Hawkeyes’ Patrick McCaffery isn’t alone, in support or empathy

IOWA CITY — Patrick McCaffery will be with the Iowa men’s basketball team Thursday night for its home game against Indiana, and he’ll accompany the Hawkeyes to their game at Rutgers Sunday.

He’s taking a self-imposed leave of absence from playing, but he’s not going into seclusion.

“Sometimes when you take a leave of absence,” McCaffery’s father and head coach, Fran McCaffery, said here Wednesday, “that's what that means, right? You remove yourself from the situation.

“He's removing himself from the competition part, but it was important to him, and he verbalized this to his teammates, that he remain supportive of them, so he'll be at practice today, he'll be at the game tomorrow, he'll travel with us to New Jersey. So that was important to him.”

When Patrick, a junior forward who averages nearly 13 points per game, decides he can play again remains to be seen. The important thing for now, his parents and brother say, is for him to know he’s doing the right thing taking time off to deal with anxiety.

It’s a quiet but paralyzing mental condition. Compounding it with the physical and emotional requirements of playing major-college basketball is no way to get healthy.

“He didn’t want to feel like he was letting anybody down,” said his mother, Margaret McCaffery. “In the last few weeks he was just mentally and physically exhausted by this. Which is what happens with anxiety. You don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you don’t have any stamina.

“He has no adrenaline. By the time he gets to game time, he feels like he’s already run a marathon in the whole day and his body just has nothing.”

In the Hawkeyes’ game at Penn State Sunday, there was one brief televised shot of him on the Iowa bench looking as un-Patrick as it gets, with his face drained of spirit.

Little did we know anxiety isn’t a new thing for him, that he has wrestled with it periodically since high school. He had been able to cope, to continue doing what he loves and be a gregarious presence.

“He's the guy that makes everybody laughs,” Fran McCaffery said. “I mean, if you were with us at the team dinner the night before the Penn State game, he's the one that's joking and laughing, and they're all laughing with him.”

But on Sunday night after the team got back to Iowa City following its game that afternoon, instead of going to his apartment, Patrick went to his family’s home with his dad.

“Fran didn’t leave until Patrick was ready to go,” Margaret said.

It was Patrick, with brother Connor’s strong agreement, who wanted to explain to his teammates and the public exactly what was happening with him. Immediately, people from near and far offered support and empathy. Anxiety is no mystery to millions, but it doesn’t always get discussed candidly.

“The outpouring of support has been tremendous from a variety of different people,” Fran McCaffery said. Many, and perhaps most, of those people understood the situation all too well. Others may become a bit more comfortable facing their own situations because a public figure they know has done so.

“I think when you're in that position,” McCaffery said, “I think you feel very alone. You're the only one going through it. But then when you find out that there's so many people in every walk of life — Kevin Love (of the Cleveland Cavaliers) as been very open about it, Lane Johnson from the Eagles. There's so many high-profile professional athletes that have gone through this.

“I'm sure a lot of them have gone through it, never said anything. We're kind of programmed to be that way. We just keep battling and we don't say anything, and we just compete.”

Saying something is better. Learning you aren’t alone is better. Stepping away from what you feel are obligations in order to take care of yourself is better.

“From a mom’s perspective,” Margaret McCaffery said, “watching somebody that you love struggle, to see him battle and try to keep fighting because he thinks that’s what he should do, I felt like it was our job to give him permission to not have to do that.

“He wasn’t letting anybody down.”

The Hawkeyes will have one less player in uniform Thursday night and for a while. But maybe they’ll become a little more whole over time because of it.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com