Neurological Correlates

Divorce as social contagion and Mr. Woods’ unfortunate car accident.

It must be tough to be married to a professional athlete.
Professional Sports Wives Magazine targets:

Over 3 MILLION [Pro athletes, wives and girlfriends]: 707,542 professional athletes, coaches, sports executives; Ages 21-65 years old target reader. With 67% (474,053) married; and 33% (233,489) single or engaged, active and retired.

Professional sports and entertainment industry go hand in hand, and many professional athletes or retired players end up in SoCal.  In the day to day, the spouses strike me as being as capable as any professional entertainment manager.  Wives plan when they are going to have children by the sports season. Kids are enrolled in the private schools that can easily transfer credits to, say, Pittsburgh — just in case.  LA Kings spouses seemed to be expert in Canadian currency arbitrage, knowing when to make luxury item purchases in Canada due to Canadian dollar devaluation.   Rehab, health, finances.  Pro athlete (and rock star) spouses strike me as another support system for the celebrity as a person, who is lucky to have them rather than vice versa.

No one knows, but people guesstimate that  60-80% of pro athlete marriages end in divorce. Why? The obvious. Some speculate that, as a group, professional athletes just don’t care about the things that normally keep marriages together, such as the threat of going bankrupt by paying ginormous child support payments. (see,  here). Others suggest rampant infidelity, women who target athletes, trophy wives, lifestyles not conducive to marriage and players being surrounded by entourages, which can discourage intimacy.

But is it really the pro-athlete lifestyle? Or maybe the question really is, why do pro-athletes have this divorce prone lifestyle?

Professional sport teams fit exactly into the model of  divorce as  “social contagion” due to the social and emotional ties among team mates.

A recent study of the famous Framingham Heart Study population reports the likelihood of divorce skyrockets if the subject has friends, siblings or co-workers who divorce:  People who have named a friend who has gotten divorced are 147%  more likely to get divorced themselves; a divorced sibling, 22% more likely to get divorced; and a divorced co-worker,  55% more likely to get divorced than the non-divorced equivalents.  But these are is not just any friends or co-workers: these are friends who reciprocate the friendship (i.e., not alter-perceived friends), and co-workers who work in an office of 10 people or less.

McDermott, Rose, Christakis, Nicholas A. and Fowler, James H., Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years (October 18, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1490708

Sports teams have a double whammy for this kind of social contagion: friends who reciprocate and smallish office environment. The same could be true for elite level athletes in non-team sports, like PGA golfers, who may consider themselves in the same “club” rather than as competitors.

So then what’s with Tiger Woods?

Perhaps John Daly.