Respect to the Renaissance People
Unapologetic Athletes, Artists ... and Unicorns?
It’s mid-October, friends, and it’s high season for high school football. The air is crisp, the concession stand popcorn is fresh, and the apple cider is flowing. If you haven’t caught a game recently, grab a blanket and a bleacher seat. And while I hope you take in all the fall sensory delights alongside a good match up, what I really want you to watch for is this: every now and then, you just might see a unicorn – not of the mascot sort* but of the football variety. An adolescent renaissance man.
You know the kid: while everyone else trots to the locker room for breathers and halftime speeches, the kicker or the right tackle hustles to his assistant director for a trombone handoff and rushes back out on the field, falling into formation with his musical unit, his marching band teammates, an everlasting bond formed with them after football two-a-days in the hell known as band camp. He’s already sweaty and he’s got a fierce case of helmet head, but no matter. He’ll strap on his shako, high step it like a boss, and play the hell out of Seven Nation Army.
A tip of the very ornate hat to you, my guy.
Of course these renaissance men aren’t just men, and they don’t just play football. They’re women’s soccer players who are also sound-mixing DJs. They’re swimmers who paint. They’re skateboarders who street art.
One of my good friends in high school was a bonkers talented athlete and artist. Her true love was football. She had an absolute cannon of an arm, and her spiral was a thing of beauty. Even the guys acknowledged it. But this was the early nineties, and a young woman playing for the football team in our three-stoplight town wouldn’t fly.
Instead, she was our 6”1 power forward who went DI on a basketball scholarship, which sometimes seemed like a consolation prize to her. Her other true love was her visual art: she was a gifted portrait artist and her work was the stuff of legend. At any given time during the school day, you could hear someone whisper “Damn” from the art room, and we all knew it was in response to one of her works. If I were petty, I might have been mad at her for having all that talent, but I couldn’t be. She was too damn funny and too much fun to hang out with.
I might still be mad that she wasn’t allowed to choose football, but I’m so glad no one made her choose athletics OR art.
Not that she would have listened. She would have pummeled anyone who dared. But still. I’m glad it didn’t have to come to that.
In our modern age of foolishly forcing kids to “specialize,” there may be fewer unicorns now than there were thirty years ago – and it didn’t seem like there were many even then. But as a student and an educator, I have always been fascinated by the folks who unabashedly pursue their athletic and artistic interests, regardless of the social cost. Especially the ones who do so without apology.
If I were a sociologist, maybe I’d study why this is so rare (or at least why we perceive it to be so; this newsletter exists, in part, to convince us it’s not as rare as we think). Perhaps I’d also study the tendency some have to so readily dismiss athletes as “dumb jocks” and creators as “artsy fartsy” or “flighty” (yes, these are still clichés, and yes, this still happens). Maybe I’d study why some people feel so damn threatened by a person who pursues many interests and is good at lots of them. But for now, I’ll stay in my lane as an arts and athletics enthusiast and instead share stories with you here of the renaissance people I appreciate and am inspired by.
As always, thanks for reading, team. And stay tuned for unicorns — they’re more plentiful than we think.
