Mental illness is something most people want to keep hush-hush. It's embarrassing, shaming, and stigmatizing.

Bennett's seclusion and the Rams guarding of his privacy are indicative of more than an eight-week drying out period in an alcohol rehab facility. Something deeper, more grave in its ramifications, is going on. The drinking episodes are only part of it.

Sometimes brains and emotions can snap from an overload, like Jack Youngblood's or Jon Arnett's legs. Some mental breaks, to extend the analogy, are more severe than others, and require a cast. You can't just buck the pain and play through them.

Bennett was forced since age nine by domineering parents, especially his father, to obsessively focus on football. His bouts with alcohol appeared to me as the tip of a bigger subsurface iceburg. At a certain point it appeared to me that the load become too great, like having a safe drop on your leg, so to speak, and he broke. He still, nonetheless, has shown the inner courage of an Arnett or a Youngblood to keep fighting his way back.

Back in the '50's the baseball player Jimmy Piersall, a Yankee infielder in the Joe DiMaggio era, had about the same thing happen, unless I'm mistaken about Bennett. His autobiography and the movie based on the book, Fear Strikes Out, tells of his oppressive childhood and subsequent mental rehab to again being able to play ball and revel in the competition. He was no longer succombing to the inner pressures baseball represented after his breakdown and subsequent courageous recovery.

Bennett could be undergoing that same sort of rebirth of mind and spirit. Piersall could again play baseball, free from the dark forces of parental oppression that drove him. He wanted to play - that resurrection cast his whole life in a different light.

And I respect this mysterious shroud of privacy Bennett has cloaked himself in. It's neccessary for his comeback that this be a private, not a public journey.

For many reasons, I'm rooting for Stetson Bennett, pulling for him, hoping he makes it back, and lives a life of joy and purpose that he's never before fully experienced. Whether or not we ever see him again in a Ram uniform on the field, I pray and wish for all the best for him.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2024 08:43AM by mtramfan.