We Still Have No Idea How To Talk About Mental Health in Sports
Untold: Malice at the Palace is entertaining and valuable, but it does a horrible job confronting the psychological realities that are the basis of that shocking night.
With the exception of quotations, Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest) will only be referred to by his active name. The use of Ron Artest is solely for the sake of accuracy when quoting.
Untold: Malice at the Palace has been out on Netflix for close to a month now. The documentary that centers around the 2004 fight between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers was met with near universal acclaim; fans and players alike were once again captivated by one of the NBA’s most important moments.
It’s a well made documentary and I recommend anyone (sports fan or otherwise) watch the Floyd Russ’ directed film. More than just detailing the happenings of the fight, the film firmly points a finger at the NBA and surrounding media about the–at times overt–racism that underlies the way that night (and more broadly, the NBA) is portrayed and administrated.
That kind of direct criticism is still rare. Particularly when discussing the David Stern era, where legitimate questions about his prejudice practices have seemingly escaped his legacy (let’s not forget this is the man who spearheaded the NBA’s implicitly racist ‘dress code’).
As Untold makes clear, the events that followed that night in 2004; Stern’s suspension of the players, the media backlash that painted the Pacers’ and the broader NBA as a collection of “hooligans” and “thugs”, was a clearly racist practice. Institutionalized oppression baked into a company built on the backs of Black athletes. For that direct criticism alone, the documentary is worth the watch.
All that being said, Untold does an horrendous job addressing Mental Health in the context of the NBA. The entire film seems to shrug off the realities of mental illness and at times borders on a near-rudimentary understanding of the realities of psychological distress.
I’m referring, of course, to the approach Russ, Donnie Walsh, Reggie Miller, Stephen Jackson, and Jermaine O’Neal take in discussing the illness that Metta World Peace has had to grapple with his entire career.
Miller, in particular, showed no sensitivity for World Peace’s struggle. Throughout the early part of the documentary, Miller switches between harsh critiques of World Peace’s psychological ailments and seemingly romantic descriptions of how valuable his “crazy” behavior was to the team. Picking and choosing when World Peace’s psychological state was manageable–based solely off his on court performance.
The most striking example of this romanticization happens early in the documentary, when Miller is describing what World Peace meant to the organization:
“Every team needs a Ron Artest.” Miller quips, “you need a guy that everyone’s a little bit afraid of.”
Miller is not subtle here, implying that the issues World Peace had controlling his emotions–behaviors that we know were a part of his psychological illness–were somehow valuable because they aided him in winning basketball games. Miller seems content to reckon with World Peace’s mind-state only if it means personal and professional gain. It’s a sad look from someone who advertises himself as a kind of mentor for World Peace.
Juxtapose that description of World Peace’s reality with Metta’s own ideas and you begin to see why Miller’s comments are so frustrating:
“I didn’t have a lot of trust with people” World Peace says, “just because of things I was going through and stuff. For me, it’s enemies. Everybody’s an enemy to me, all the time.”
The difference is striking. Where Miller was gushing about the fear that World Peace brought on, World Peace himself felt alone. He expressly makes clear that he felt alienated from his peers, and Miller seems to have no remorse that this was the case.
That constant juxtaposition is what’s so disheartening about this documentary. World Peace presents himself so candidly throughout the film, and so often describes the struggles of a man who had no emotional support within his place of work–his place of passion.
Instead of supporting his transparency in the film, the documentary’s other central figures–Walsh, Miller, O’Neal, and Jackson–alternate between varying descriptions of World Peace as “crazy”; ridiculing him and the moments throughout his career where he was clearly overwhelmed and dejected.
At best it comes off as tone-deaf, and at worst, legitimately harmful.
Miller’s behaviour doesn’t exist in a vacuum, however. It’s an extension of an NBA that likes to present itself as a kind of progressive monolith. Acknowledging and addressing mental health without building any successful infrastructure to actually help its players. Meanwhile, untreated psychological illness remains a readily present part of so many NBA lives.
Jackie MacMullan of ESPN.com famously reported that while the NBPA insists mental health files be confidential, “NBA owners…want access to the files of their ‘investments.’” That’s not a surprise, the NBA’s support has almost always been performative. But these are the realities of an Association that brings its owners billions in profit and often leaves its players without the necessary resources for independence.
These issues aren’t singularly administrative or political though. In basketball, and in athletics generally, there’s an intense male chauvinism baked into the fabric of the sport. “Toughness” is embedded in every young competitor as the key to success–whether that looked like Jay Bilas’ ESPN excerpt or something as simple as “suicide” drills–the successful basketball player was always the “tough” one.
