When my close friend and lacrosse teammate decided to try out for a play this past fall, I responded with earnest, if cautious, encouragement. I was happy to see him branching out and trying new things, but deep down I doubted he could pull it off. I assumed, probably like most people, that lacrosse and theater had nothing in common.
Several months later, when a group of about 20 of us from the team went to see his play, we were astounded. It wasn't that he had transformed on stage; he had, instead, become more himself. His speech was assertive and crisp, his focus palpable and his movement free. It was as if we were watching him play the best game of his life.
Which led me to an entirely unexpected question, one that has dissolved the barrier between my life in sports and my life in writing: Are sports and the arts actually more similar than we think?
When I called Dartmouth senior Alexi Pappas '12 to talk about her dual life as a poet and a runner, she was in New York for Passover, having broken her own school record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at Princeton University the day before. With her winning time of 10 minutes and seven seconds, she has likely qualified for the Olympic trials this summer in Oregon. She has a lot to be excited about in the future. But for now, she just wanted to talk about her favorite philosopher.
"Do you know Roland Barthes?" she asked me. "He talks about bliss how it's not happiness exactly, but the borderline or the edge of happiness. You're not comfortable, you're on the edge. That's the place where I write from and that informs my running as well."
Exploring this territory, the precarious edge of happiness, helps us to see the complex interplay of intellect, creativity and emotion between sports and art.
"One thing I've learned in theater is you can't expect something to be perfect the first time," Julian Flamer '12, a football player and actor, said. "It takes a lot of patience. Football is the same way."
Since his football career ended this fall, Flamer has increased his focus on acting and is currently preparing for his role in the acclaimed Dartmouth Dance Ensemble show "Undue Influence."
"I'm not a dancer, so I have to be diligent and persistent," Flamer said. "Athletics works the same way. If you want to get better, you have to rep it in many different situations. I want to get to the point where I've mastered my part."
Although winning is paramount on the football field, what Flamer realized through theater is that success in any activity requires mastery a level of skill where the individual can rely on his or her instinct and physical intelligence rather than rational thought process.
"If you're working on a play in football, you can't be thinking, OK, I'm going to step with my left foot and hit him with my right hand,'" he said. "You have to have your role so down that you don't even have to think about it's a part of you."
Both Flamer and Pappas credit their artistic pursuits with helping them understand and express the emotional side of sports, a crucial element that is rarely understood by casual observers or fans. Flamer said that football players, though frequently thought of as unfeeling and impervious to self-doubt, experience a wide range of emotions in their daily work on the field and in the weight room, from love for the game and for teammates, to anxiety about coaches' expectations, to the burning desire to win.
"You're never emotionless," Flamer said. "That's what people don't realize. Without emotions, you'd just walk off the field."
Junior winter was especially difficult for Flamer, whose love for football was tested by the team's grueling schedule of 7 a.m. workouts four days a week.
"Emotions come hard when you're running sprints during the offseason," he said. "I want to play more, I want to start, I want to win. So much self-doubt builds up."
He said that his Acting II class, which reconnected him with the rich experiences and relationships he's accumulated over the course of his life in football, was what kept him engaged and positive.
"In acting, you have to think back to all the experiences you've had whether they were good, or hurt you or made you sad," he said. "You have to reach inside yourself and think, When was this me?' Acting was the perfect outlet. It did something nothing else could."
Men's hockey player Kyle Schussler '12 taps into his creative side through oil painting. The majority of his work focuses on rural western Canada, the region of his birth and the landscape of his childhood in hockey.
Schussler's playing career at Dartmouth was up and down as he struggled to get playing time.
"There was a lot of mental frustration," he said. "The studio was huge for getting things out. It's more productive than hanging out in the basement or watching TV you can get things out on paper or on canvas instead of bottling it up."
His work in the studio also benefited him on the ice. At practice, when his coach drew up plays on the white board, Schussler's artistic mind helped him read and understand the game more quickly by "recognizing patterns." The subject of his most recent piece is the team whiteboard, which he hopes will help outside viewers "realize the intellectual side of hockey that you don't normally see."
Pappas has only recently begun to explore running through her poetry, a slow but exciting process. Because running is an individual sport, she said, runners can easily get stuck in their own heads. If a runner suppresses his or her emotions, from anxiety about an upcoming race to frustration with an injury, "running can become your enemy," she said. "If you stay within yourself, it's not healthy."
In March, several nights before Pappas and her distance medley relay team flew to Idaho for the NCAA Championships, she read a selection of poems from her ongoing honors thesis at Left Bank Books. Her coach, along with a cluster of excited teammates, were in attendance.
"The poetry allows me to show them what I experience in this sport," she said. "It brings about this element of honesty that I think is particularly important with running."
For Pappas, Flamer and Schussler, their artistic endeavors aren't so much a refuge from the rigors of being a student-athlete at Dartmouth as much as they are a creative way to engage with, and make sense of, those experiences. The arts help athletes explore their whole lives, fighting off the human urge to compartmentalize. It's a slow process that requires patience and a willingness to explore uncomfortable emotions and memories.
"It's important that people become more OK with feeling uncomfortable especially athletes," Flamer said. "The arts, whether it's music, theater or visual art I think all athletes should try them. There are great outlets on both ends."
