Why Sports & Broadway Are Basically The Same!

When I was a kid, I told myself I wanted to be either a professional soccer player or Spider-Man. Those were the two goals. Both have their own challenges for sure. One required a lifetime of discipline and commitment, training, practice, proper nutrition, etc. The other required getting bit by a radioactive spider, and I couldn’t find one anywhere. So, I decided to work with what I already knew, which was athletics and theater. Because high-flying, dramatic acrobatics accompanied by heightened text seemed somewhat close to becoming a friendly neighborhood superhero who lived in New York.

Along the way, I learned that sports and theater really aren’t all that different. In sports, I was always taught to be a team player, to become the best in my own role, my own position, and thereby I would make my team as a whole better. Well, in theater, regardless of your part, we are tasked with becoming a real, living, believable character, surrounded by other characters on stage or on screen. An actor’s job first and foremost is how can we be our best in this position to fully benefit this team.

Usually, when actors get a part in a play, for example, they start by reading the script extensively. Legendary actor Anthony Hopkins, for example, when cast in a movie called Bobby about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Sr., realized he had one long speech in particular. He said he "read it 250 times" just to build confidence and a sense of ease.

This is obviously similar to athletes -- say, football players, for example. Some positions in football require less memorization than others, like a kicker, whose job it is to go out there and kick the ball. Yes, there are formations and variations, but at the end of the game, if the ball goes between the uprights, the kicker has done his job.

A quarterback, however, when going from one system to another, like an actor going from one production to another, takes on many more challenges. It starts as simple as having different teammates -- or castmates, we could call them, but for quarterbacks, they need to learn an entirely new playbook. And on the other side, even if an actor has already played the part for which they’re going to play again in a new production, there is new blocking, there’s a new stadium (theater), and there are new coaches, among many other things.

And all of this is to say that, when actors or athletes are preparing for their new roles, they are preparing for an event, an opening night, a season, and a consistent yet grounded live performance.

Take actor George Lee Andrews, for example, who performed in The Phantom of the Opera for 23 straight years, which is more than 9,300 shows. And even then, he had 656 performances in the ensemble, 4,329 performances as Monsieur Firmin, and 4,397 performances as Monsieur André. 23 straight years with one team in the NFL has never happened, and it’s extremely rare for an NFL career to last past 20 years. According to the NFL Players' Association, "The average NFL career lasts 3.3 years."

Even with the idea of "franchise quarterbacks", the guys drafted to lead a team for years, sometimes they don’t make it very long in the NFL. The goal with casting for a play and the goal with drafting for a roster still remains the same: teams or productions want a show that people will pay to see over and over again. People want teams that win. People want shows that will sell.

So, at the end of the game, or for the final curtain call, whether you’re hitting the gym to brace for a tackle or you’re trying to embody a hopeful Olympic swimmer in Lucas Hnath’s play Red Speedo, there are many similarities between these two seemingly very different worlds. Whether you just signed a multi-million dollar contract or you made your first paycheck as a working actor, the point still stands that, as performers, we are serving something larger than ourselves. We are playing for a city. We are hoping for ticket sales. We are fighting for and working on our craft. And we are doing all of this in an effort to create something that people will love.