Hazards of ballet dancing

The deep snows have settled in across the northern third of the country and when I called my son-in-law in Vermont the other night, he was out in 22 degrees of frost checking some deficient tube in his tractor, whatever that means.

It's the time, anyway, when the prairie families and the mountain families and the people of northern New England prepare for the winter as for a siege. It's a time when it's easy to see why Vermont, as an example, has one of the highest state income taxes in the union, for it's a large state, it's vastly populated and somebody has to ensure that the roads, from the motorways to the dirt roads of the back country, are navigable in a state that can wake up in summer to 90 degrees and in winter to 20 below zero. There's a fearful cracking and shifting of road beds going on all the time. The maintenance, alone, costs a great deal of money and by one of the paradoxes of the modern tax system, this money has often to be paid by the poorest people. 

No wonder professional summer athletes of any profitable skill tend sooner or later to retreat in winter to Florida and other balmy climes. They've had their fill during the baseball season and the golf season of muscle cramps and heal spurs and torn ligaments and they don't propose in the off-season to revert, like my son-in-law, to the life of a pioneer. 

The incomparable Jack Nicklaus, who has for the fourth time been voted by the professional golfers of America the best player of the year, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and he developed his skill, even as a boy, during the winter months by rigging up a blanket on a clothes' line in the family garage and banging away at balls while the snow whirled about his eyes. If ever there was a sportsman with the iron character of an old Viking, it's Nicklaus. By the way, he resents very much being called 'Nicklaus'. But, in his thirties, he, too, has succumbed to the sun and the ease of a climate in which you don't fight nature but snuggle up to it. He lives now in West Palm Beach and he gets ready for the new season by playing and practising on green grass in 70 degrees. 

And, not far away, in most directions of Florida are summer ball players not practising at all but nursing their ailments against the coming of the spring. Somebody – Red Smith or Jim Murray, our two raciest sports writers – should do a comic piece some time about the winter convalescence of baseball players especially. It would be comic to us but not, of course, to them but I don't suppose at this time of the year there's a baseball player of any eminence who isn't, at this moment, putting his hands under whirling sprays or getting injections for a heel spur or otherwise boosting the income of the physiotherapists. For the fact which the howling fans really pause to consider is that summer games, baseball and golf in particular, involve skilled movements that not only defy nature, but wound it. 

God never intended anyone's forearm to pitch a curveball, a weaving, twice-turning, full volley unknown to cricket. Nobody's ankles or knees were constructed to slide in a single, plunging motion into third base though it's a motion practised every day as assiduously as a cricketer goes out for batting practice. And there must be thousands of poor maniacs listening to me now who may be comforted, though they won't be helped, to hear that the spine and its marrow object strongly to the necessary golfing movement of keeping the hips square while the shoulders make a clockwise pivot. 

I discovered the other day that there's another group of athletes who suffer from the handicap of twisting ligaments and bruising muscles, but throughout a year-long season and so they have no time to ease up and nurse their wounds. They are ballet dancers. The other day, one Edward Villella, a principal dancer with the New York Ballet, went to an orthopaedic surgeon in Cincinnati for a muscle cramp in his lower back. The doctor didn't think that the cramp was severe enough to explain the dancer's pain, so, considering the man's profession, he X-rayed his toes. Mr Villella had been too busy to take time out – ever, it seems – to have them X-rayed. Well, the surgeon found nine broken toes in ten. 'Fatigue fractures,' the doctor said, 'are not uncommon but nine in one person is extraordinary. I didn't believe one person could have so many and go on functioning in his strenuous profession.' 

This discovery prompted the doctor to suggest to the artistic director of the Cincinnati Ballet to put its 54 members in his charge to find out more about what ballet does to the human body. 'There is,' said Dr Miller, 'practically no information in the English-speaking literature on the medical consequences of classical ballet; some reports in Russian and Scandinavian journals, but the bibliography is really very short.' 

The required ballet movements, he believes, are more exacting than the gross movements of football – he's talking about American football which is to soccer, physically, as professional tennis is to ping pong. The particular hazard of ballet dancing, it appears, springs from the dancer's attempts to create an appearance of grace and beauty when, in fact, the poor fellow or girl is twisting the limbs into abnormal and crucifying positions. 

