There’s a chill in the air above the ice at Matthews Arena. From the student section, the Doghouse, fans of the men’s hockey team are loudly cheering on the Huskies. The atmosphere is tense.
The Northeastern men’s hockey team, led by junior captain and forward Joe Vitale, is attempting to hold down a 3-2 lead against the University of Vermont, a team the Huskies haven’t beaten since 2003.
Vermont has pulled out its goalie and is sending forward a furious 6-on-5 final attack as time winds down. The Catamounts try to chip the puck into Northeastern’s zone, but see it stolen.
Vitale races down the ice and dumps the puck into the Catamounts’ empty net, sealing the win and sending the Doghouse into rapturous cries of victory.
After the game, Vitale is a presence in the locker room, hanging out and horsing around with other players. He walks by forward Randy Guzior, who netted the game winning goal this night, and briefly interrupts his interview with a prolonged, “Goooooooooooz.” He fits right in.
Vitale led the resurgent Northeastern men’s hockey team this season – a program that won just three games between 2005 and 2006, but at one point this season, climbed as high as seventh in the national rankings. Vitale topped the team in points.
He was picked in the 2005 NHL draft by the Pittsburgh Penguins. He’s team captain for Northeastern. Hockey, it would seem, is his entire life. But not quite.
A few nights later, he’s in the kitchen, at the stove now, preparing dinner for himself. Chicken piccata, an Italian favorite of Vitale’s, is what’s on the menu.
At 6-feet-1-inch and 194 lbs. with a strong jaw beset by a layer of stubble, he’d look more appropriate in a razor commercial than in front of a stove wearing an apron.
And though one might not expect to find cooking among the top interests of a star hockey player at a traditional Division 1 hockey school, Vitale’s like many athletes – even professionals – who have discovered recently they don’t need to constrict their interests to the sports they play.
Vitale carefully lords over the preparation of his meal, adding oil and butter to the warming frying pan. He takes his floured chicken breast and places it in the pan.
Giving it a minute to settle, he procures a couple of lemon slices and squeezes them over the chicken. He adds white wine and a little more olive oil to get “just the right taste,” he said. He dashes a dozen or so capers onto the chicken and finishes by adding the rest of the lemon slices to the sauce around the chicken.
He takes a step back, and watches as it simmers to perfection.
Vitale is engaging in what he called the one activity that could possibly rival hockey in terms of his enjoyment: cooking.
“If I’m not playing hockey and I’m not doing school work, I guarantee I’m probably flipping on the Food Network and watching all the stars. Rachael Ray or Emeril, all those guys, I get a kick out of it. I come from an Italian background, and my dad taught me how to cook at a young age. It’s always been a passion of mine. It’s a good hobby; everyone can enjoy it.”
Testing the boundaries Gilbert Arenas, a basketball player for the Washington Wizards, plays video games online with his fans; and Clinton Portis, a football player for the Washington Redskins, has made a habit of dressing up in different costumes for postgame interviews.
Both players have gained cult followings thanks to the goofy off-field personas they project, and these types of quirky hobbies, including Vitale’s penchant for cooking, are accepted nowadays as indications of diverse, unique interests, rather than emasculating distractions from on-the-field focus.
“Yeah, I think the guys think it’s pretty neat,” Vitale said. “Every now and then they come by and ask ‘What’s a good recipe for steak? If I have steak tips what should I do?’ and I can offer them suggestions.”
Athletes like Vitale, and the relatively off-beat activities they embrace, like cooking, are changing common preconceptions about athletic manliness, and what’s considered acceptable on traditionally hyper-masculine elite athletic levels.
Many players struggle more with trying to break this stereotype than to fit it, said Chris Carr, a sport and performance psychologist at the St. Vincent Sports Performance Center in Indianapolis, Ind.
“I think any athlete, particularly collegiately, at times struggles with the stigma that’s attached,” Carr said. “That societal stigma or cultural stigma or media based stigma about what an athlete is. The old dumb jock stereotype. There have been in the past athletes that I’ve worked with who have dealt with that perception of being a dumb jock.”
But what about the popular notion that, in order to fit in socially and productively on an elite athletic squad, one probably shouldn’t have any noticeably awkward or nerdy tendencies?
This doesn’t seem to be the case, as team environments have shown to be surprisingly accepting, said Gary Bennett, a clinical and sport psychologist with the Virginia Tech athletics department.
“There’s an athlete we have on our soccer team who has been involved in some of the school productions from the theatre arts department, and I don’t think it’s really affected his role on the soccer team,” Bennett said. “He didn’t try to hide it, and I think he got a lot of support in the department. A lot of other student athletes came out and watched him in his production.”
But the specific team dynamic, he said, plays an important role in how well a player with an unconventional set of interests and hobbies may be received.
“I think a lot of it depends on the culture of the team, and how supportive the coaches and players are,” he said. “I can see how [being different] would be more of a problem if there’s more of a culture where people are defined by solely being a part of that team.”
Football is one sport where team culture is often perceived as so ultra-masculine that it may be off-putting to individuals inclined to seek out atypical activities off the field. In fact, it’s a culture that seems it could make life more difficult on these types, said Kirsten Peterson, a psychologist with the coaching and sports science division of the US Olympic Committee.
“I can imagine on a football team there’s going to be a pretty strong culture one way or another,” she said, “and you might have to work harder to fit into that kind of culture if you’re coming at this from a football perspective.”
