Encounter With An Athlete

It could have been that I first became aware that there was something called ballet through one of those pictures occasionally seen on sports pages, the massive Polish tackle and the fragile ballerina at a barre on the field. Or maybe it was in a short just before Buck Jones galloped through one of his many thin diversions at the Saturday movies. Then, some time later, while cooling off in the library on a hot summer afternoon, I came across a book defending boxing from those who are always railing about how the sport savages the fighter's brain. Ending his defense quietly, the writer asked: "Who hit Nijinsky in the head?"

At the time, the mystery for me was not who hit the gentleman, but just who was Nijinsky? The tailor down the street? I did not know for a long time, until one evening, out of curiosity and severe intimidation by a young girl I never saw again, I found myself in a theater gallery, which was, so I was told, the sanctuary of true scholars of ballet. As I watched, I could not help feeling much like the woman who once commented on the easiness of Rodin's work, to which the sculptor replied: "Yes, it is easy. All you have to do is take a large piece of marble and with your chisel knock away all that you don't need." The engrossed eyes, the motionless bodies nearby failed to change my mind, and when the performance was over I was convinced that ballet was easy. Even more, I found it offensive—sharply so.

While leaving, I became more agitated by what seemed to be the audience's trenchant vivisection of the evening and then, stroking my ignorance and looking about at the mother-of-pearl cigarette holders tilted in the air like lances, the good looks and easy confidence of a world I never knew, nor wanted to know, I wondered something: What did these people understand about the real world, say, Mays making a catch in deep center field. Like a whip cracking out, the question had come, shaped by a waterfront atmosphere in which a badge of acceptance was a blue work shirt, and dented beer kettles were old school steins, and there were people who would ask—if they had read any literature of the '30s—what the hell was so romantic, so human, so noble about having your skull baked near an open hearth, sweating on a dock, raising a large family. Indeed, what was so noble about surviving?

Such things as romance and art belonged to others, the frivolous ones with money who ran things so badly and then always stooped down to the rabble, the proletariat, to bail them out. The word art was never heard in the language of the neighborhood, and if the subject was thought of at all it was in relation to the prints of one saint or another looking patronizingly down from the walls of dim kitchens and gray bedrooms, or to the fluttering octaves of the choir at High Mass. It was through sports that the people found expression, and they devoured the seasons like chunks of raw meat, insensitive to essences: the esthetics of movement, the myriad of delicate lines to each sport. It was the catch by Mays that counted, not the brilliance of his flight.

Their minds belonged to the quantifiers. They were locked into a scoreboard attitude toward life, from the grim mathematics of factory production to the simplest of recreations. It was not how you did something, it was the result that mattered, that and the look of one's exterior which, when swept aside, covered dark storms of anxiety, bitterness and a true sense of defeat. It was just a matter of time before it all would blend into the worst sort of cynicism—into craftily bungling plumbers, weight-manipulating butchers, gouging TV repairmen. It was, though, not their true spirit. Once they had been an inquisitive people with creative, rowdy style, with an infectious feel for life and the zest for making their lives count in some special way. But that was before they learned that nobody put any of this up on a scoreboard.

For an artist of any stripe to come out of this environment, this thinking, no matter how sympathetic his parents might be, is a long, long bet. To connect ballet with this backdrop is blasphemous, and to connect with it one of the greatest dancers in the world is beyond credibility. I could not believe that Edward Villella could be from Queens, N.Y. The incongruity of Villella and Queens, a cut above a waterfront area but still a fortress of convention and practicality, started me thinking of ballet again. I then learned that Villella had been a welterweight boxing champion at the New York Maritime College, a better than average infielder, and that he had worked summers pushing racks over the chaotic streets of the garment center. He could also brawl if he had to, and once it nearly cost him his life. Set upon by several young marines, he ended up in a hospital with a badly lacerated face and a concussion.

It seemed an ordinary background, that is for anyone save a ballet dancer. By now I had become curious. Who were these people, where did they come from and what were they like? I read of Nureyev, the mysterious Tartar whose name is synonymous with ballet, an artist many believe is without equal but one others view as "too pretty, too cornball." I tried not to allow a quote from a ballerina to influence my remote picture of him. "I spend all my offstage time," said the ballerina, "pinning up his hair and spraying it. He feels it is very poetic." I did like, though, the way he answered his critics: "I am Nureyev, dancer, nothing more than that. I am on sale. It is free enterprise. If you like, you buy. If you don't like, you leave alone."

Of all the dancers I read about, it was Nijinsky who struck me. At 19 he had captivated Europe and was often referred to as "the man of whom birds are jealous." Ten years later he went mad, and he spent the rest of his life in institutions, where he painted pictures of strange bugs, distorted masks and faces with staring eyes. The story of his life is engulfing, but above all I came away from it with a sense of the human body, something I had never thought much about before. "It was not the transference of an inert mass from one position of balance to another," wrote a friend of Nijinsky, "but the supple alliance with weight, like a wing on the air, of all that machine of muscles and nerves, of a body that is not trunk or statue, but the complete organ of power and movement."

I decided to see Villella perform. I was told he was the complete embodiment of athleticism, and maybe the finest athlete in the country. I did not dismiss these opinions, but I did remain skeptical and, even though I was no longer ignorant enough to think ballet was easy, I fully expected much of what I felt many years before—the solemnity, the glibness of balletomanes who seemed to transmit the impression that ballet belonged in a cathedral. Instead, the opposite was obvious in the lobby of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. The lobby had the familiar look and sound of a ball park, the crowd had a natural feel, and even the elegance, blending with unkempt young people and the drab uniforms of the street, seemed real and stately, rather than contrived for a moment. It could have been that I was looking at it all with new eyes, but it is more likely that dancers like Villella and the choreographer Balanchine are chipping at the jewel-encrusted veneer of ballet, bringing it to the people, making it human.

I find it difficult to communicate what I saw on this night, except to say that I had never seen such sheer human force generated before, never seen the physicality of a body expressed so completely as it was done by Edward Villella. For 40 straight, relentless minutes, he used every muscle, every fiber in his small body, leaping (at times over six feet), jumping, twisting, running, all of it with a constancy of grace and control that in sport is seen only in fragments. He developed every movement admired in athletics and brought to each one a quintessence of its beauty: the balance of a pivot at second base; the timing of an over-the-shoulder pass reception; and surely every move you have ever gaped at on a basketball court. I left feeling exhilarated, but inwardly confused.