David Roth's Weak in Review: Curt Schilling, Russell Wilson, and the Problem with Confidence

We're born weird, which is good. Or, more precisely, we're born as soft, stupendously incapable noise machines and gradually lengthen as we pass into a period spanning several years that's defined by the sort of free-associative disinhibition associated with mellower hallucinogens. Then we're emotionally 14 years old for like, twenty years, and, somewhere in there, a combination of negative reinforcement and the world's pressures turn us into humans. It is not efficient, nor is it especially pleasant in parts, but it is the best we've come up with after a few millennia. For the most part, it works.

There are exceptions to this rule, however, and they are fucking terrifying. People that act with the sort of stagy grandiosity that suggests they're being followed by invisible reality television cameras, say, or people whose approach to human interaction still stubbornly adheres to the cloak-and-dagger Stratego dynamics of middle school. Periodically you'll meet someone like this in real life, and it's never less than shocking. It's a wonder, given the way the world works on us (and works in general), that anyone can afford, or would even want, the luxury that having this sort of delusion represents. To be That Type of Person—to believe that you are always right, to see yourself as something like the main character in life on earth—is weird, of course, but it also seems lonesome and stressful and un-fun. It is a little bit easier to understand the impulse, though, when it comes from a professional athlete.

This week, it just kept coming from professional athletes. Curt Schilling, who was a great and gritty Major League pitcher and who is settling loudly into a second career as a curdled Facebook uncle, allowed an especially dank and not especially coherent Islamophobic meme to escape from his Facebook account and onto his Twitter feed. He was suspended by his current employers at ESPN, and apologized. He will absolutely do this sort of thing again, because he is Curt Schilling. And Curt Schilling is this way, and is the flailing vainglorious dipstick that he is, in part because he is That Type of Person.

He is hugely blessed, and the lightning in his right arm has made Schilling's life very different, and made Schilling himself very different, than they otherwise might have been. This has worked out well for him in some ways—he earned nearly $115 million as a baseball player, and enjoyed other advantages like having the state of Rhode Island mistake him for someone who deserved a $75 million business loan. His talent shaped his life, and more specifically shaped it into a bell curve of sorts: he leveraged his talent and became great, and then at some point the relationship shifted such that he was on the wrong side of it, and Curt Schilling just became kind of an asshole. Schilling is, as any athlete and many non-athletes claim to be, an authentically self-made man. It's just not much of a compliment in this case.

For those who have watched him ripen and bloat into the public figure he has become since retiring, there are several subsidiary curlicues of weirdness that define Curt Schilling. There is his enthusiastically enforced open-door policy to any reactionary egregiousness, and his deeply held sense of obligation to stick in his oar on any and all topics, presently under discussion or not. There is his blithe confidence and tween-y compulsion to overshare. (There's also his tremendous collection of Naziana, including a number of mint-condition SS uniforms, but let's assume that Schilling is one of the few collectors of Nazi doodads who doesn't use them as masturbatory aids and agree never again to revisit that particular image.)

Every loudmouthed bit of it seems to resolve to an unearned, unshakeable, and utterly unaccountable confidence, which we can reasonably assume has its roots in Schilling's talent. To see Curt Schilling in action—gleefully inveighing against entire religions and orientations and belief systems and worldviews, blithely believing that every bit of offense or outrage or hurt he causes is the result of someone else's ignorance or sissification or bad faith—is to see someone who, as the pitching coaches say, trusts his stuff. It's also the natural behavior of someone who has been trained never to question himself, and who spent so much of his life—including that period in which the rest of humanity is broken and remade by the world into actual people—being coddled and indulged and absolved and deferred to because of that magical right arm of his.

This is not necessarily a nice thing to do to a person. Fame on this level—and on the level of Russell Wilson, who recently shared his belief that the tricked-up bottled water he endorses gave him superhuman recovery powers—must be an intensely disorienting thing. To be revered (and paid) as a god is strange enough, but the consecutive miracles of self-belief required to do the things that pro athletes do can't help but be warping and weird after enough repetitions. If you are going to stand on a mound, stare in at Barry Bonds, and believe, in defiance of Barry Bonds and everything else, that you will strike him out, you need a self-belief that borders on unreason. It's unfair to judge Wilson on a few strange tweets and his increasingly rococo public religiosity, but there is some grounding reason under all that weirdness: if Wilson views himself as some sort of divinely chosen warrior-prophet—and he does appear to view himself that way—it's hard to say that the violent and impossible unreason of his workplace and job allows anything else.

The more professional sports metastasize into something bigger and crueler—the zero-sum, value-neutral cruelty of the market, as tragedy and farce, respectively—the more their obligations crowd out everything else. All that remains is a whole screaming spectrum of unreasonable demands. For fans, these games are fundamentally an excuse to be idiots during our time out of the office, but for the people who play them there is a different and deeper hazard. Curt Schilling, in the end, will always and only be Curt Schilling's fault, but he's an example of something more than off-the-rack Facebook dickholery. He is the shining diamond formed by the inimitable pressures of our huge games—a world within the world, where the prevailing pressure does not break its captives toward adulthood, but holds them tightly in place until every saleable miracle has been extracted, at which point it releases them, finished and unfinished, into a world that is so much bigger.