It feels appropriate to followup a recent mental health post with one about calculated madness, emotional fuel, and uncontrolled passion.
We want competitive fury, but athletes need control as well.
Al Hrabosky had a routine before storming onto the mound to face the hitter. He added long hair and a moustache to authenticate the "Mad Hungarian" routine. In 1975 he won the NL "Fireman of the Year" award, but is best remember for his preparatory antics.
Jack Lambert played a violent game for the "Steel Curtain" Steelers. Lambert was known for his ferocity on the field although a cerebral bookworm off it.
Dennis Rodman played with an edge, on the edge, with elite rebounding and defensive skill. He was an airport custodian after high school but a growth spurt helped launch his career. But sometimes he went over the edge, like headbutting an official. Was it his personality, mental illness, or something else? We may never know.
Professional athletes suffer from the same spectrum of disorders as the general population. Their manifestations may be more public.
Grayson Allen has earned a reputation for tripping. One might wonder the type of response or retribution this would receive at the professional level. Its unlikely to be pretty or earn petite suspension.
Abrams describes anger in athletes in detail. Anger is a normal emotional response. But its consecrated endpoint, aggression, varies from minor to lethal. "It
behooves athletes to learn to increase their self-awareness of their emotional state and adjust the
volume of their emotions to match the emotional load that a given task requires. Without this,
they are prone to mental mistakes that can sabotage peak performance."
But a separate condition exists, "Hostility Bias" as "people who are
frequently hostile tend to have a distorted cognitive set that leads them to be prone to perceiving
neutral stimuli as provocative, have difficulty identifying non-hostile explanations for an event,
difficulties generating non-violent responses on how to handle a situation, and a legitimization of
violence as a manner in which problems should be solved." Think of hostility bias as inherent tendency to overreact to non-threatening stimuli, like someone accidentally bumping into us.
Sam Walker describes Roy Keane, Manchester United captain as likely having hostility bias in The Captain Class.
We might struggle to measure intent, but "the usual suspects" have a way of appearing in videos like these - Dwayne Wade, Rodman, Artest/World Peace, and Draymond Green for example.
There is suggestion that self-control is 'fatigable' and amidst the variable "set point" of self-control, some individuals with and altered threshold for violence may "lose it" under stress.