Athletes: Once the career ends, then what?

"Hard exercise is the most under-prescribed antidepressant on earth."

Tim Layden's piece remembering 9/11 in the Sept. 12 issue of Sports Illustrated contained this brilliant quote from Kevin Read, an Olympic gold medal winner in rowing at the 2004 Athens games.

Read was describing the soothing effect sports had provided three years prior, when he was working on rescue teams at the Ground Zero wreckage. For a man who'd seen what he'd seen, sports had literally been a drug — an escape.

Sports helped a nation to cope in some small way with that inexplicable tragedy. Yet they can do so much more than provide solace. For some, they help maintain sanity.

In the wake of the domestic violence charge leveled against recently retired baseball star Manny Ramirez, in which his wife Juliana contested that the former slugger hit her with an open palm, one wonders: Where does it all go wrong for the recently-retired?

Ramirez is simply the most recent example of a worrisome trend of former athletes whose lives spin into an irreparable mess once the proverbial spikes are hung up for the last time.

SI ran an article in their March 23, 2009, issue detailing how and why so many athletes go broke within years of retirement. It's often the same troublesome track that leads to trouble: One becomes accustomed to a certain style of living, and doesn't know how to adjust it to more realistic terms upon retirement, when high living is no longer economically feasible. Floyd Mayweather won't always be able to afford burning $100 bills in clubs, after all.

After enjoying endorphin-laced benders in their respective sports and getting paid unseemly bundles of money to do so, athletes are quite suddenly chucked off that wonderful binge and forced to face real life. Sober never looked so scary.

And professional careers are normally nowhere near as long as you might think. According to Livestrong.com, the average NFL running back enjoys an average career of 2.57 years. Hard to build up retirement savings in that amount of time. And when you've spent a lifetime working toward a certain goal, starting down a future without sports can be quite daunting.

It hearkens the image of Morgan Freeman's character of Red upon release from prison in "The Shawshank Redemption," asking his supervisor if he can use the bathroom. While athletics is certainly no prison, players do become enclosed in their own sort of cell, shut off from real life.

Not all athletes encounter terrible difficulties in adjusting to the delicate life of retirement, but it is frightening how many do.

Take away the drug from the addict, and expect him to live a normal life? It's nearly impossible. We wonder why Brett Favre is continually linked with rumors of a return to football, or why Michael Jordan ever considered coming back after ending his glorious NBA career (for the second time) on that iconic 15-foot jumper in Salt Lake City to seal the '98 Finals.

Jonah Lomu, considered one of the most powerful rugby players of all time (check out his YouTube videos), might have spoken for all athletes when he recently told the French newspaper Le Monde that "he could not live without rugby."

For the consummate competitor, inactivity must feel like a cruel application of calamine lotion.

Focusing on the NFL and NHL in particular, the recent spate of suicides in both sports has been dominated by former players whose careers were predicated upon contact. The harrowing story of Dave Duerson, the former Bears defensive great, is but one example. Some simply can't take the daily toll of mental instability without their longtime outlet.

Brian Cazeneuve, another SI writer, recently wrote a memoriam of Wade Belak. The ex-Nashville Predator enforcer, who took his own life weeks ago, was remembered by friends and family as an "outwardly jovial player." Yet there was another side of him — a competitor who lived for contact in any way, shape or form.

Cazeneuve summated perfectly when he wrote, "The life of an enforcer — who in most cases is in the league only because of his willingness to drop the gloves on a regular basis — is not easy, and the deaths of three scrappers [Belak, Rick Rypien, and Derek Boogaard], each of whom struggled with depression, addiction, or both, has renewed calls for the NHL to abandon its long-standing tolerance of fighting" (Sports Illustrated, Sept. 12).

For anyone who's ever played a contact sport, you know all about the adrenaline kick. Take away that prescription from men who've depended upon it for years, and you create an ever-expanding problem.

Commissioner Roger Goodell has already begun implementing severe fines for certain hits in NFL games, after seeing the terrible long-term damage successive concussions can exert on the brain. The NHL now looks likely to follow suit. It's a good start for attempting to prevent more cases like Duerson's.