Athletes Find Ways to Stare Death in Face : Sports: Possibility of being killed or injured is the invisible participant in the arena. Psychologists say many professionals deny fear exists. Some believe they’re invincible.

If, as the psychologists say, all living animals, from humans to the dust mite, feel fear, how come:

1. A baseball player can face a 90 m.p.h. fast ball that, if it veered off course by an inch or two, could cause severe harm or death?

2. A race car driver can speed along at more than 200 m.p.h. when an inch or two can mean fiery death or severe injury?

3. A 100-pound jockey can ride a 1,200-pound horse in a race when an inch or two can mean being crushed to death or severely maimed under the hoofs of other 1,200-pound animals?

The possibility of death or injury is the invisible participant in the world of sport, a world that dominates the lives of many Americans almost every waking hour.

It may be entertainment to those millions, but to the athlete there is a much darker side.

On Friday, for instance, race car driver and television personality Neil Bonnett died in a crash during a practice session at Daytona International Speedway in Florida.

Bonnett, 47, had been attempting a comeback after what was thought to be a career-ending crash in 1990 that left him with a severe concussion and memory loss.

Doctors advised him then to quit the sport, and Bonnett turned to television work, becoming a racing analyst, color commentator and host of a show called “Winners” before being drawn back to driving.

“You can’t walk away from a sport you’ve spent your entire life around,” Bonnett said in an interview last year.

Last month, the Austrian skier Ulrike Maier, winner of two world titles, died after breaking her neck during a World Cup downhill race. She was 26.

In 1991, Mike Utley of the Detroit Lions, a 290-pound offensive lineman, was paralyzed when he broke his neck after being flipped upside down while making a block.

The next season, Dennis Byrd, a defensive lineman with the New York Jets, broke his neck going after a quarterback. Byrd was more fortunate. Expected to be left paralyzed, he has almost completely recovered.

Well, then, how do athletes overcome fear?

Some say they are never afraid, which psychologists call denial.

Bobby Unser Sr., one of car racing’s legendary figures, said: “You know people get killed, but you always think it will be the other guy. It won’t be you. If I were standing with just one other car racer and we were told one of us would be killed in a race, I’d still race. I would be sure it would be the other guy.”

Then there is the repression of fear.

“I think all players are afraid,” said Tim Lewis, who retired during his third year with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers after doctors found he had a congenitally narrow spinal canal that could eventually leave him paralyzed.

“In football many a locker-room conversation is about how I hope this doesn’t happen and that doesn’t happen,” Lewis said. “But when the whistle blows, fear goes out of your mind. You’re invincible. You’re Superman; you’re a projectile missile.”

Here is George Young, a scholar whose life has been football--first as a player, then as a high school coach and now as general manager of the New York Giants: “The Marines and the Army use discipline to get a man to walk into bullets. It’s not natural to get a soldier to walk into bullets. And what we do in football isn’t much more natural.”

One of Unser’s competitors over the years, Mario Andretti, said he never realized his wife’s fears until his own son started racing.

“I make a lousy spectator. I’m OK when I’m running with my son. But when I’m not going against him, I can’t watch.”

Psychologists and psychiatrists have been studying the “athletic personality” for almost 30 years.

They found a macho world, one they had hoped women would help soften. Instead, as women’s sports grew, the women quickly assumed male roles.

Denial exists everywhere.

Two basketball players, Reggie Lewis of the Boston Celtics and Hank Gathers of Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, died after playing with diagnosed heart conditions.

Though few athletes acknowledge fear publicly, the realization that this could be the last ride, the last race, the last fight hovers in the subconscious. They live in a world of broken bones, crippling spinal cord injuries, detached retinas.

Fighters end up brain damaged; hockey players toothless; football players with hip replacements and arthritis.

“Let me describe for you what it is like to be hit hard,” said former light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres, who has spent his life in boxing, a sport that has seen its share of death.

“It is like 1 million ants get into your brain and into your whole body. I got hit that way three times in my career. Today, fighters get hit like that three times in one round.”

The fear is ubiquitous.

A baseball player feels it as he hits against a fastball pitcher; football players when they’re about to line up across from a 250-pound linebacker; lightweight jockeys as they mount a horse that may toss them into the path of several tons of thundering hoofs.

But with pain and fear comes reward, especially at the top.

For the amateur athlete, there is adulation or the high that comes with defying injury or death.

For the professional, there is that and a lot more--the money that can be earned in big-time professional sports has become astronomical. Troy Aikman of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys recently signed a contract that will pay him $50 million over a decade--six months after undergoing delicate back surgery that could have ended his career.

