ve never meet Patrick Kane. We are the same age and share some mutual friends but I’m not in any better position to talk knowingly about his character than is any average reader of The Buffalo News. When I first heard about Kane’s incident with the cab driver, words like maturity and ego started floating around in my head. I heard the testimonies and I saw the bruises on the cabbie’s face. There’s no excuse for someone, anyone, to respond that violently towards a 62-year-old man. If I had sat down to write this three weeks ago, immediately after the details became a matter of public record, the tone of this post would have been a lot like this paragraph: judgmental.
The more I started to flesh out the ideas I had about the importance of good character and how little of it young athletes seem to have, the more I realized how inadequate a position I’m in to criticize Kane’s behavior. I have flaws (as my former girl friends would gladly attest) and I’ve made regrettable mistakes too. It’s clear to me though that our age is just about all that Kane and I share in common. The best way to gain perspective on Kane’s actions is through exploring the lives of other professional athletes, particularly those that were productive early in their careers.
Recently, I watched a few clips some of Mike Tyson’s latest documentary and I started thinking about how much emotional energy Tyson put into his boxing career. His persona was iconic and it sometimes spilled beyond his professional career and into his personal life. How could you expect anything different from Tyson, or any young athlete for that matter? He was ill equipped to maintain a stable personal life while achieving so much professionally.
To be a great professional, athlete or otherwise, one not only needs the talent and the passion, but also the belief that you belong amongst the best. Tyson succeed on all accounts. It was clearly his personal life that led to his demise as a professional boxer. What caused his personal life to derail? It certainly wasn’t his talent in the boxing ring or his passion for the sport. It was his overwhelming belief in his superiority over other boxers which sometimes caused him to act similarly towards the people around him.
You have to remember that these are people who do their jobs with an unfathomable amount of viewers. The pressure that comes with that is something that most people, myself included, cannot understand. Ask yourself this, what is the greatest number of people that have watched you do anything? Is the answer to that question anywhere near the numbers these athletes perform their jobs in front of? We can only speculate on the psychological demands involved in that.
Professional athletes also have an unwavering connection to the consumers that indirectly pay their salaries. We learn new details about athlete’s lives every single day from the media. Tyson never missed an opportunity to confirm his greatness when speaking to the press. Admittedly, he wanted to strike fear in his opponents and to grow his reputation as a prodigious fighter. I think that Tyson also put on this show for himself. Publicly reaffirming your greatness is a terrific way to find the motivation to live up to those expectations. We see this kind of behavior all the time from current athletes. It’s not always ego that drives athletes to speak out to the press. I suspect that an honest, self aware athlete will tell you that occasional public outbursts help maintain an ultra competitive state of mind.
As far as Kane is concerned, his situation is a bit different as he did not grow up in an unsavory environment like Tyson did. On all other accounts however, his professional career is not all that different from Tyson’s or any other athlete who has had success at a young age.
So where does that leave us given Kane’s behavior towards the cab driver? Everything our parents taught us and Kane’s parents taught him about how to treat people can be thrown out the window as far as I’m concerned. Not many of us have had the magnitude of success Kane has achieved so early in a career with such intense public attention. How did he do it? Certainly having a great deal of talent and passion for the game helps. But without having an unnaturally strong belief in his own abilities, Kane almost certainly wouldn’t have made it this far. That’s what it takes to make it as a professional athlete in 2009. Being emotionally balanced is not a virtue, it’s a hindrance.
On one hand we praise him for being mentally discipline enough to get the most out of his physical talent while on the other hand we vilify him when he behaves with that same edge that has helped him achieve so much success in hockey.
No doubt this was act of terrible judgment but we as a society need to take some responsibility here. Eventually Kane will mature and learn to separate his approach to the game of hockey from his social interactions with others. Until then, we should cut him some slack. He is still learning. While most of us will insist we would never act the way Kane did on that infamous night, few, if any, are in a position to relate or understand what it’s like to be in Kane’s shoes.