Now this is self-evident the moment it's spoken, but I think most of us have gone along for ever under the delusion that ballet dancers are more fragile, less stoical, certainly, than most other athletes. It turns out that they are professional stoics, more routinely resigned to pain than the most cheerful, ageing arthritic. Dr Miller went to work on the ballet company and found that most of them had broken toes and didn't know it. The men – who usually start dancing ten years later than the women – can only achieve what they call 'a complete turn out' by screwing their knee joints to stay straight while the lower legs are turned out. The women were riddled with bunions and calluses, all of them wear bandages and practically all of them routinely relieve the pain with a daily pharmacopoeia of drugs. 

Dr Miller has gone into their diets and he now prescribes carbohydrates before dancing to give, as he puts it, something for the muscles to work on. So anyone who's thinking of entering ballet school had better start now following what for Mr Villella is a new and greatly helpful routine. He eats a potato with his steak and finds he's much less troubled by muscle cramps. 

This study came out while we were watching, two nights running, Chinese children and youths going through some extraordinary and, I should guess, muscle-bruising motions for the delectation of president and Mrs Ford. She's an old dancer herself which may explain why she was able to look on serenely at a flailing sword dance which made some of the tough American correspondents wince, but it wasn't the dancers of the People's Republic that gave me second thoughts, it was Susan Ford, the president's young daughter who, after flogging around the grand Inturist tour and photographing the Great Wall and such, finally collapsed and had to go to bed. 'She can't take it,' the president said jocosely, 'like us youngsters.' 

He had a point there and the orthopaedist's study of the ballet dancers recalled to me a question I've often pondered but never gone into, which is are politicians tough because politics makes them so or are constitutionally tough men instinctively attracted to politics? In my experience, the most active United States senators and congressmen are the oldsters in their fifties, sixties, sometimes their seventies. They leave their young colleagues wilting. They appear to be as long-lived as conductors. I noticed long ago that the most indestructible of American politicians are the ones chosen to be the permanent chairmen of the presidential nominating conventions. And they're not chosen for their physique, obviously, but for their long standing in the party. 

I remember old Sam Rayburn of Texas, a big man and Joe Martin of Massachusetts, a little man, standing up there, night after night, till the early hours, banging the gavel and policing everybody in auditoriums stewing in a hundred degrees while young correspondents fell over their desks or staggered off in a haze to their beds. And the leaders of the state delegations, as well as the chairmen, would bellow and speechify and wave and visit around, and get to bed at four and be up at seven wooing candidates and bullying delegates. And then they go off home to shake hands in town and go touring farms and factories and then back to Washington and the mornings with the mail and the visiting constituents, and afternoons and evenings in exhaustive debates. 

I simply put up the problem without being able to resolve it. Maybe we should X-ray the whole Congress and see if energy doesn't beget energy. Certainly, most of them work three times as hard as most manual labourers and live longer and die in their beds full of age and bourbon. 

Talking of bourbon reminds me of Bourbon County, Kentucky and something that happened this week to – or rather something that was made to happen by – the most famous living son of Kentucky. On the television news the other night, there was a sad story about an old folks' home in New York. It takes care of 54 handicapped people who are too infirm to get to other social centres. They've run out of money and it was announced on the first night of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Light, that two weeks from now its doors would be darkened for ever. And one of the inmates making the customary blessing that morning said, 'A big miracle happened on Hanukkah. My God, where is our miracle?' 

Well, the morning after the television item, a man who'd been touched by the story, went up to the centre – he was a big, supple black man and when they opened the door, it was Muhammad Ali. He said, 'Why don't you stay open?' And they said, 'Because we need $150,000. That's why we don't stay open.' 'All right,' he said, 'then I'll give it to you.' And they fell all over him. He kissed all the ladies, they all wept, the man who'd made the blessing said, 'A miracle from a mensch! Do you know the word mensch? A real man! Muhammad Ali is a mensch.' 

The centre will stay open for at least another year.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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