The danger isn’t always in competition.

Monica Seles, then the world’s No. 1 woman tennis player, was stabbed last year by a spectator during a match. She has yet to resume competitive tennis even though her wounds were not life threatening.

Just last month, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was struck on the knee by an assailant after a practice session. Charges have been filed.

But the greatest danger remains in the arena.

During a qualifying round of the springboard diving at the 1988 Olympics, American Greg Louganis hit the back of his head on the board as he was coming down. Such accidents can be fatal--a Russian diver was killed at the World University Games in a similar situation.

Louganis, however, went on to win a gold medal.

He did it by denying it happened--he never watched the videotape.

“I didn’t want that image in my head going into the competition,” he said at a post-victory press conference.

“From my perspective. I jumped off the board and heard a big clank. That’s all I know. I don’t want the visual image of seeing me hit my head.”

His fear?

More of losing than of injury.

“I was scared going into the final,” he said. “When I hit my head on the board, it shook my confidence a lot. I took extra dives in my morning workout. I needed to get over the jitters.”

And diving is far tamer than those in which the danger is clearly visible, like boxing, football or auto racing.

Football players at least have size to protect them.

Not so with jockeys, whose maximum riding weight is around 114 pounds. Clad only in helmets, goggles and bright silks, their stirrups shortened, they sit astride animals bred for speed with huge bodies and thin ankles. When those ankles snap, the rider is in death’s path.

The jockey’s guild says that 125 riders have been killed since 1940. The only year since 1960 in which there were no fatalities was 1992, the guild says.

Julie Krone, certainly the best of all women jockeys, was almost killed last Aug. 30 at Saratoga when she was thrown. Doctors said her Kevlar vest, the bulletproof vest used by police departments, saved her life. She ended up with a shattered ankle that has kept her idle since.

“For the first time in my whole life, I said to myself, ‘This is really dangerous,’ ” said Krone, who weighs 99 pounds. “I felt uncomfortable about riding.”

But the feeling was temporary. A month later, she couldn’t wait to ride again.

Kent Tekulve, a former pitcher once described by Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda as a “tall skinny nightmare” because of the fear he inspired in hitters with his submarine delivery, was himself terrified when he came to bat.

He recalls hitting against Nolan Ryan, when Ryan didn’t always know where his fastball, clocked at more than 90 m.p.h., would go.

“I would just stand out of the box and wait for three strikes. And Ryan wasn’t even pitching hard at me. He knew I couldn’t hit,” Tekulve said.

Then there’s Ron Hunt, who played from 1963 through 1975 and at one point held the major league record for being hit by pitched balls--243 times in 12 years, or 20 times a season.

“Injury? Hah! I was never afraid,” said Hunt, 52, who deliberately got in the way of fastballs from Ryan and other hard throwers. He was either the lead-off batter or second up and describes himself as a “head player.”

Now a rancher in Wentzville, Mo., Hunt took delight in jumping in front of the catcher after he was hit and throwing the ball back to the pitcher.

Boxers may be hit 243 times in a 45-minute fight by fists barely covered with gloves weighing 8 to 12 ounces.

There are a few refreshing changes in this world of denial. One is Torres, an Olympic silver medalist in 1956. He says his knees shook, his stomach was in knots every time he was ready to fight.

“Fear was my main emotion. I learned through experience how to deal with it, how to manipulate it. I made fear my best friend,” said Torres, a novelist and a former New York State boxing commissioner. “I knew when my opponent was going to throw a punch before he threw it.”

Torres says a fearless fighter doesn’t go anywhere.

At the highest level, players have to be motivated to play through pain. Many realize that after a while, the risk isn’t worth it.

That’s why Young of the New York Giants has a maxim in choosing players.

“You rarely want a player who’s extraordinarily smart. He could do something else with his life than play this silly game.”

One example is John Frank, who spent five years with the San Francisco 49ers, played on two Super Bowl champions, and was entering his prime at 27 when he walked away to go to medical school full time.

Frank, a medical student in the off-season, once rushed to the side of an opponent who appeared seriously injured, only to be chewed out by a coach for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

That was his decision-maker. Frank is now a doctor.

Richard Migliore, 29 in March, was the nation’s leading apprentice jockey in 1981. Since then he’s had a series of spills, the most serious in 1988, when he broke his neck and doctors told him he’d probably be a quadriplegic.

He was back riding in four months.

His attitude is typical of top-level athletes.

“If it’s your day to die,” he said, “it’s going to happen.”

Related Story: A26