Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"

Crazy is as crazy does

It’s a crazy world out there...

CREDIT: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images
Monica Seles
By Hunt Archbold

It’s a crazy world out there. I mean, how else do you explain that tickets for the final game to be played at old Yankee Stadium this year (Sept. 21 versus the Orioles) are going for more than $16,000 on StubHub? Or that bandwagon fan Atlanta has yet another pro sports team (the WNBA’s Dream) set to begin play, which it won’t properly support?

No, the crazy I’m talking about is of the legitimately diagnosed, mentally ill variety. It was recently reported that 15 percent of all inmates in Georgia’s county jails have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. I’m not surprised by this in the least, as too often those with disorders can’t find or even seek much-needed treatment, and instead turn to a life of crime that can result in senseless tragedy. We’re less than two weeks removed from the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre that claimed 32 victims, including two from our state.

Back when I was learning the sportswriting craft at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, I worked for two-plus years as a health care technician at Dorothea Dix Hospital, the state psychiatric facility that’s set to close this year after 152 years of service (a new $120 million state psychiatric hospital is set to open this summer). Health care technician was merely the handbook description of an orderly; it was my job to interact with the patients, help them get their medicines, keep them off the nurses and doctors and generally make sure all went smoothly on a daily basis on and outside the ward. This was the late ’80s, and the environment wasn’t too far removed from the one depicted in the book and film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”—minus the lobotomies.

I utilized sports as a way of connecting with the patients, whether it was through hoops and horseshoes in the courtyard, billiards and ping-pong in the game room or watching events on TV. I saw Doug Williams win Super Bowl XXII MVP honors from the day room of the 201-North ward at Dix Hill. One time I remember being on the asylum’s expansive grounds attempting to teach five patients the game of golf. It was then that I remarked to them that if they wanted to escape, all they had to do was bludgeon me repeatedly in the head with an assortment of short and long irons and then bolt. Their reply mostly consisted of golf being boring and that they’d rather go to the canteen for cigarettes and coffee.

The point here is that I trusted those guys. But maybe that was because to a degree, they were in a controlled environment. The same cannot be said of the other mentally ill folks roaming the streets. I’m reminded of Monica Seles, who was just booted from that celebrity dancing TV show. It was 15 years ago during a tennis tournament in Hamburg, Germany, when the then No.1-ranked player was stabbed in the back with a boning knife by a deranged fan during a match changeover in front of 6,000-plus fans. Later, Günter Parche admitted he wanted to take out Seles, who was never the same player after the attack, so Steffi Graf could regain the world’s top ranking.

Our city has seen its share of crazy, too, and I’m not talking about last year’s hotel parking lot fight between evangelist Juanita Bynum and her husband Bishop Thomas Weeks. Do we really think Eric Rudolph is sane? He detonated four bombs in our city a bit more than a decade ago. I remember bowling off of Monroe Drive and feeling the reverberations of the explosion that wounded four people at the nearby Otherside Lounge. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling. Surely Mark David Chapman is deranged. Raised in Decatur (he attended Columbia High), Chapman bought the bullets in our city that he used to pointlessly kill John Lennon nearly three decades ago.

But then again, what’s the difference between crazy and desperate? In the past few months, Sean Taylor was murdered in his own home, Shelden Williams carjacked at gunpoint and Kenyan athletes were hacked to death and burned in response to disputed presidential elections.

I’ve got a crazy person in my life. His name is Randy N., and for the last few years he has consistently called to complain about my presentation of information for a national telephone sports score company I announce for. He’s angry, rude and will shout obscenities at me (others at the company, too, but this guy certainly doesn’t like me) for no particular reason. I’m giving out scores, Randy—chill out! Do I fear for my life? No. But I’ve been around crazy before, and that voice on the other line ain’t right. In a crazy world where we’re a few weeks removed from the ninth anniversary of the Columbine High massacre, nothing, no matter how hideous, seems implausible.

Happy times … and I hope I’m around for next week’s Grunts. SP