Maybe the message began as a tool for facing adversity, but it’s descended into a sort of purging of weakness for guys who have devoted their lives to this game. That kind of purge can be incredibly dangerous and, as Kevin Love mentions in his Players Tribune article, is an incredibly isolating existence:
“I’d never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn’t want to be the only one. I didn’t want to look weak. Honestly, I just didn’t think I needed it. It’s like the playbook said — figure it out on your own, like everyone else around me always had.”
Truth be told, Love hasn’t been the only noteworthy basketball player to speak up against a culture that breeds anxiety and mental illness. Everybody from Houston Rockets’ assistant John Lucas II to DeMar DeRozan has made clear that the psychological well-being of NBA players is consistently overlooked.
Their courage is commendable, but as MacMullan’s aforementioned piece highlights, their words are only valuable if their name (the owner’s ‘investment’) is deemed noteworthy. There’s a reason that Lucas–who runs a wellness aftercare program for athletes–was not given the platform that Love or DeRozan were–despite estimating in August of 2018 that “more than 40 percent of NBA players have mental health issues, yet less than 5 percent of them are seeking help.”
It’s a staggering figure, and one that should have made national headlines. Instead, it was reduced to a throw-away article behind some ESPN piece highlighting the year’s incoming draft class.
That their struggles are only legitimate to the general public because they are money-making laborers is just another expression of that same racist system. The value of your mental health should exist outside the confines of the work you do, not as an extension of how good you are at that work.
The NBA is comfortable advertising Love and DeRozan’s critiques of the system because it still brings viewers back to the product. A conversation, however, on less famous players like Rick Berry or Eddie Griffin–players whose struggles with mental health left them dead–is almost never addressed.
World Peace was no stranger to this appropriation. The struggles he endured growing up in Queensbridge, New York: his parents separating at 13, his younger sister dying of SIDS at 16–were romanticized to death by an NBA that loved to advertise his rags-to-riches story but refused to reckon with the anxiety and depression that came with it.
This, in fact, has become a signature of the NBA Draft Cycle where every young prospects’ deepest trauma is readily advertised to a national audience. Their wounds poked and prodded as if these weren’t children living out their wildest dreams.
That Untold spent maybe 40 seconds directly addressing World Peace’s struggles with anxiety and depression is a joke. That, immediately following World Peace’s courageous transparency, they chose to show footage of him being detained like a wild-animal and Miller describing World Peace as “a little edgy” and “unsettling”, is disgusting.
Moreover, it‘s a testament to how little care Russ and the rest of the Untold team actually had for discussing World Peace’s struggle. Which, ironically, is the part of the Malice at the Palace story that is the most ‘Untold’.
Still, the film’s ending remains the most problematic. Highlighting Jackson’s earlier championship with the Spurs and World Peace’s eventual championship with the Lakers, the documentary presents their professional success as a kind of retribution for the racist practices they endured. Then making note to emphasize that both O’Neal and Miller ended their careers without a ring–as if that ended up being the most significant consequence of the Malice.
What happened on November 19th, 2004 and what happened in the months that followed was unwarranted, painful, and systemically racist for all players involved. Casting the NBA championship as some kind of retribution for what those players went through, however, is bullshit. They are not property; their existence is not and should not be defined by what they achieve within those lines, and neither should their legacy.
Particularly for World Peace, who was clear about the damages it did:
“I started to get depressed. And then the season's coming back, then I started to panic a little bit when that season came back. So, then that's when I requested the trade. I was like, I just need to get out of here. Then, I really went into depression. I went from 248 to 273 [pounds].”
World Peace’s trade request was cast as some kind of traitorous act. A consequence of his inability to hold himself accountable rather than a healthy decision made with the intention of helping his well-being. It’s the last line in what was a continuous theme in this documentary: basketball, above all else, is what’s most valuable.
I can’t emphasize enough how heartbreaking these lapses in storytelling are. As we continue to move into an era in the NBA that is centered on player empowerment, there needs to be more of an understanding that basketball is still only a job.
Documentaries like Untold: Malice at the Palace are significant historical tools. They present an opportunity for the uninformed to learn and for the misinformed to be corrected. That opportunity is incredibly valuable, but as I hope I made clear here, is also incredibly fragile.
Untold made a significant mistake mishandling mental health the way they did. The consequences of such a mistake are infinite, and, for the sake of those–like World Peace–who are both devoted to basketball and still struggling with their psychological well-being, I hope these mistakes can eventually end.