“She was able to uncover so many things—not just about playing tennis, not just my identity and retiring, but also coping with my performance as a broadcaster, helping my relationships with my family, my partner, and friends,” Siripipat said. “She was able to open up my world and transform so many aspects of my life.”  

Nearly a decade after this therapist inspired her to focus on mental health, Siripipat—a one-time junior tennis star, former ESPN reporter, and current sports anchor—is a counseling psychology student at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education who wants to help athletes, coaches, and parents experiencing social and emotional struggles. 

“As mental health continued to [gain in]awareness and athletes became more outspoken about it, I saw a tremendous need for there to be somebody that could tap into different realms,” said Siripipat. “My goal is to blend my broadcasting experience, athletic experience, and my eventual counseling psychology training to be the Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil of sports.”

A Tennis Star from Missouri 

Siripipat began playing tennis at age 7. A decade later, she became one of the top 10 junior players in the United States. Her dream of becoming a professional tennis player was slowly becoming a reality, but in her junior year at Duke University, where she played on the women’s tennis team and amassed a 44-15 overall singles record and a 17-2 Atlantic Coast Conference singles record, her knees and right shoulder became worn from years of overuse. Three surgeries later, Siripipat realized her childhood dream was no longer possible. But she stayed close to the world of sports, which she had come to know and love.

“If I couldn’t be an athlete, at least I could continue to be around and cover athletes,” said Siripipat, who turned to sports journalism. “[Broadcasting] reminded me and felt so much like sports. There’s light and there’s just that live element and adrenaline rush and pressure.” 

From the Court to the Studio

For 17 years, Siripipat has worked as a sports anchor, reporter, and news producer at TV stations across the East Coast. She spent six years at ESPN, where she anchored televised shows like Sports Center and covered the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, and Wimbledon; she also co-hosted “Spain and Prim,” with Sarah Spain; it was one of the first national sports radio shows to be hosted and produced by women. Siripipat also hosted “The Next Chapter” podcast at The Athletic, a subscription-based sports website, where she interviewed athletes about their retirement experience. 

In recent years, she has been nurturing another dream. Siripipat, who has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Duke and a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia, has always been passionate about psychology. It started with her personal struggles and expanded as she witnessed other athletes face mental health challenges. At ESPN, she helped launch a podcast called “Inside Out,” where athletes reflect on the psychological and social impact of sports. After receiving her master’s in 2018, she realized that if she wanted to reach the same level as her role model—Dr. William D. Parham, the first-ever director of mental health and wellness for the National Basketball Players Association—she needed to earn her doctorate. 

Encouraging Athletes to Speak Out and Seek Help

A year ago, she set her sights on Fordham’s doctoral program in counseling psychology at the Graduate School of Education. 

“The program and a few of the faculty members were in the space of what I was interested in—career transitioning, identity loss, retirement. The faculty themselves are very competent, but they also seem to have similar personalities to mine. And the diversity—just being embedded in Manhattan, I think is huge,” said Siripipat. “It was the perfect place.” 

On May 15, she shared the good news of her Fordham acceptance on her Twitter account that has nearly 30,000 followers: “Fordham was my No. 1 choice for a host of reasons … I’m excited for The Next Chapter & to share it with all of u!” 

This semester, Siripipat says she’s been learning about “group counseling, psychohistory, multiculturalism in Dr. Ponterotto’s class, racial issues, social justice issues, [and]hidden biases,” and she plans to bring those lessons to today’s sports landscape and athletes past, present, and future. She also works with Jennie Park-Taylor, Ph.D., associate professor and director of training for the counseling psychology doctoral program, as her graduate assistant. 

Decades from now, she hopes those efforts will pay off. 

“That would be my goal: to connect the dots and meld the two worlds of sports and psychology,” said Siripipat, who wants to be a good role model for her two-year-old son. “I [hope I]would’ve transformed or helped change the landscape where athletes can not only feel comfortable about coming out and talking about their issues without being judged, but also created a space where coaches and parents are more educated about how to raise not just a youth athlete, but a happy, healthy kid.” 

