SCOTT on:

   Jeff Francoeur

Put yourself in Jeff Francoeur’s shoes.

You’ve always been a natural. You’ve never struggled athletically.

You’ve been lauded, applauded and coddled since middle school.

You’ve always been cool, you’ve always been successful, you’ve always been a star.

Now your most humiliating professional moment – a demotion to the Mississippi backwoods and Double-A baseball after a prolonged slump – is splashed on the front page of the newspaper in your hometown.

As interesting a baseball story as Jeff Francoeur’s lost season has become, it’s an even more fascinating human story.

A 24-year-old man who’s never experienced failure in his life is now failing in an incredibly embarrassing and public way.

This is why sports is the ultimate reality TV show.

Project Francoeur’s situation to your business and imagine how you’d feel. Imagine if you’re hosting a radio show in Atlanta and the program director walks into the studio one morning and tells you he’s sending you to Macon because your ratings aren’t good and you need to work on your topic selection.

From the Major Leagues one day to bus trips the next.

Think of the toxic stew that must exist in Francoeur’s mind.

The confusion about why he’s struggling after never having experienced something similar. Dealing with boos for the first time. Being humiliated by a demotion to the minor leagues. Having your dad, your high school coach, the star of the team, the team’s manager, the team’s hitting coach and now the minor league coach all feeding you – probably contradictory – batting advice.

His confidence has got to be shot and for an athlete, that’s fatal.

All athletes, even the nice guys, are egomaniacs. You can’t play professional sports with doubt and Francoeur must be swimming in doubt.

What’s more, all men – all serious, ambitious, aggressive men anyway – take an unhealthy amount of their self-worth from career success. Knowing that Francoeur is tanking at the office, knowing that everyone knows it, his self-esteem as a man has to be wavering.

Again, put yourself in his shoes. How much fun is it at home when you know you aren’t getting the job done at work? When the sales aren’t coming in, when the drywall job you just did has to be done over because you screwed up, when the case you just spent four months preparing goes the other way.

And now because you’ve failed at work you’re marooned in an isolated outpost 500 miles from your friends and family. When you screw up at the office, your job doesn’t send you out of state to prove you can still cut it.

Francoeur’s life and emotional stability are playing out before our eyes and stories like this are what make following sports so compelling.

I wonder how capable Francoeur is of pulling himself out of this slump.

Francoeur’s trouble is between the ears and 24-year-old men, athletes, people who’ve never struggled a day in their lives rarely have the perspective and ability to self-analyze necessary to be their own psychologist.

Rich, young, male professional athletes who’ve always been successful are perhaps the people least capable of pulling out of a funk. Francoeur is all of those things. He’s never faced hardship or real problems and pain and what pulls you out of personal and professional struggles is the experience of having faced it before.

He grew up in an upper-middle class suburb, he was a state baseball and football champion, he was a first round draft pick, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, he was the fair-haired face of his hometown team – he’s never failed in his life.

Do you get that?

He’s never failed before.

What he’s going through now he’s never dealt with and he doesn’t have the tools to deal with it and he’s forced to deal with it publicly.

The man is so obviously confused, so obviously grasping at straws, so utterly incapable of pulling himself out of this tailspin I wonder how he’ll be able to get out?

This is way beyond sports, this is human drama and I can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

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