Psychologist explains how sports could have helped, instead of hurt, ‘Adolescence’ character Jamie Miller

Former NBA player John Amaechi, who was raised in the U.K., broke barriers as the first professional basketball player to announce he was gay in 2007. (Dennis Grombkowski/Bongarts/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Jamie Miller is extremely troubled. He might only be a 13-year-old character in a fictional television show called “Adolescence,” but his story has prompted widespread consternation about the plight of disaffected men who feel dangerously isolated and alone.

Even if you haven’t seen the four-part British drama series, which has rapidly become the top streaming Netflix show in 75 countries, you will likely know that his character is drawn into a world of misogyny and hyper-masculinity, radicalized online and arrested for killing a female school mate.

The devastating narrative has inspired a societal reckoning, with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressing parliament with his concerns.

“There’s a reason why the debate has suddenly sparked into life,” Starmer said. “A lot of people, who work with young people at school or elsewhere, recognize that we may have a problem with boys and young men that we need to address.”

As parents, teachers and government ministers globally now attempt to grapple with the misogynistic crisis that is now emotionally crippling the youth, they will inevitably focus on the plague of toxic masculinity spread by some male influencers online. Former England football manager Gareth Southgate spoke recently in a BBC lecture about “the callous, manipulative and toxic influencers whose sole drive is for their own gain.”

“They willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, that strength means never showing emotion and that the world, including women, is against them,” he said.

But anyone looking for answers should also focus on the environment that has made so many young men vulnerable to be preyed upon in the first place. The world-renowned organizational psychologist, author and professor John Amaechi told CNN that he found “Adolescence” to be disturbing, adding that he resented the fact that he was supposed to feel sympathy for those who are sucked into the manosphere and are therefore also “victims.”

“The way that men are behaving is about their choices and their perceptions,” the former NBA player said. “We can’t move from that point. Their dominance narrative is that they’re entitled to women’s bodies and any job they want, regardless of effort.”

In “Adolescence,” Jamie Miller reveals to his psychologist that his experiences with sports have contributed to his worldview. He’s an artistic, scrawny character whose shortcomings as a soccer player brought shame on his father, whose his peers ridiculed his son, and Jamie boasted of routinely skipping the physical education class at school.

Amaechi says he can understand exactly why Jamie would have felt this way.

“I hope people recognize that the experience of fearing the environment of sport as a young child is not exclusive to fictionalized characters,” he said. “There are tons of children going about their day right now, whose every fiber of their being is, ‘How can I get out of PE?’ It is so toxic to them.”

Instead of being a welcoming community of positive reinforcement and shared goals, the retired basketball player turned psychologist said that so often sport is the complete opposite.

“It can be weaponized by people who say that only certain types of people will experience (sport) if they are big and strong, loud and extrovert. But if you are anything else, if you haven’t gone through puberty yet, you’re mocked and abused. There are people who think that even developmental or amateur sport should only be for a strata of people who want to play hard, kick people in the face and then go and have too many pints,” he said.

“I’m not surprised that there’s lots of people who think, ‘I’d rather not, thank you. That’s not my idea of a good time.‘”

Amaechi himself can relate to this sense of trepidation. By his own admission, he was an extreme introvert at school, drawn more to the works of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams than he was to rugby or soccer. At 6-feet-9-inches tall, his freakish height was either something to ridicule or fear, but at the age of 17 he picked up a basketball for the first time, setting him on an unlikely trajectory to the NBA. The details of that day are still indelibly seared into his mind, because what could so easily have been a traumatic event instead became something wonderful.

“I walked in and everything in that room stopped,” he recalled of the scene in Manchester, not far from where “Adolescence” is set. “They looked at me, and instead of mocking me, they grabbed me by the arm and were like, ‘You’re on our team.‘”

In telling the story more than three decades later, Amaechi is reliving it.

“I missed my first shot by about six feet,” he said, smiling, “And one kid said, ‘That’s amazing, it was his first shot and he only missed by six feet.’ That was the second I realized I’m never leaving this space.

“I looked into the faces of the people on this team, and all I can see reflected back is legitimate care and a sense of my own great potential. That’s what sport can be at its best. But you and I know that there are kids who will walk into a gym like that, and coaches will sneer, and players will distance themselves. And then we wonder what’s wrong with those kids and why they don’t want to play sport.”

The fictional Jamie Miller has clearly been traumatized by his experience with sports, leading to his sense of isolation. Amaechi makes the case that a positive experience of sport can lead to much more than a healthy lifestyle and a sense of community, especially since the notion of emotional stoicism has paralyzed so many young men.

“At its best,” he explained, “sport is a place where intimacy is not just allowed but explicitly demanded. The idea that you throw your arms around someone – that when they’re hurt, you hold them, when you lose a game, you console them in a way that is emotionally literate. And when you win a game, you celebrate with a kind of abandon, getting rid of the false ideas of stoicism and you just have moments of joy. This is the best that sports can offer.”

But he cautions that everybody throughout the sports community would have to buy into this broader vision and appreciate the societal value, otherwise the experience may only reinforce the message that pain should be hidden and opponents, even teammates, should be destroyed if they get in your way.

“If teammates insist that it is a vulnerable space where people can live real rich emotional lives,” he said, it will help people like the character depicted in “Adolescence.”

“There is a place where people will care legitimately and show care in ways beyond punching them in the arm and saying, ‘You’ll be alright.‘”

Amaechi has observed too much of sport at its worst to believe that it’s capable of reforming itself, never mind solving a societal crisis.

“Sport is one of those areas where the most vulnerable people are put in direct contact with coaches with the least qualifications possible,” he said. “I’m not saying they need to be therapists, but they need to have more skills than just knowing how to teach a kid to score a goal or a basket.”

However, he’s eternally hopeful that it could provide a part of the answer.

“Sport done well,” he concluded, “with the explicit goal of seeking out young men who would otherwise find themselves isolated to the point of being drawn to these toxic manosphere people, absolutely it can.”

There are many factors which need to be addressed; including the role of parents and the socio-economic pressures that might prevent them from being present, the under-investment in teaching and the underbelly of Big Tech. But as society grapples for an answer to this intensifying emergency, it appears up to leaders in sports to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Article by Don Riddell.