In 2018, he will graduate from Fordham’s Graduate School of Education with a master’s degree in mental health counseling.

“My grandmother came to the hospital, and the doctor said he couldn’t stop the bleeding,” Young said of that tragic day. “She said, ‘I don’t wanna hear that.’ She prayed and prayed.” And while she did, the doctors got the bleeding under control.

“When I woke up, my mother was at my bedside saying I was gonna be OK. I thought I’d died, and when I woke up I just burst out crying,” he said.

That experience, the result of a run-in with an acquaintance who was high on PCP, profoundly changed him. He’d already started to turn away from a life of gangs, drugs, and violence thanks to the Young Men’s Leadership Group, an after-school program that Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver started at Young’s New Haven high school. But it was the strength he summoned to forgive his assailant that inspired him to devote his life to helping others.

In 2013, after years of working at rehab centers and homeless shelters in New York City, he earned a bachelor’s degree at the College of New Rochelle’s Rosa Parks Campus in Harlem. He knew he wanted to go on to graduate work at a top university.

“I said, ‘In order to best serve the population that I would like to work with, I need to enroll in a school that’s diverse and sticks to their principles and their mission statement of social justice,’” he said. He applied to Fordham and was accepted.

Shriver, who visited Young’s bedside the day he was shot, said he was blown away when Young told him he was pursuing a master’s degree.

“How many people who’ve been through what he’s been through get degrees at all? Very few. How many people get these degrees with a vision for how to overcome insidious kinds of bias and self-defeating mentalities and cultural barri-ers? … He’s an outlier in every good way.”

Feelings of self-doubt made graduate school difficult at first, but Young credited GSE faculty members, particularly Professor Joseph G. Ponterotto, Ph.D., with helping him overcome his fears. In fact, Young mined his experiences for a research project on how African Americans interact and thrive in unfamiliar environments.

After graduation, Young will be volunteering at the AJS Wellness Center in New Rochelle and doing outreach for the Larry T. Young Foundation in New Haven, which he founded in honor of his deceased brothers Larry and Glenn. He’s planning to apply to doctoral programs in 2019.

He’s hopeful that his own ability to bounce back from adversity will help him inspire others.

“The African-American story of going through slavery and discrimination and still being able to look at someone in the face and say, ‘I love you brother’— that’s what makes us unique. That’s how we survived for 400 years. The perseverance and resilience,” he said.

“That’s my story.”

The story of Bobby Fischer has for decades garnered international intrigue.

At 15, Fischer became the youngest chess grandmaster in the world. To Cold War-era Americans, Fischer’s victory in 1958 over the reigning eastern European champions rendered him a national hero, resulting in accolades like “genius” and “boy wonder.” His 1972 capture of the World Championship from Boris Spassky of the USSR is still considered to be the most widely watched chess match in history.

But over time, Fischer’s reclusive and increasingly bizarre behavior alienated him, until his vitriolic anti-Semitism and endorsement of the 9/11 attacks ultimately sank him into infamy. He died an exile in Iceland in 2008.

So, how could one of America’s greatest minds have ended this way?

That is the question Joseph G. Ponterotto, Ph.D., tackles in his groundbreaking book, A Psychobiography of Bobby Fischer: Understanding the Genius, Mystery, and Psychological Decline of a World Chess Champion (Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, Ltd., 2012).

“I wondered, what happened? How did he go awry?” Ponterotto said. “He was a gifted, brilliant prodigy, and I kept thinking that, if he would have gotten counseling and treatment early on, his life could have been very different.”

After Fischer’s death, Ponterotto, professor of counseling psychology in the Graduate School of Education (GSE), coordinator of GSE’s Mental Health Counseling program, and himself an avid chess player, launched a “psychological autopsy” of Fischer—that is, a posthumous psychological evaluation. He interviewed surviving family members, friends, chess masters, journalists, and biographers who knew him.

Between interviews and archives, including a 994-page FBI file on Fischer’s mother, Regina, Ponterotto pieced together how the former grandmaster’s genius degenerated into ostensible madness.

