Baffoe: Patrick Kane & The Superhuman Psyche
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) Even the most ardently blind Blackhawks loyalists had to be considering it, if not secretly worried about it. My Twitter mentions, email inbox and Facebook reminders that people from your childhood never grew up screamed it.
There was serious worry entering this season that issues off the ice would negatively affect star winger Patrick Kane. One doesn't take to a keyboard to yell at a writer to "stop talking negative about" one's sports hero if there isn't that attempt to repress, repress, repress the anxiety over real life negatively impacting much more important sports stuff. The evil, conspiratorial Lame Stream Media may have ruined poor Kaner's life a few months ago.
Turns out all that worry was for naught. Kane's currently on a 21-game point streak and has only failed to assist on or score a goal in two of Chicago's 26 games this season. He's playing some of the best hockey of his career, looking more than comfortable on the ice and making defensemen and goalies look repeatedly silly.
Chalk most of that up to a superstar like Kane's nearly unmatched talent being incapable of total suppression. Part of what we're seeing from him on the ice, though, is a reminder that when we watch sports, we watch superhumans.
And not just regarding their physical gifts.
It's difficult for most of us to fathom having to do our jobs with our coworkers gossiping about us, let alone being front page news. Yet we see repeatedly professional athletes — I hesitate to use the word "overcome" because that would heroify them — immunized to the pesky virus that is Lamestream Media.
"It's almost like after school or something, when you don't want to worry about your homework, you get to go play with your friends," Kane said two weeks ago of using the ice to ignore his troubles. "That's kind of what the feeling has been for me, just getting away from everything, playing hockey, doing something I love to do. I've just been enjoying it more than ever."
That's a description given by someone beyond reality. Reverting to child-like wants, equating serious legal issues with homework. It's not exactly someone who seems like he "gets it," as any expert in sexual criminology or human resources manager would probably admonish any one of us if we showed the same attitude at the office.
But that's not to be unexpected from someone who has been told his whole life that he's superhuman, that his sports skills are the ultimate definition of himself. It eventually gets to be so that the superhuman's psychology mutates to match his biology.
The superhuman will call it something akin to "ignoring the haters." Headphone commercials have even harnessed and glorified the phenomena. Ignoring, blocking out, building a mental wall have become all-star talents in and of themselves. If it's not apathy toward criticism beyond one's play, it's instead fuel converted from bulletin board material transcending the locker room. And it's all often encouraged by a rooting public.
Consider Kobe Bryant. He recently announced that this is his final season in the NBA. Instantly the funereal tributes began, the lamentations, the amped-up snark about his diminished skills. None of the columns, retrospectives or Twitter jokes would be happening had Bryant's career succumbed to a dark chapter in his life in 2003.
The Kobe basketball player discussion always ends up touching on his mental drive, his tenacity and his uncanny ability to be an unabashed unsympathetic sociopath when it came to his game. Those traits — all spun positively for the most part — rarely get applied to that 2003 rape case and its inability to deter his progression to one of the greatest careers in league history. There's almost never a parallel between how the superhuman brain chemistry drives success on the court/ice/field and how it allows for a sweatless immunity to anything off of it.
Ben Roethlisberger has battled injuries this season to become one of the most impressive football stories of the year. Football stories — as the NFL is wont to foster — are so often seedy when read between the lines. The affectionately nicknamed Big Ben more than once faced accusations of sexual assault. It was only a motorcycle accident and his penchant for being staunch in the pocket that ever posed a threat to a bust in Canton. The Big Ben narrative is one of toughness and perseverance and even leadership.
Greg Hardy is utter human garbage and is the 2015 posterchild for the NFL's dislocation from basic decency. He's also grades out as the 14th-best defensive end in the entire league, despite serving a suspension.
These aren't scenarios capable of handling by the ordinary psyche. But that's because for so many star athletes, what makes them superhuman doesn't end with their size, speed or strength.
It's an ability to operate on a conscious -- or is it unconscious? -- level that just isn't human.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
