Athletic Artistry
By: Paul Shirley
Tags: Music, Psychology, Athletes, Kurt Cobain

On the last day of this year’s Lollapalooza, as cold rain tore into my back while I stood in front of the stage where the Arctic Monkeys were supposed to be playing, I struck up a conversation with a man a decade older than I as he shifted his weight on top of a tarp I was hoping he’d have the sense to turn into a tent. When I asked about the rest of his day and about which headliner he was excited to see, he said, with a spark that hadn’t been there when we were just two idiots standing in a thunderstorm, “the Foo Fighters.” Then, quickly and as if by way of apology — probably because no one much likes the Foo Fighters anymore — he added, “I was supposed to see Nirvana at Lollapalooza ’94, but well, they didn’t make that. And this feels like closure, in a weird way.”

Nirvana didn’t headline Lollapalooza in the summer of 1994 because lead singer Kurt Cobain shot himself in the spring of 1994. The Foo Fighters are, of course, the longtime project of Nirvana’s drummer, Dave Grohl.

I am prone to skepticism about claims of rabid pre-suicide Nirvana fandom; in my experience, many people apply their devotion to Nirvana retroactively. But I kept my mouth shut; I had my eyes on his tarp, after all.

We chatted for another ten minutes, and then the rain slowed and the Arctic Monkeys came on. I soon said goodbye to the Foo Fighters Fan and walked to Manchester Orchestra before enduring one more rainstorm en route to the headliner I was excited about, the Canadian DJ Deadmau5.

There, my friends and I stood in the mud and danced and acted like fools and then Lollapalooza was over and then I went home and I forgot all about the Foo Fighters, Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain.

That is, until I watched the tear-soaked, soul-baring Basketball Hall Of Fame acceptance speech given by Dennis Rodman.

Dennis Rodman never killed himself. But, one year before Cobain blasted part of his cranium off a wall in Seattle, Rodman found himself sitting in a truck outside the Palace Of Auburn Hills with a loaded gun in his lap and thoughts of suicide in his head.

Rodman had been misunderstood for years, he said, and he couldn’t see how that was ever going to change.

I read about Rodman’s tale of (extreme) woe as a teenaged subscriber to Sports Illustrated. I was like most human beings — I couldn’t imagine that a professional athlete would want to kill himself. How could someone so big and strong, with everything going for him, ever consider putting a bullet in his brain?

But then, a year later, Cobain’s suicide seemed perfectly normal. This because we expect musicians to have brains that exist on the edge of sanity. When a musician kills him- or herself, we lament the passing of an artist, but we aren’t surprised. It’s all part of the mystique; artists are supposed to be fucked up, we think.

Athletes are not supposed to be fucked up. Athletes are not supposed to be like musicians — subject to the same doubts and fears and compulsions. Their weirdness — whether it is Zack Greinke’s social anxiety or Ken Griffey Jr. trying to overdose on aspirin — must be an aberration, we decide.

But this is a mistaken conclusion. In the end, athletes are more like musicians than they are like anyone else.

How do I know this? Well, the little boy that once read about Dennis Rodman’s near-suicide eventually became a professional basketball player.

By the metric of, say, Dennis Rodman, my basketball career was a colossal failure. However, by any rational measure, I was a wildly successful basketball player. One reason I was able to play for so long: I was driven — sometimes by fear of failure, often by a desire to avoid the real world, but almost always because I felt at peace on the basketball court. I wanted to find that peace over and over.

Now that I’ve gotten to know several musicians — thanks to a job writing about music and thanks to a year and a half spent dating one — I can report that their motivations are similar. When they play music, they feel something similar to what I felt on the court.

There are other similarities. Musicians understand all the things that go into being misunderstood by the world at large: the unseen ratio between preparation and performance, the bizarre nature of life on the road, the sometimes-cruel, sometimes-kind influence of luck on an entire career.

But most of all, musicians understand what it is like to bare one’s soul — a soul that is often more fragile than anyone knows — in front of a large group of people, for extended periods of time, and with the knowledge that, in doing that soul-baring, things could go very badly.

There will always be a disconnect between fans of sports and music and the purveyors of those sports and music. The fans think they understand what it is like to be a professional athlete or musician. After all, they think, they played high school ball and the sax in the marching band.

But the difference between a professional musician and an amateur one — just like the difference between a professional athlete and an amateur one — is bigger than “I just kept doing it.” Something has to be different. I don’t know what that something is, exactly — probably a strange cocktail of brain chemicals and childhood experiences that drives the professional athlete or the serious musician to pursue that activity full-time — but I do know that my brain isn’t an amplified version of my high school point guard’s. There’s a difference. Not a good difference, necessarily, and probably an unhealthy difference. But a difference.

And then, because of this difference — a difference that sometimes leads to seemingly inexplicable off-court or off-stage behavior — the two populations converge. Dennis Rodman becomes more like Kurt Cobain than like Steve, your neighborhood basketball junkie. Kurt Cobain becomes more like Dennis Rodman than like Ernie, the Bon Scott impersonator in For Those About To Rock, the AC/DC cover band down at McGillicutty’s.

The people we call artists — writers, poets, musicians, dancers — don’t become as singularly talented at the one thing at which they are singularly talented without having a few screws loose.

Athletes are no different.

After watching Rodman’s speech, I paid attention to the reaction of those who had also seen it. Most said, wrote, or intimated that they had never been fans of Rodman — he was too “odd” or “strange” or “flamboyant” for their tastes. But after watching Rodman explain himself in his halting, inarticulate way, they understood that there was an actual human being behind all that mascara and costumery.

Those people didn’t like Dennis Rodman The Basketball Player because Dennis Rodman The Basketball Player wasn’t very good at covering up his inner weirdo. And further, he wasn’t very good at explaining his inner weirdo. Fans dismissed him as a freak and devoted their attention to athletes who were easier to understand.

They could do this because most athletes are good at covering up their inner weirdos; they learn that society doesn’t want its athletes to be emotionally complex. Society wants its athletes to be like superheroes: cartoon-like and easily deciphered.

They aren’t. They’re just as gifted and complex and then, because of it, just as odd and fucked-up as musicians.

That man you’re watching on Saturday or Sunday or Monday Night — whether he’s Dennis Rodman or Chad Ochocinco or Ron Artest or Gilbert Arenas — is Kurt Cobain, only with height and muscles and an ability to appear at ease in front of huge crowds.

So don’t be surprised if he does something strange once in a while.