“People know his genius at the chessboard, and they know his bizarre behavior, but they don’t understand why,” he said. “No one really addresses what led to Bobby’s downfall, what led to his giving up on chess, to these symptoms of paranoia and isolation, to the intense anger he felt toward Jews. I uncover those issues to explain that behavior.”

Fischer’s superior intelligence—the root of his celebrity and perhaps his downfall—is aptly explained by his family history. His mother Regina was a polyglot who earned an M.D. and Ph.D. in hematology. Fischer’s putative biological father (the paternity of whom Ponterotto corroborates) was also extraordinarily intelligent.

“Bobby’s biological father, Paul Nemenyi, was a brilliant statistician and engineer. There’s even a theorem named after him,” Ponterotto said. “He had prodigious intellectual gifts, but he also had psychological troubles.”

Nemenyi’s coworkers described him as “an unstable and undesirable person” who exhibited bizarre behaviors, such as an aversion to wool and a proclivity for extreme cleanliness.

According to Ponterotto, it is possible that Fischer inherited not only his father’s genius, but also his maladies.

“There’s hereditary influence,” Ponterotto said. “And there’s [also]some correlation between the neurological functioning in creative genius and in mental illness. It’s not a direct correlation or a cause and effect… but some of the same neurotransmitters are involved.”

His creative genius, coupled with genetic predisposition to mental illness, and the stress of family dysfunction and early fame, meant that when Fischer relinquished chess—his sole source of stability and self-confidence—he was left even more susceptible to the onset of the disease.

Initially, he seemed merely eccentric, making outlandish requests of chess tournament directors to ensure optimal playing conditions. His behavior, however, grew more paranoid. His friends reported that he sometimes lashed out violently. One friend recalled when Fischer had the fillings in his teeth removed for fear the metal might pick up vibrations or even radio transmissions.

“The problem was that he didn’t have balance,” Ponterotto said. “His personal identity was fused with his chess identity. So when he stopped playing competitive chess, he lost that structure and became more vulnerable to possible mental illness.”

Although Ponterotto stresses that, ethically, he cannot formally diagnose Fischer, he can weigh others’ suggested diagnoses against Fischer’s behaviors, family history, and the stressors to which he was exposed.

Based on these factors, Ponterotto believes the evidence is strongest for paranoid personality disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by unrelenting paranoia and suspicion of others, but is not schizophrenia.

The disorder, though serious, is treatable with psychotherapy.

“What would have happened if he’d gotten counseling early on? Instead of being world champion for three years, he could have been world champion for 10 years and lived a happier, healthier life,” Ponterotto said.

In his book, Ponterotto considers which services would have benefitted Fischer, and each of his family members. He also examines how prodigious children today might be spared Fischer’s tragic outcome.

“It starts with elementary schools—school counselors, school psychologists, principals, teachers. We need to have systematic, comprehensive programs in place to support [not only]at-risk children, but also gifted and talented children,” he said.

The issue is complex, though. By encouraging prodigies to find balance in their lives, do we risk stifling their particular talents? How do we kindle creative genius without burning out its possessor?

The answers are still uncertain; but at the very least, a deeper understanding of Fischer’s story might help advance the issue.

“There may be an expense that comes with a gift,” Ponterotto said. “[In Fischer’s case,] we let a gifted prodigy fall by the wayside.”

Although Ponterotto publishes widely in multicultural psychology—he has written 12 books and nearly 100 articles—this new venture marks his first book targeted at a popular audience.

Evidently, he is reaching them: When part of his research was published in Miller-McCune magazine in 2011, the online story drew 18,000 hits within the first few days.

He and a GSE doctoral student, Jason Reynolds, are now examining Fischer’s life from different perspectives in psychology.

“I was able to coalesce… all my skills as a psychologist, a quantitative and qualitative researcher, and a historian into the intense study of one person, which is what I do in clinical therapy,” he said, adding lightheartedly, “It was like my midlife crisis was to do interdisciplinary research and re-engage my lifelong passion for chess.”