Sports Commentary July 11, 2005

B & G Imagination Junction


The Greatest Athlete Ever To Wear Greasepaint……………………..



This reporter is just returned from his annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. Yes, it was enjoyable as always to venture into a world very different than the normal. I call Las Vegas a Disneyland for adults and just like the real theme park it is good for a few days before returning to the real world.

Las Vegas is best known for gambling but is also one of the top entertainment centers in the world. Stage shows, of all types, play each day of the year catering to just about every taste.

Annually I now visit two cities where if one can sing, dance, act or otherwise entertain that is where one wants to end up. When one visits Las Vegas and New York one has no trouble finding great performances.

As mentioned, Vegas is an escape from normal reality—my normal reality is observing and writing about sports. To be sure competitive athletics is part of the city’s entertainment as Vegas is a thriving metropolis that is much as any city once away from the fabled Strip.

Over the years both outstanding athletic teams and individuals have come out of the city—among the city’s best known sports stars are the recently written about tennis star, Andre Agassi and baseball player Greg Maddox.

Yet, I can attend sports events anywhere but when in New York it is Broadway and when in Vegas it is its varied forms of stage shows—both cities might be the only places that I can travel to and care little who is home that week. If you know me at all you know that surely makes both destinations escapes from my reality.

Ah, but now I am back from Las Vegas and memories of entertainment and sporting thoughts have returned.

One form of show business talent, that there is plenty of up in Nevada, is dancing. I always enjoy watching show dancing because of the beauty of the art and because it, very definitely, is athletic.

To me, dancers are athletes. We often marvel at the artistry of a great athlete so why not think of a dancer as an athlete?

So having just been in a town full of outstanding dancers the question came to me who might be the greatest athlete ever among dancers?

Ever covers a lot of years and there are many candidates. Whether one likes classical dance or not observe the athleticism of the ballet dancer.

Watch the Russian Ballet and those fellows leaping over teammates in a line standing up and tell me that they could not compete in the long jump.

How about a night at Riverdance or any other number of folk dance performances? Go to just about any Broadway musical and tell me that those kids in the chorus are not athletes.

Yet, there has always been a sort of reverse snobbery that if you are into sports then you look at those that dance as sissies.

Every now and then we read or see stories of athletes taking ballet classes to improve their coordination—seemingly, such stories always put the athletes on the defensive that they would be involved in such “non-macho” activity.

So though the dancer surely knows that he or she better be a good athlete to be a good dancer society, in general, is slow to accept such an equation.

For the male dancer acceptance has been harder to come by and might never have ever even been on the table for discussion if not for one man and thus his extraordinary ability and impact as a dancer makes him the hands-down winner of the best athletic dancer ever, Gene Kelly.

Kelly had a goal, well beyond just being a star, of taking the “sissy” art of dance and making it cool to the crowd judging macho by how bloodied the athlete gets in trying to win a game.

Only an unknowing fool would think Kelly a sissy and if you had tried to confront him with such a charge he might do the same as an NFL lineman and knock you into next Sunday—the man had an attitude and took it to the stage with him.

Kelly was qualified to prove his point because he began as an athlete.

Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh in 1912. One of five children Kelly was a typical boy playing baseball, football and hockey. He was on the varsity baseball team in high school and hoped to be good enough, someday, to play for the hometown Pittsburgh Pirates.

Meanwhile, though, Kelly’s mother was a lover of the arts and made all of her children-including the boys-study ballet. So, as a youth, Gene lived the experience of fighting the tag of being a sissy.

As Gene got older he realized that he might not grow big enough to be a good major league baseball player and anyway he actually enjoyed dancing discovering it was not a bad way to meet girls.

All five Kelly kids formed an amateur vaudeville act that played around town—later, Gene teamed with younger brother Fred for a song and dance act.

Gene had become so good a dancer, at so young an age, that at the age of twenty the family opened a dance studio—never lacking bravado the kid insisted that it be named the Gene Kelly Dance School as he was well-known around town and his name out front would bring in customers.

He was quite right. Along with just ordinary folk, the still young man was sought out by professional dancers to assist them in improving their own acts.

In 1933 Kelly graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in economics—he tried law school for a while but it just was not him as the man was meant to dance.

Yet, it was now the depression and money had to be earned—the dance school helped but was not enough so Gene the college graduate took what jobs that there were including ditch-digging.

Kelly never stopped dancing and teaching others how to dance so, in 1938, he and Fred headed to Broadway.

After landing a couple of minor roles Gene hit the big time, in 1940, cast as the despicable night club singer Joey Evans in the new Rogers and Hart musical Pal Joey.

Kelly’s energy and ice-breaking performance shot him to the top in New York not only on stage but as a choreographer as well.

Hollywood beckoned Kelly and in 1942 he debuted in the film musical, For Me And My Gal with Judy Garland.

MGM locked Kelly up to a long-term contract and after a few more films Kelly began to flex his muscles and reinvent how dance was perceived and performed on film.

The tyrannical head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, never got along with Kelly and vice versa but Mayer loved money and Kelly’s ground breaking movies were starting to make money and heaping artistic praise on his empire—so, Mayer mostly let Kelly alone.

Good thing that he did as Kelly did a string of classic musicals that changed how we looked at men that dance—Kelly brought his athletic talent and blue-collar mentality to the dance floor.

It was said then and is still said that there were just two male dancers of significance, Kelly and Fred Astaire.

Their styles were vastly polar opposite but both cut their deep niche. The media tried to say that the two were hated rivals but in fact they were the best of friends with obvious mutual respect.

Kelly was very hard to work with or for not only because he was a perfectionist but also because he had that athlete’s competitive spirit.

In the 1940’s Kelly hosted parties, at his home, where the main activity was volleyball—even at volleyball Kelly hated to lose. One day his team was defeated—Gene went into the house and kicked a wall in disgust breaking his foot. If you ever see the film Easter Parade remember the volleyball player as Astaire, instead of Gene, starred with Garland because of Kelly’s Irish temper.

Kelly recovered to do three films that absolutely defined he and his style forever. In On The Town, An American In Paris and Singing In The Rain Kelly was at his very best—the latter film is considered the best musical ever made.

The best musical number, ever filmed, is thought the title song from Singing in the Rain—it seemed to combine all the traits that made Kelly great.

All the time we hear about athletes playing hurt—on the long day, of the principal shooting of that classic song and dance, Kelly was sloshing about in all that water with a one hundred and two degree fever. You try that sometime.

No, you cannot because you do not have the gifts that Gene Kelly had but like all great athletes and artists he made it look so easy that we all think that we can do it.

Kelly, single-handedly, brought dance to the masses and literally put an American stamp on a European art form and he did it by being an athlete not wearing tights but dressing and acting just like the average guy.

By the mid 1950s Hollywood was changing and Kelly was now in his late forties. He turned to directing and playing non-musical roles including a heralded performance in the 1960 film, Inherit The Wind.

Gene Kelly died in 1996 and I mourned his passing as I have for any of my sports heroes because that is how I thought of him.

I have always separated the sports greats that changed the way that their game is played from the other greats.

In my opinion no one did more to change dance in America than Gene Kelly and he did it by being an ex-baseball player that took his swift turn, of a double play, to the stage and screen and did it seamlessly.

So, now returned from Vegas, my thoughts return to sports and in homage to the greatest athlete ever in show business.

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