We long ago passed the tipping point between sports and celebrity. So probably the looming all-athlete season of TV’s “Dancing With The Stars” was inevitable, the most recent nexus of a competitive dare and of jocks’ apparent addiction to applause.
What once might have seemed paradoxical—like having ventriloquists battling it out in a mime competition—now fits right into prime-time programming. You take folks who are famous for a specific skill and are convinced they can demonstrate a limitless diversity of corporeal talent, and market their not-my-job venture to a public drawn irresistibly to boldface names.
That’s entertainment. Allegedly.
It just doesn’t sound like a slam dunk: basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—post-career activist, cultural ambassador, outspoken figure on race and religion—now 71 years old and paired with a partner more than a foot-and-a-half shorter than his 7-foot-2. Perhaps part of the anticipated viewer appeal is similar to race car crowds counting on a spectacular crash. One of the DWTS season headliners, after all, is Tonya Harding, a person of interest in one of sport’s memorable crackups.
On a limited basis, this arrangement has been attempted for more than a decade. Football’s Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice, basketball’s Clyde Drexler and short-track speedskating’s Apolo Ohno were among the first jocks who waltzed—or tangoed or rumbaed—onto the DWTS set.
It should be noted that the artistry of professional athletes, basketball players in particular, has been compared favorably to ballet by some principals in that discipline. And there have been plenty of reports of football pros employing bits of dance in workouts, including the ballet bars installed at the Dallas Cowboys training center to facilitate creative stretching routines. So there certainly is the possibility of cross-over aptitude.
A consumer anthropology research executive, Robbie Blinkoff, called the acceptance of “jocks in a dance competition…an enlightenment, in a way. A few years ago, it would have seemed ironic. But the old rules don’t apply.”
Furthermore, traditional expectations of what qualifies as a sport—Must there be a defense? Is choreography allowed? What about subjective judging?—have been evolving for some time. In my three decades of covering the Olympics, one constant was the negotiation over which activities were worthy of inclusion under the Games’ big tent. Candidates included Frisbee, Lifesaving (rescue dolls are used, rather than real drowning victims), artistic roller skating, dog-sled racing, water skiing, tug-of-war, aerobics. Among stranger things.
And, yes, also knocking on the Olympic door have been variations of rug-cutting and foxes trotting. Especially ballroom dancing and, most recently, break dancing. Perhaps, then, it is a logical short sock-hop to the upcoming televised dance-offs featuring Kareem; figure skating’s Harding, Mirai Nagasu and Adam Rippon; baseball’s Johnny Damon; football’s Josh Norman; luge’s Chris Mazdzer; college basketball’s Arike Ogunbowale; snowboarding’s Jamie Anderson and softball’s Jennie Finch.
Still, and not to step on any toes here, the sports-centric DWTS format really is the blurring of performance types. Acting is not singing and tightrope walking is not playing the tuba. Maybe that’s the intended charm in this show, to mix physical metaphors and dispense with a black-and-white delineation of performance expectations.
But what about old radio comic Ed Gardner’s compartmentalizing of show biz—that “an opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, sings”?
