The World of HEACASE

The world that my protagonist, Dr. Andrew Beck, lives in is an alternative reality of the New York metro area in April 2019, a year before COVID-19 invaded our lives. Andrew is a sports psychologist who works with professional athletes, but there is no NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, or PGA in the World of Headcase. Instead, there are the Professional Football League or PFL; the Basketball League of America or BLA; the Professional Baseball League or PBL; the North American Hockey League or NAHL; and the Professional Golfers League or PGL. In the World of Headcase I do use some familiar venues and sports figures. Most of the players are all athletes that competed pre-1990’s but I use the players to make an emphatic point. For example, I refer to the Masters Tournament in Augusta, and to former champions Jack Nicholas, and Arnold Palmer. This is because the impact of the conversation be-tween Andrew and his former Masters Champion father, Ted, needed to be big, and using made-up players was not going to have the same impact as using these golfers whose names are synonymous with greatness. 

It seemed daunting at first to have to create all the athletes, teams, and leagues in my alternate reality. But then, as I sat at my desk, I recalled my childhood in Rutherford, New Jersey, with my friends on Wood Street, and I realized we did this all the time. We used to pretend we were these three-sport super-star athletes back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s before Bo Jackson and Dion Sanders. The only two-sporter was Danny Ainge, who played basketball for the Boston Celtics and baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. Well, not to be outdone, we pretended to be guys talented enough to play three sports at an elite level: football, basketball, and baseball.

One of the best things about playing God in my own world is my ability to make all the New York Teams playoff contenders in their respective sports, proving that my writing is an utter work of fiction. The last time New York had contenders in every sport was 1969 when the Jets, Mets, and Knicks all took championships that year. The only exception in 1969 was that the Rangers went to the playoffs but lost to Boston Bruins in the first round. But not to worry—in Headcase, my hockey team, the New York Sentinels, gets their revenge against the Boston Freedom, almost ensuring them a birth in the playoffs. Sorry, not sorry, Boston!

As I began to recall the make-believe worlds we built as boys, the World of Headcase started to form. Although the players Andrew treats are all fictional, I didn’t have to change much there, but I did have to come up with new team names and leagues and the names of opponents when they spoke about them. I also had a blast coming up with their uniforms, colors and fonts.

The New York Tides' baseball team comes from the old minor league affiliate of the New York Mets, the Tidewater Tides. The Tides’ colors are gray with blue pinstripes and lettering. In the book, there is a scene when Andrew is 12 and playing baseball with friends, which are the actual names of my childhood friends, and the Tides’ uniforms that year were baby blue. I love Columbia University’s colors and that’s what I pictured the Tides uniforms were like in the 1990s of Andrew’s youth.

The Tides also had a personal connection to my childhood. My brother and the other older boys on the block would tease me when I struck out in Wiffle ball and say, “We’re sending you down to Tidewater.” Which meant I was relegated to the minors, and they wouldn’t let me play until I got better. This demotion made me practice harder to earn my way back up. So the Tides had that place in my mind - scrappy players fighting for a shot at the big leagues. And now that I was in command as an author, I thought, why not let the Tides finally make the majors?

The basketball team is the New York Black Knights. The Knights had been used in The Natural with Robert Redford, so I didn’t want to use that. I liked the juxtaposition that a Black Knight is a winner and a good guy in the “World of Headcase.” Finding their font was tricky and took the longest, but it was fun. I loved designing the black and gold uniforms. They are strong colors that go well together, and Pittsburgh doesn’t own them! The Black Knights’ uniforms are my favorite ones. It was not until after I finished the novel that I realized that West Point’s mascot was the Black Knights, and their colors are a similar black and gold, but not exactly like mine. I decided to keep the Black Knights moniker, I like the uniforms I came up with better anyway.

The New York Sentinels are the hockey team in the World of Headcase, and their uniforms are like the Minnesota North Stars’ uniforms (they moved to Dallas in 1993). I came up with the Sentinels moniker because Vladimir Poplov is an enforcer, also known as an “ice guardian.” As I looked for synonyms for “guard”, one of the words was a sentinel. The Sentinels' white, green, and gray uniforms projected the image of a steady, tough hockey team that no one messed with.

Once I had the players and teams, I needed to create the arenas and stadiums. Some of the most famous entertainment venues in the five boroughs are sports stadiums: Citi Field in Queens, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. For Headcase, I had to create venues that could rival these real-world cathedrals of sport.

