An interesting question is how negative is the correlation between sports and music.
For example, on Twitter, Samuel Johnson tracked down a quote from Paul McCartney about how none of the Beatles were interested in playing or watching soccer, which must be pretty statistically unlikely for four straight Liverpudlian blokes born in the 1940s.
One of my favorite videos is Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days:
I had a friend was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool, boy
Of course, it’s a fastball, not a speedball, which is something else entirely. Ray Chapman was killed by a fastball (or a spitter, perhaps), while John Belushi was killed by a speedball. Springsteen is evidently not a rabid baseball fan.
If you watch the carefully edited video carefully, you’ll note a couple of brief shots that suggest Bruce throws like a girl:
My impression is that rock stars tend to be not terribly masculine (e.g., Springsteen says his stage character is modeled on his blue-collar dad, but that in real life he takes more after his artistic mom), but straight. Long hair, high cheekbones, ectomorphic build, and a general air of delicacy all seem to correlate positively with musical performing stardom.
It’s a fairly unusual combination, but it’s evidently a good way to get girls.
How many rock stars died of AIDS in the 1980s-1990s? There was Freddie Mercury and then there was… uh… there was that guy in the B-52s. It’s an especially limited toll considering that more than a few rock stars were needle junkies, the other main way to die of AIDS.
You might think that being cheered on the stage and on the field would attract the same type of personality:
Marilyn Monroe [Just back from a USO tour of Korea]: “Oh, Joe, you can’t possibly guess how wonderful it is to be cheered by 10,000 people!”
Joe DiMaggio: “Yes, I can.”
Are there particular types of music that, say, guys who played high school football gravitate toward?
