Editor's Note: Originally drafted by FC Dallas in the first round of the 2011 SuperDraft, Bobby Warshaw spent more than two years in Major League Soccer before moving to Scandanavia, where he currently plays for Norwegian First Division club Bærum SK. A formeracademic standout at Stanford University, he has also written for Deadspin.com and PennLive.com. His viewpoints do not necessarily represent that of the editorial staff of MLSsoccer.com.
I’m a 25-year-old man. I have wonderful parents, compassionate brothers, and caring friends. I play soccer for my income. I sign autographs on the street. I am living the life most human beings dream to have.
But if I’m being honest, I never open my mouth to talk about what’s going on inside my head. I don’t talk about it because I’m an athlete and we don’t talk about what’s going on inside our heads.
Eighteen months ago Landon Donovan took a break from professional soccer. He told the LA Galaxy that he needed some time off and went to travel Southeast Asia. When he returned to LA in March 2013, he landed to a bombardment of questions from the media, and the press weren’t alone in wondering what had happened. We as Major League Soccer players had plenty we wanted to know too.
Here’s what Donovan told us: He needed a break.
Why? How? You’re on top of the world, we thought. I’ll be the first to say that I was annoyed by the whole thing, and I don’t think I was alone among MLS players. We all have our problems. We still show up to work and do our job.
Then we began to learn a bit more, and all that was behind Donovan’s motivations. During a media scrum in Los Angeles he told everyone he had been burned out since the Galaxy won MLS Cup the previous winter, and that the time away from the game helped clear his head.
When the editors at MLSsoccer.com approached me about a potential article on Landon Donovan, I responded in seconds. I knew what mattered most to me. I knew what impact Landon would leave on my life. This man, this star athlete on top of the world with countless resources at his disposal and everything to lose, opened up to the world about the real emotions going on inside his head.
“We have a sort of stigma that being in a difficult mental place is not acceptable,” Donovan said at the time. “We should ‘pull ourselves up by the bootstraps’ and ‘fight through it,’ and all this. And it’s a little peculiar to me, that whole idea, that if someone’s physically hurt, we’re okay with letting them take the time they need to come back. But if someone’s in a difficult time mentally, we’re not OK with letting them take the time they need to come back.
“Hopefully,” he added, “there’s at least a few people out there in the world that can relate to this and be somewhat inspired.”
Did you hear that? He’s talking about mental health. And he’s repeated the same kinds of comments plenty of times ever since, most recently in a parade of retrospective interviews and career eulogies this month.
Perhaps it tells the story of how rare and exceptional that concept is that I feel uncomfortable just writing the words
mental health.
I’m a man, and more importantly here, I’m an athlete. We don’t use those words. We don’t talk about our feelings. Even my parents – who have been overly supportive with everything I’ve written for this site and others – cringed at the idea.
Are you sure you want to do this?
Yes. One of the greatest things Landon Donovan has done for my career was express his opinions about mental health and the idea that fatigue, happiness, and loneliness directly affect my play on the field. The heart and head show up between the white lines as much as the legs and feet.
Athletes live in a gladiator’s world. Perhaps that’s hyperbole – we’re all just playing sports, after all, right? – but it certainly feels dead serious in the locker room. We have a lot on the line: paychecks, pride, the happiness of thousands of loyal supporters. Any issue – psychological, emotional, physical – is seen as a sign of weakness. The strong survive. When I talk to athletes about mental health, they view it as something of a game of survival. Some can’t handle it. More jobs for the rest of us.
And a large part of me agrees with the process. There have been moments when I could have talked about my feelings. There have been opportunities to open up. The girl I'm dating asks. My parents ask. An old friend wonders, "What's new?"
Each time I make a rational decision: Open up and feel vulnerable, or keep it in and feel strong. I like to think that letting my troubles boil inside of me builds the muscles and anger inside of my chest. Each new adversity I internalize builds a layer of armor.
I’d like to think coaches and teammates will tell you I'm as steel as they come on the field. I like it like that. I need that. We don't do vulnerable, and we don't choose weak.
But then life happens. We lose friends to accidents. Some guys get injured on the field – badly. Kids get sick. Divorce. Some of us grow apart from the ones who raised us and the lives that made us men in the first place. Plenty of guys spend sleepless nights tossing in bed after games in MLS and in leagues around the world. I know it.
So why has it been such a novel concept that our playing would suffer because of this? Donovan’s right when he compares mental status to physical injuries, and he’s right when he says we give someone six weeks off for a sore hamstring but largely ignore emotional injuries. We ask why a guy looks beat on the field, but we ignore the symptoms at the dinner table the night before. We talk so often about the game being mental, but we never talk about the mind.
I don't think MLS or any league I’ve played in has a mental health epidemic. I couldn't tell you Landon's words have been seen as some kind of wake-up call or a beacon for a group of broken hearts, in part because plenty of good guys I know wouldn’t even engage on this topic when I asked. Instead they talk about how lucky they are and their pleasure to accept the bruises along the way. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they didn’t notice Landon trying to kick down a wall.
I did. And I know this comparison between mental and physical health makes as much sense as anything I've ever heard. I know being a human is tough enough, and being a professional athlete is an incredibly scrutinizing thing most people will never know. I’m not complaining about my job (travelling and autographs, remember?!), but I am saying there are a whole bunch of athletes out there – and people – who would be a lot better off if we just talked about this a bit more.
Landon's comments were not that of someone looking for an excuse, and he didn’t devalue adversity. He’s not letting people off the hook, and we’re not looking at some kind of crisis of weakened men asking for your understanding. Instead I would argue his comments required a different form of courage and formed another layer of strength.
Imagine a society of people brave enough to articulate their emotions, even in the face of backlash. Imagine how much better we might be. Landon wasn’t just better at soccer than the rest of us, he was a braver man, too.
When you ask me what I remember about Landon Donovan, it's not the goals record or the assists record, or Algeria or Portugal or Jurgen Klinsmann. It’s that Landon Donovan, a man with everything to lose, put his vulnerabilities on the table and said he was hopeful a few people could relate.
The goal against Algeria was awesome. Being honest as a man and an athlete was way cooler.