The Tides baseball team plays in Empire Stadium. It’s still in Queens but much closer to Flushing Bay around College Point. The multi-use arena where the Black Knights and the Sentinels play is in Hudson Yards. I named it The Tomlin Insurance Sports and Entertainment Complex, affectionately called “The TISEC,” pronounced as “tiZ-eck”. 

Tomlin Insurance is a real company in Barbados. The Tomlin family has been a big part of my life in the last few years and I wanted to show my thanks and name an arena after them (See the Acknowledgements for the backstory). The reason why I put the “TISEC” in Hudson Yards goes back to 2012 when Mayor Bloomberg tried to get the Olympics hosted in NYC, which would have been a disaster, in my opinion. He also tried to lure the New York Jets back from the Meadowlands to Manhattan. They came up with the concept for the West Side Stadium. There were lots of drawings and renderings I was able to find that helped me picture the stadium in Hudson Yards. Hudson Yards also becomes important in Headcase as a dispute between one of the lead contractors and the local electrical union indirectly pulls Andrew and his wife Sandra into a mysterious murder.

The other stadium I mention in the book is in the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, NJ, the next town from my childhood home. I created a football team called the New Jersey Bulldogs. I chose the Bulldogs as the mascot because it is the same as my high school in Rutherford. I even used my school colors of navy blue and white for the team’s colors. I changed the name from the current MetLife Stadium to Meadowlands Stadium, but I kept the same location.

All my athletes are an amalgamation of my experience with pro athletes as a fan and other athletes I trained and competed against as a competitive athlete. I was a gold medal winner in Judo at the 1994 Nutmeg Games, and I also medaled in tournaments in NY, NJ, CT, and RI.

My first face-to-face experience with pro athletes came when I was 17, when I worked in the locker rooms for the visiting teams playing the New Jersey Generals in the long-time defunct USFL. During the games, I worked the sidelines handing out Gatorade to the players and helping the trainers with injured players getting whatever they needed. After the game and in the locker room I used to talk to the players about their lives outside of football. I was always interested in what kind of man they were, as a person. Most were kind and generous with their time even after playing a hard game. Glen Corano, the father of MMA fighter and actor Gina Corano, was a former quarterback with the Dallas Cowboys who was at the end of his career playing with the Pittsburgh Maulers. Mr. Corano spent a good half hour with me talking about life and he encouraged me to pursue my idea to become an accountant and help pro players manage their financial affairs. I had heard so many stories about players who made bad investments and managed their money poorly that by the time they were out of football they were penniless. Typical of a middle child, I thought it was so unfair to these men who were ill-equipped for life out of football. These stories and more of player off-field antics were verified by my older brother, who worked with the New York Giants in the 1980s as an equipment manager.

My dad also designed personalized athletic wear for pro athletes for the various New York teams. Players would call the house, and I would talk to them about their latest game and stats for a bit before my dad gave me a stare that would burn a hole through my head as I reluctantly handed over the phone.

I have spent a good portion of my life around athletes and understanding how they think. But in the end, I learned most that pro athletes are just like us, except they have a very particular set of skills that makes them perform amazing athletic feats. And those talents earn them millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars a year, but for a very short time. Almost every athlete I researched experienced some kind of trauma growing up. Some were horrific. They struggle with certain parts of life, and they work in a profession where split-second decisions under extreme duress are ruthlessly analyzed. This scrutiny comes not only from their coaches, general managers, and team owners—but by journalists, fans, and even their own extended family whose existence depends on their ability to play and excel at a game.

Headcase is a novel about a troubled psychologist, who is treating professional athletes with real traumatic issues, and his own childhood traumas and gambling addiction get him in trouble along the way. But during the story, I am also trying to show the reader the plights of pro athletes. Although these are fictional characters, the problems of drug addiction, gambling addiction, rage issues, impulse control problems, and a deep-seated mistrust of others are common amongst athletes and people everywhere.

My primary goal is to entertain my readers with a world from my imagination. I hope they like the characters, feel empathy for them, and root for them. Secondly, if I could increase awareness that seeking help for mental health issues is an act of bravery and courage, that would make me very happy. Lastly, I wish to bring some awareness to the hyper-focused world of pro athletes and remind the most ardent of fans that athletes are people too, they suffer, and when they say they are experiencing mental health issues, we need to believe them, care for them, and support them. As Michael Phelps said in his 2020 HBO documentary Weight of Gold, “It’s okay to say you’re not okay.”

If I can do all of the above, then I feel that the World of Headcase has done its job, and so have I.