HANOVER- It would be easy to convince yourself that there are two John Turners.

You could believe there's John Turner, the former 280-pound lineman for the Dartmouth football team who will be in Berkeley, Calif., tomorrow tossing University of Tennessee bodies around while playing lock for the Big Green rugby side in the national Sweet 16.

And then there's the more genteel John Charles Turner, a dedicated Ivy League student who somehow found enough energy during the final lap of his rigorous five-year bachelor of engineering program to compose a piece for piano and cello that he'll debut in Spaulding Auditorium on April 26 as part of the college's 27th annual Festival of New Musics.

It would be easy to think there are two distinct Turners. Easy and wrong. Turner will tell you as much.

"I used to take piano lessons or play in Collis (Center) before practice,"he said, "and I remember someone asking me, 'How do you flip the switch? How do you go from music to football?'

"The thing people don't understand is, there isn't a switch, or if there is, it's always on. I just have this huge amount of intensity, passion and vision that I apply to football, to rugby, to school and whatever I do."

That passion was obvious one night this week, when the 6-foot-5 Southern Californian, dressed in khaki shorts and flip flops, sat down at the piano in the Top of the Hop, kicked off his right sandal and lost himself in a selection from the work he'll be playing with Thayer School classmate Brian Ferguson in the upcoming festival.

It is the same passion that made him stick football out through early morning conditioning classes, two-a-day practices in preseason heat and a late position change, all for the chance to get on the field for a handful of games and to play what he figures was perhaps 10 minutes over his entire four-year career.

It is the same passion that helped him make the transition from football to rugby, a game he knew nothing about before he decided to give it a go after his football eligibility expired.

"The first game I played was against Northeastern down at Mystic River last year," Turner said. "Pretty much all I did was go out and hit anybody who had the ball. I got so many penalties. I told the ref at halftime, 'Look, I've never played this game before. You are going to give me a ton of penalties. Can you just explain to me what they are for?'"

It is the same passion that saw him average less than 10 hours of sleep during the school week for the first month of classes last fall as he sought to prove he was worthy of admission into Thayer's Master of Engineering Management program. He did finally gain acceptance.

And ultimately, it was the same passion that brought him to name the musical piece he will debut later this month, "Antithetical: in direct and unequivocal opposition."

The title is a response to the statement made by Dartmouth Admissions Director Karl Furstenberg in his Dec. 20, 2000, letter to the president of Swarthmore College praising that school's decision to drop football and saying that, "football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours."

Turner didn't set out to prove otherwise with his composition. He simply wanted to create a piece of music, something he's been doing since high school.

"I wrote this for myself, to prove that I could do it," he said. "It's a learning process. Last year, I played a piece at this performance that was a three-movement piece for piano that I had spent 10 months writing. I didn't get any academic credit for it. I'm pretty sure that had I been a music major and written a paper with it, it would have counted as an honors thesis. I just did it for fun, and I decided I wanted to do it again."

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