King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Sean Taylor killing: A grief counselor talks about how teammates and fans can gain "control" after a senseless tragedy.

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Nov. 28, 2007 | We've had entirely too much practice lately at trying to make sense of the death of a beautiful 24-year-old athlete. Washington safety Sean Taylor, who died early Tuesday, a day after he was shot by an apparent intruder in his Miami-area home, is the fourth NFL player to die at that age in this calendar year.

It's a fool's errand, trying to make sense of the senseless, of Taylor or Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams being shot to death, of Broncos running back Damien Nash collapsing and dying after a charity basketball game, of New England Patriots lineman Marquise Hill drowning in Lake Pontchartrain after a jet-ski accident.

Taylor's teammates were understandably grief stricken at the news. Grief counselors were on hand at Washington's practice facility Tuesday, and several players and coaches, as well as team owner Daniel Snyder, broke down or barely held it together as they spoke to the media about Taylor.

There was also an outpouring of grief from fans of the team. Message boards filled with memories, prayers and expressions of sympathy. Candlelight vigils were held, flowers and tokens were left at the team's headquarters. All by people who, with rare exceptions, had never met Taylor and knew him only as a uniformed, and even masked, performer on a football field.

"Sometimes it's almost an idealized relationship," Lynn Kahle, a professor of sports marketing at the University of Oregon, says about fans' feelings toward famous athletes. "If a person is involved with your life and you're heavily involved with them, there may be 500 things you think about them. Four hundred of them are good and 75 of them are neutral and a few of them are negative.

"With a celebrity, on the other hand, most of what you get is filtered through media reports that may only emphasize certain aspects of a person. So if a person is a football player, most of what you may know about the person is what kind of football player the person is."

Psychologist Stuart Fischoff, senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology, says that "fandom is always self-serving."

"The person is a celebrity to a given individual because of how that celebrity makes the fan feel, about himself, about the world," he says. "It always goes back to the fan. It's what the fan felt, what the fan needed. So in some sense [the outpouring of grief and sympathy] is an egocentric, rather than an altruistic, compassion and concern."

That doesn't make the feelings any less real, though Jane V. Bissler, a clinical counselor in Kent, Ohio, says they tend to be fleeting.

"We live through our sports heroes," she says, but "we don't have a day-to-day relationship with this person. We have a Sunday afternoon, or a Monday night, relationship with them. So that's when you'd be thinking about them, as opposed to if it's a personal relationship, they didn't come home for dinner or they didn't come home for the holidays. We miss the people where we expect to see them."

Next page: Gaining control, not "closure": How grief counselors might help teammates and fans