The sports world will probably remember Bert Yancey as a seven-time winner on the PGA golf tour.
But thousands of Americans who have a mental illness will remember him as their willing spokesman, a man who faced the world to explain what was wrong with his brain's chemistry. By talking about the bipolar disorder with which he battled for three decades, Yancey believed he could strip away layers of stigma and misconception.He wanted to make a difference in the lives of young people who found themselves fighting a little understood battle that often left them feeling completely ostracized by others. He had been there more than once himself, and because of his renown as a golfer, he wasn't afforded privacy for his strange behavior. His "episodes" were sometimes very much in the public eye.
Yancey died of a massive heart attack during the Senior PGA Franklin Quest Championship at Park Meadows Golf Course in Park City Friday. He was 56.
I remember the first time I talked to Yancey about his battle with his manic-depressive disorder. He was in Salt Lake City for the two things that brought him the most satisfaction: golfing and "myth busting," as he put it.
I hadn't been covering human services for very long, and I didn't know much about bipolar disorder. I knew even less about golf. But I did know that it is a rare and giving celebrity - especially a sports hero - who is willing to answer personal questions about an illness that has been so little understood and so often denied, buried or hidden for most of its history.
He explained the illness in careful, measured tones, with simple illustrations of the many forms the illness took in his own life so that I could understand and try to explain it to others.
Imagine, he said, that he's giving a telephone interview. Suddenly the idea pops into his mind that the call is being taped. From there, he might conclude that the tape is being played for the president, to help him decide if he wants Yancey to speak at the White House next week.
"That's irrational, but if I'm in an episode, I believe it very strongly," he told me that day. "I can be walking along and decide that I should capture the heat of the Gulf Stream to save energy in Florida. Suddenly I believe I'm doing it. Or I'm curing cancer with money from Howard Hughes. The ideas are grandiose."
He had his first episode (he thought it was a nervous breakdown) when he was a senior at West Point. After nine months in a psychiatric hospital where he received electric-convulsive treatment (ECT), he was discharged, from both the hospital and the Army. At that point, he got serious about his golfing and joined the PGA tour.
For 13 years, he had the life he'd remembered from before his first episode, he said. Then things got confusing again.
In 1974, on a trip to Japan, he believed he had been sent to Asia to deliver the people from communism. He thought his messianic mission was being funded by Arnold Palmer.
At a well-attended, television-broadcast tournament in 1975, he created a stir when he flashed a cigarette package at the TV cameras. Over and over again he sent what he believed was a code that would be seen and understood by Howard Hughes, who would give him the money to cure cancer.
A few days later, he learned that his condition had a name - bipolar disorder - and it was, in most cases, treatable.
Mental illness is so far incurable. In Yancey's case, it never stopped completely. He learned to recognize what was happening, "to isolate and control it," usually without hospitalization.
He learned to live with it, and with medication he was the "senior partner."
Along the way, he learned to impart hope to others - particularly young people - who shared his illness and the fear and dread it sometimes brought to his life.
He talked to people who were lucky enough to not have a mental illness, so they could understand and stop being afraid or cruel.
He told people who did have such illnesses that it was all right; they could find help. And beyond the chemical imbalance, their lives were very much worth living.