Aggressive Athletes: Can We Please Start Telling The Truth

About five years ago, I had a conversation with former USC tailback turned Fox Sorts Radio personality Petros Papadakis about anger in football.

Papadakis' own anger was legendary. The story goes that on his first day of practice—literally his introductory day on the USC football team—Papadakis started four fights....it might have been five.

Anybody who looked at him wrong, bumped him wrong, got in his face about whatever—Petros responded by pummeling.

Was he thrown off the team? Asked to publicly apologize? Demonized by national media?

No, actually, he was made team captain.

I mention this because there's been a bit of hand-wringing lately about Elizabeth Lambert—especially from some of my fellow PT bloggers.

Today Jared DeFife wrote a piece about Lambert's ego problems which have clearly led to her "aggressive and unapologetic" behavior. A few days ago, it was Jim Taylor arguing that, while he feels sorry for her, he feels that a better punishment would have been her complete expulsion from the team.

While I hold my fellow bloggers in the highest respect, I also think they know very little about the way sports are really played, or, more specifically, how players are taught to play.

The question I asked Petros those few years ago was this: is it possible to play professional football without anger.

Petros had a two part answer. The first part was simple.

"No," he said, "or not really."

He then told me if you had the athletic prowess of a Reggie Bush (then a USC tailback, now a New Orleans Saint) you might be able to get through high school without relying on anger, but at the college level you won't succeed.

"Even if you have the talent to play at the college level without anger," he said, "if you're in any kind of serious program (and by serious he means a program that regularly sends players to the NFL) and don't play angry, your teammates will figure it out and they'll destroy you for it."

The second part is that it's not just football. Petros also felt the same held true for just about every sport. But this shouldn't be news to anyone.

In 1991, TIME did a story called "the Tactics of Tantrums" about Jimmy Connors behavior at the US Open. In the course of one minute in the Open, Connors called the referee calling the match a "bum," a "son-of-a-bitch" and, my personal favorite, "an abortion.

And no one cared.

Why? Well, they later quotes Chicago Blackhawk team psychologist Cal Botterill about this: "The very best athletes can use their emotions—and anger is one of them—to push their performance way up."

They also point out the old baseball saw about managers who "prefer players who get mad."

So what does this mean? Well, the same article also quotes sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie who talked about a football player who used to start fantasizing on Thursday that his opponent (who he will play on Sunday) raped his wife.

Seriously, I'll take hair pulling over rape fantasies any day, but maybe that's just me.

Furhtermore, after having that initial conversation about anger and sports with Petros, I have since raised this question with almost every professional athlete I interview (probably 5-10 a year) and they all agree: they try to play angry, and they were coached to play angry.

So while I don't disagree with my fellow bloggers about the "psychology" behind Ms. Lambert's behavior-—yes, there's a lot of ego-rage in sports—I would like to point out that they're criticizing her for doing almost exactly as she's been told.

Now, sure, no one "told" her to go out and pull hair-but they certainly told her to "be physical" to "play to win" and to "channel her emotions" but, as Petros told me so many years ago, she was most likely also told to "get angry and stay angry because that is how you win."

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So did Lambert cross the line? Or are we just hypocrites?

Because, seriously, from a coaches' opinion, her actual transgression was getting caught.

In Jim Taylor's piece he argues that Lambert will "hopefully learn from this experience, rebuild her life and perhaps even return to the soccer pitch."

But the truth of the matter is the real lesson is don't pull hair or sucker punch an opponent because it's too visible-next time maybe just tape a razor blade on your pads...just a little one, small enough that no one will notice.

Okay, well, maybe that's not what I really mean—but it is absolutely how we teach our athletes to play the game.

And this is the real reason that Lambert appears to be such a unapologetic, narcissistic twit about the whole thing. She's acting like she can't figure out what the big deal is....because she ACTUALLY can't figure out what the big deal is...

She's really just doing what she's been taught to do, taught, arguably since she was a kid and first started playing the game at any real competitive level.

So whose fault is this really?