The hockey micro-verse on Twitter blew up on Wednesday afternoon when a Newsday article about goaltender Rick DiPietro hit the web.
My timeline was covered with quotes from New York Islanders’ goalie talking about how much it hurt that the Islanders waived him and sent him to the minors. The really disturbing part of the story was that during his prolonged struggles to stay healthy and live up to large 15-year, $67.5 million contract he considered suicide.
The way that we treat athletes is unlike any way we treat other human beings. Fans pour so much of their hopes and love and passion into the players on their local teams. When they succeed they are lauded; when they lose they are treated subhuman. It is so easily forgotten that the wins and losses affect them more than they affect the fans.
Watching DiPietro play five, eight, 26, eight, three since 2008 had to be frustrating for fans on Long Island. The disappointment of DiPietro just adds to pitiful pile of awful that has been the New York Islanders in recent years. Bad teams, a bad arena, a county that can’t afford to keep them; this team has resorted to trading for large contracts just to meet the league’s minimum salary requirement and planning a move to Brooklyn where they will be less than second-class tenants in the Barclays Center.
But no one feels residual effects of all that more than the Winthrop, Mass. native, DiPietro.
I am an expert on Rick DiPietro. I remember when he was supposed to be the foundation for a new dynasty at Boston University, then left for a year. I remember him being drafted first overall, when he probably shouldn’t have. I remember him signing an unprecedented contract after the 2004-05 lockout that he never had any hope of living up to.
I have been one of those fans, one of those writers and one of those “experts” that has said he is a bum, a loser, a complete disaster of a player. But I don’t stop to think — none of us do — that professional athletes are human, as fragile as the rest of us.
Rick DiPietro has been a lot of things in his professional hockey career. It’s a shame it took us this long to remember that he was a human being first.
Mike Hopey is a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in journalism and media studies. He can be reached at hopey@mail.usf.edu.
