Former Football Player Runs Up a Different Sort of Score

Don’t draft football players who are too smart, George Young, general manager of the New York Giants, used to say.

Why? They figure out they can leave and do something else.

A case in point is Mike Reid, a former defensive end for the Cincinnati Bengals who left pro football in 1976 after six years and started doing something different.

First, he toured as a musician. Then he wrote pop and country songs.

Now he has composed an opera: “Different Fields” premiered here Feb. 7 and will be performed later in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn.

Yes, Reid’s opera is about football, but the music is classical.

They’re two fields Reid knows. Before he was a Bengal, he majored in piano performance at Penn State, where he played football and was a first-round draft choice.

In “Different Fields,” a football player who’s a gambler throws a game for the people who hold his gambling debts.

While the main character is the athlete, the topic of adulation of celebrities is addressed. A youngster idolizes him.

“It is a curious thing, that we allow a moral context to be put on sports, as if catching a football and making a home run was more than that, and it’s not,” Reid said. “Great athletic accomplishment cannot tell you about being a decent or honest person.

“From the time I was young, I almost resented the notion that athletics builds character, because it is simply not true. It reveals it. It’s a pressure situation. Do you have it within you to accomplish the job? Athletics is no grander example than delivering newspapers on time.

“The story of kids beating up women. Why do we forgive them? They’re troubled. Why do we think football is going to make them less troubled? It gives them more money. The money buys them out of travails of everyday life.

“It seems we’ll forgive athletes any deviant behavior we wouldn’t forgive our neighbors for as long as they hit home runs, make touchdowns or hit baskets.”

Reid is 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs 225. When he played defensive tackle, he weighed 265.

When he was a Bengal, his teammates never razzed him about his interest in music, though several told him later they wondered what he was all about when they’d hear Beethoven string quartets coming out of his room.

One linebacker bought a quadraphonic stereo system and asked Reid for recordings to test its volume. Reid took him Mahler’s “Eighth Symphony” and Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

“We pealed paint off those walls,” Reid said.

The linebacker became hooked on classical music.

Reid didn’t leave football because he wasn’t playing well, or to go into music.

“I quit playing football to quit playing football,” he said. “I had just kind of had it.

“I think I lost interest in the game when I got into the later part of my pro years. The game was never an end in itself to me. It always was something I would do and go through on my way to ‘real life.’ ”

First, he said, “I started, against all common sense, to play the road as a solo musician, in great little clubs, a throwback to the coffeehouses of the ‘60s.”

He played piano and sang original or obscure blues and folk songs.

Now he is married and has two children, but then he was single, traveling 35 to 40 weeks a year, building a following.

“I could make a living,” he said. “All I had to do was pack some clothes, get in the car and be willing to be gone awhile.”

Reid had saved money from his football earnings, but not a lot.

“I signed for $22,000 in 1970,” he said. “The average salary today in the league is $1 million.”

In 1980, he moved to Nashville and was hired as staff writer by a publisher. After two years and not much satisfaction, he thought he’d leave Nashville, but first he played his songs for Ronnie Milsap.

Milsap recorded several. “Inside” became Reid’s first hit. “Stranger in My House” won a Grammy as best new country song of 1983 for Reid. In 1985, Milsap won a best male country vocalist Grammy with Reid’s “Lost in the Fifties Tonight.”

Since then, Reid has had his “I Can’t Make You Love Me” recorded by Bonnie Raitt, “In This Life” recorded by both Bette Midler and Collin Raye, and “Sometimes I Wonder Why,” recorded by Anita Baker.

A few years ago, eager to write music more than three minutes long, he was asked to do a piece for the Tennessee Dance Theater. He composed “Quilts,” a song cycle based on quilt patterns, for piano, violin, cello, two singers and a dance company.

From that came a commission by the Kandinsky Trio. They wanted music for piano, cello, violin and a speaker, Connie Reaganblake, storyteller of Appalachian tales.

“It’s a chamber piece; it’s not a gimmicky thing,” Reid said. “There’s plenty of room for the trio to be out in the open. It was important to me they not be relegated to just underscoring the story.”

Reid has to understand the workings of classical music to compose, but it has always bothered him that some people stay away from it because they don’t understand it.

“You don’t have to understand it any more than you do a bright starry night,” he said. “It’s to be experienced.”

The opera was the idea of Michael Ching, artistic director of Opera Memphis. He and Reid wrote a plot outline. The Metropolitan Opera Guild became co-commissioner.

Reid was enthusiastic.

“My favorite idea of an evening out is to have people sing a story to me,” he said. “I love musical theater and opera. Someone is singing an emotion that has to be sung; to say it would not be enough to express the range of what the person is feeling.”

Reid wrote a musical for the Tennessee Repertory Theater, but wasn’t pleased with his lyrics. He wanted somebody else “to write wonderful words where I could listen for the music in them.”

The Met Opera Guild sent him the work of several librettists. He chose Sarah Schlesinger. “I’ve written music I’ve only ever dreamed about,” Reid said. “The sense of freedom her work gave me has made me a better composer.”

Reid said he’ll write songs again, but he feels he has found himself in the trio and the opera. He’s thinking about writing for string quartet and voice, and the Kandinsky Trio wants another piece.

He’d like to set poems by Wendell Berry to music. And he’s thinking about writing a companion opera to “Different Fields,” which is only an hour and 15 minutes long.

“I’ve known what it’s like to have a hit song out,” Reid said. “But maybe the truest and best offering I have is music that will reach the smallest audience. So be it.”