On the court and on the field, they are the world’s winners, exhibiting a natural grace and prowess their adoring fans can only dream about. Yet so often, when off the field, our sports heroes lose: their perspective, their balance, their place. In a work as timely as the latest fracas on the basketball court or the most recent drug-induced scandal in the dugout, Stanley H. Teitelbaum looks into the circumstances behind so many star athletes’ precipitous fall from grace. Why, he asks, do these sports heroes who seem to have it all also seem, increasingly, to have a superhuman proclivity for self-destruction?

 

In his psychotherapy practice, Teitelbaum has worked extensively with professional athletes and sports agents—work he draws on here for insight into the psyche of sports figures as well as the off-the-field challenges they face. Considering both historical and current cases, he shows how, in many instances, the very factors that elevate athletes to superstardom can contribute to their downfall: the adulation of fans and obsessive attention of the media and the distorted self-image and personal demons that often accompany a headlong drive to succeed. An evenhanded and honest look at athletes who have faltered, Teitelbaum’s work helps us see past our sports stars’ exalted image into what that image—and its frailty—says about our society and ourselves.

Stanley H. Teitelbaum is a practicing psychotherapist. He is faculty and senior supervisor at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health and the Training Institute for Mental Health, both in New York, and the Contemporary Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies in New Jersey.

“Stanley Teitelbaum’s volume, Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols, is a thoroughly researched book full of entertaining stories about the underbelly of sports.”—Max Kellerman, TV & Radio Personality

“Drugs, gambling, domestic abuse, even-occasionally-murder-all are part of the day-to-day existence of the world-class athletes profiled in this sobering account by psychotherapist and lifetime sports lover Teitelbaum. . . .While Teitelbaum does cite ‘an erosion of morality and ethical behavior in the public sector,’ he is not a moralist, but objective and unsympathetic in his detailed examination of the foibles, compulsions and pathologies of the men and women many fans still idolize.”—Publishers Weekly

“Teitelbaum writes persuasively that sports stars have much to answer for. . . . An even-handed, practical argument that athletes must be guided by decency and held accountable for their actions—and that fans need to get a life, or at least a dose of reality."—Kirkus Reviews