SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco Giants star Joc Pederson is scared to fly. Outfielder Seth Brown of the Oakland Athletics, too.
They are hardly the only ones. Longtime manager Dusty Baker would bet that anxiety in the air has shortened more than a few careers. He recalls watching terrified teammates and coaches cling tightly to photos of their loved ones during bumpy flights.
“There’s no helping them,” Baker said. “A lot of times they have a couple drinks more than they should on the plane. I’ve had guys I played with, they had like four or five kids, and the plane was having turbulence and they would start kissing their kids, like they were kissing them goodbye, like it was the last time they would see their kids.”
In big-time sports, there’s no getting around regular flying. Major League Baseball players might crisscross the country several times in a single week. NBA and NHL teams frequently play on consecutive nights in different cities and time zones. Even 300-plus-pound football players have to be comfortable traveling from one coast to another. And then there are sports like golf and tennis, with professional tour events spanning several continents.
Hall of Fame football coach John Madden, who died in late 2021, is among the most famous for his trepidation with air travel. Debilitating claustrophobia prompted him to eventually begin taking his own bus around the country.
Netherlands soccer player Dennis Bergkamp was nicknamed “The Non-Flying Dutchman” for his anxiety, which he said stemmed from traveling on smaller planes while with Inter Milan in the 1990s. Former NBA power forward Royce White, a first-round pick by the Houston Rockets in 2012 out of Iowa State, fought crippling anxiety that became far worse when he flew and led to panic attacks — so he too regularly drove on his own whenever possible. Even Barry Bonds, who hit a record 762 home runs, told The Associated Press he has a fear of heights.
“We’re pointing to flying but what we’re really pointing at is the feelings of being out of control, the feelings that come with trusting, so it’s the fear that we’re pointing to,” said high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, who has worked with the Seattle Seahawks among other sports teams, Olympians and businesses.
Athletes find different ways of dealing with the stress at 35,000 feet.
All-Star pitcher Dan Haren used to visit the cockpit on team charters, hoping for some comfort when he became overwhelmed. Troy Murphy, a former forward with the Golden State Warriors, did the same.
“You empathize with them, because it’s tough,” said Mike Dunleavy Jr., Murphy’s former teammate and the Warriors new general manager.
Baker and Atlanta Braves manager Brian Snitker remember how teammates turned to alcohol to ease the nerves.
For many years with flying, players had to “get used to it,” insists Hall of Fame baseball star Rickey Henderson, who recalled what he described as crazy flights when he would try to “close my eyes and go to sleep.”
“I was in the minor leagues for a period of time and I rode buses for 14 hours,” Henderson said, “I definitely don’t want to do that.”
Even with heightened awareness around mental health, there is a greater prevalence of anxiety in society now than people might realize, according to Gervais. He is proud of those who speak up and take on the challenge to cope with it, a part of how they strive to reach peak performance in their sport — and appreciates teams being proactive rather than reactive.
“What’s great is that there is an attunement and there’s an awareness, more than there has been in the last 15 to 20 years about the importance of the psychological well being of people,” Gervais said. “It’s always had a seat at the table of high performance. Now that seat is not in the poorly lit end of the table, it’s moved up to kind of center court, because if you don’t have the ability to work with your mind, especially under pressure, all of the physical and technical skills are not able to be accessed.
