Lucas Glover’s Private Struggle Is A Reminder That Tour Players Are Human
The recent murky details of Tour player Lucas Glover, his wife Krista and his mother was a tough read. Mainly because its something no one wants to go through and we tend to believe a pro golfer’s life is perfectly fine with swollen bank accounts and endless perks.
GolfWorld writer John Feinstein outlines the unfortunate experiences of several Tour players dealing with health and family issues to illustrate even a “blessed” pro golfer’s life is fraught with the same issues as us common folk.
“If Lucas was a lawyer and he came home after a bad day and the exact same thing had happened, it wouldn’t have been any kind of story,” Paul Goydos said. “But because he’s a professional athlete [and a U.S. Open champion], it’s all over the Internet and the news. Things happen in people’s private lives all the time. But when you’re a public figure, they tend not to be private.”
There is a tendency for those who watch great athletes perform to think the rest of their life is as easy as they make playing a sport appear to be. After all, those who succeed at the highest levels of sport make money that few people can even relate to.
“People think because you’re making a lot of money—whether it’s as an athlete or an actor or any other job where you perform in public—that you have a perfect life,” Goydos said. “In reality, that’s often far from the truth.”
Sometimes, as a reporter, you know things about an athlete’s personal life that you don’t report because it IS personal and it should be up to them whether to go public with the story.
But when there’s a police report involved—as with Glover two weeks ago; as with Woods nine years ago and again after his DUI stop last year—privacy is no longer an issue. Once a public figure is involved in a story that is in the public domain, any pleas for privacy will go unheeded.
Being an athlete—even the wealthiest and most successful of athletes—doesn’t protect you from loss or from unhappiness. Goydos remembers reading a story about a group of researchers who interviewed several lottery winners and several paraplegics and then going back to talk to the same people about their lives a year later.
“Almost without fail, the parapalegics were happier than the lottery winners,” Goydos said. “A lot of times life is about your expectations. You win the lottery, you expect to be happy. If you’re a paraplegic, you’re probably happy for anything good that happens in your life.
“When you’re a kid playing golf, you think that if you make it to the PGA Tour and make millions you’re going to be happy because that’s your dream. Sometimes, when the dream comes true, you find out it isn’t all you’d thought it would be. And that can make you very unhappy.”