Some football players haven’t seemed to notice this limiting culture, though, and continue to reinforce the idea that athletes of any sort, from any sport, can explore a diverse set of interests.
Aaron Bernotas, a hulking 6-foot-4-inch, 330 pound sophomore offensive lineman at La Salle University, performed in musicals in high school. His teammates know about it and haven’t given him a hard time about his dramatic hobbies, he said.
“My teammates knew I did musicals in high school. At first I don’t think they really believed me,” he said. “But I had different pictures, different movies that I would show them. They think it’s hilarious. They’re cool with it.”
Coming clean with the team When Chris Norse, a sophomore English major at Northeastern, is on stage, he looks comfortable and at ease. Recently, he starred in “You Can’t Take It With You,” a drama produced by the school’s theatre department. His character, Donald, dressed up purposefully in a quirky manner, donning a bright orange button-up shirt and brown suspenders raised past his hips that accentuate the character’s goofy, loveable persona.
In one scene, Donald sang a song while wearing an apron and setting the dinner table. Donald’s easygoing and unabashedly hokey nature wasn’t a far cry from Norse’s own personality.
In the theatre, there has never been an issue of acceptance for Norse, but the same can’t be said for his other passion: lacrosse, where he competes on the school’s club team, nationally ranked in the top 10 in the country by Lacrosse Magazine, Lax World magazine and Collegelax.com.
“[Participating in both theatre and lacrosse] was difficult last year,” he said. “I was sort of hesitant to tell the guys I did all that stuff. I wasn’t going to go announce it at a team meeting or anything like that.”
Now with a year under his belt, he’s been able to talk to his teammates about his penchant for theatre and the a capella group he sings in, but it’s not always easy.
“Most of the guys are pretty cool about it now, though some do rag on me every now and then,” he said.
Though a situation like Norse’s is not necessarily the most difficult, it would be wrong to suggest that old, persistent stereotypes survive on thin air. Even in today’s athletic world, where it seems any type of person with any type of hobby could be accepted by his or her team, certain squads can make matters difficult on an athlete who doesn’t fit the stereotype.
Some may even feel forced to hide their true personalities, said Vincent Granito, an officer in the division of exercise and sport psychology in the American Psychology Association.
“A lot of times there is this push to conform to whatever the norms happen to be for that setting, and if the norms are that it’s not right for a male athlete to be involved in an extra curricular activity, it doesn’t necessarily go along with that ideal role that a person is supposed to play,” he said. “Then the behaviors to take care of that would be to hide the fact that I’m involved with these extra curriculars, that it’s not necessarily something I want to talk about, it’s not necessarily something I want to let my teammates know about.”
Granito argues that in cases where athletes face pressures to hide their true selves from teammates, the stress can affect their athletic performance.
“If you’re constantly conflicted over what role you’re supposed to be playing now, then that’s certainly going to take away from a person’s ability to concentrate or a person’s ability to focus on what they’re able to do,” he said. “And we know, at least from research, that if the person loses focus, or loses concentration, then their performance ends up suffering because of that.”
Still, high-profile examples make the point that – to some extent – cases in which atypical athletes must conceal their true identities are exceptions to the rule, rather than the other way around.
Down the line When a person types the name “Gilbert Arenas” into Deadspin, a popular sports humor website, it returns 109 search results.
He’s regularly featured on the site, which describes him as “the most subtly weirdo human in sports right now.” And, he’s gathered a cult following because of the pronounced quirks in his personality, from the video games he plays online with fans to the sometimes rambling, sometimes hilarious blog posts he writes for nba.com. Portis has also become a cult favorite on Deadspin, and was voted into their “Deadspin Hall of Fame.”
Joe Santilli, a former Northeastern hockey player and graduate who is now assistant coach for the men’s hockey program, said players like Arenas, Portis or even amateurs can find acceptance despite off-kilter personalities nowadays.
“I think [the rejection of atypical athletes] was a big ’80s thing, the ’70s, ’80s old jock stereotype,” he said. “From a coaching perspective, a huge turnaround was when the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl for the first time, and they played as a team and did everything as a team. Everything since then revolves around the team and how much a team can come together. I think nowadays, more focus is on the team than on individual players.”
This, he said, allows for different personalities to mesh and fit in the locker room. To most athletes, a successful team is all that matters.
“All different personalities come together now. I think it’s more of an acceptance thing. Someone is on your team and you accept them for who they are. You might give them [a hard time] in the locker room, but outside the locker room, he’s your teammate and that’s all that really matters,” Santilli said. “Whereas back in the old days with the jocks they’d be giving a kid a wedgie in the locker room.”
Ultimately, it appears that athletes on elite levels who step outside the traditional box, like Vitale with his cooking or Norse with his theatre, can break the strangle-hold longstanding stereotypes have had on athletics.
Moreover, these types appear increasingly more common as time moves forward. “I think a lot of players are starting to find they need, with a lot of rigorous hours at the rink or with whatever they’re doing, some therapy,” Vitale said. “For a lot of kids, to do whatever they do, it’s kind of a good break to get away from things. I think it’s more common now.”
Santilli said he sees this as a complete change from where athletics have been traditionally – a change that will likely continue its momentum.
“You think about 10 to 15 years ago, you probably wouldn’t be accepted being in theatre, being in musicals, you know?” he said. “That’s something that’s changing.”
