Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  Through the ’91 season, after Randall went down, the defense couldn’t really fault Richie too much for the team’s struggles— although the head coach was hardly blameless in the string of quarterbacking disasters on his side of the ball.

  But by the beginning of the ’92 season, Buddy’s Boys are getting restless. They still see Richie as Norman’s boy, and he still sees them as a foreign camp in his own locker room. When he talks about the offense it’s “us” or “we,” but when he talks about the defense it’s always “those guys” or “them.”

  “They” are the best defense the league has seen in more than a dozen years. And it is pretty clear to everybody that Richie needs them more than they need him.

  6

  THE SLUICE

  Jerome had his own way of opening training camp. He usually arrived last.

  Throughout the day, players would pull up the curved driveway in front of the tan brick, nine-story Gertrude Schmidt dormitory at the southwest corner of the West Chester University campus, a steady parade of Broncos and sports cars and Jeeps and BMWs, and big men would unload armfuls of clothing or a travel bag and then the bulkier vital cargo: electronic equipment, three-feet-tall speakers, amps, TV sets, and the tangled spaghetti strands of wiring for their video-game hookups.

  Jerome would show up at about five, as the curfew clock ticked down into fine territory. As his black Bronco made its way through West Chester, you’d hear the woofers of his car’s megaspeakers a half mile away, whump-whump-whump-whump, like a cotton bat to the brain. So guys would be hanging out of the windows watching by the time he drove up front. Jerome would jump out, and then bellow:

  “Fuck West Chester!”

  And camp was under way.

  Four weeks of brutal, two-a-day practices down in the twin humidity sumps outside Farrell Stadium, four weeks of living crammed into brick Gertrude, tossing on narrow mattresses, coping with roommates, listening to the howling all-night video tournaments or the card games called Punk and Broo or the game they played with dominoes called Bones, four weeks of getting banged around just to get used to getting banged around, of tolerating rookies, fast and strong and driven, looking to take your job, four weeks of practical jokes, aches and bruises, cafeteria dining, of dodging the Pack, which hovers outside every building and on the practice field sidelines with notebooks, recording devices, and cameras at the ready, and the fans, who swarm everywhere you show your face, four weeks of meaningless exhibition games, hollow, meandering contests with all the risks of real combat and none of its rewards—all of it through a stretch of summer that sits on your chest like a three-hundred-pound wrestler, with locusts whining in the dense campus greenery and yellow jackets buzzing around your helmet, air so thick it feels like you have to scoop it into your mouth with both hands. You battle through the practices soaked with so much sweat, from the crown of your helmet to the toes of your socks, that you wonder at how human tissue could lose such rivers of fluid. The only leavening for all this is camaraderie, getting back together with the guys and escaping the off-season’s full-court press of family and real-world responsibility; gettin’ back down, in short, with Jerome.

  But this year, 1992, there is no Jerome. Seth and Clyde and even Reverend Reggie are still reeling with grief. That training camp rat, Jim McMahon, and Eric Allen, Byron Evans, Roger Ruzek, Calvin Williams, Andre Waters, and Keith Jackson are all holding out for bigger contracts (Keith is angling for $6 million over three years— payback time). Buddy is long gone, and killjoy Kotite’s in charge. Richie’s practices aren’t as brutal, but the bastard actually enforces the 11:00 p.m. curfew, even for veterans, and he’s sooooo serious. He actually made the guys hand over their supersquirt water guns because they might damage the dorm—Shit, coach, with brick floors and walls?

  Little of the old playful mood is evident as the team checks into Gertrude this August, despite the fact that lots of folks are predicting that this team, even without Jerome, could go all the way. Quite a few of the players and coaches feel that way, too. But that’s part of the problem. As a young team on the make, it was fun every summer getting ready to take the NFL by storm. Now the Eagles have arrived as a power. Instead of training camp commencing as a time of unburdening and rebonding, it rolls in heavy with expectation.

  Camp is one of the rituals of pro football, an annual rite of questionable value but profound significance in the culture of the game. Sequestering the army prior to battle, removing them from their women (ostensibly) and children, from all the domestic comforts, hardening them with rigorous discipline—these were all conventions of the ancient manly art of war. It fuels anticipation for the approaching sixteen-game regular season, just as a week of planning, drill, and hype precede every game on the schedule—a season is, after all, mostly preparation and anticipation, punctuated at weekly intervals by several hours of violent action. In the past, the main purpose of camp was to whip players into shape. Old warriors reported flabby and wheezy after a long off-season of overeating, smoking, drinking, and other indulgences. There are still a few backsliders on NFL rosters,but not many. Today’s pro athletes, with such big dollars at stake, are often in better shape when they report to camp than they will be for the rest of the year, what with the cumulative toll of nicks, pulls, bruises, and sprains of the modern twenty- to twenty-five-week schedule. Despite their reputation for wild living, very few players can long afford a profligate life in the competitive world of the NFL. All the vices of modern society are present, of course, but serious depravity is present to a lesser extent on a pro roster than in society at large.

  Veteran Ken Rose, for instance, a backup linebacker and captain of the Eagles’ kicking squads (their special teams), works as a professional trainer in Los Angeles during the off-season. His compact, thickly muscled body looks chiseled out of jet-black granite, with every oblique, pec, dorsi, subscap, deltoid, trapezius, et cetera, etched in stark relief. Alongside him even the fittest of his teammates looks vaguely slothful. Ken is probably the most extreme example, but he is not alone among players who are far better educated in, experienced with, and committed to the modern science of bodybuilding and physical training than any of the coaches who are supposed to be guiding them. After ten years in pro football, Ken maintains a dietary and workout regimen in the off-season that inside a week would probably kill the pizza-gobbling occasional joggers and weekend golfers on the coaching staff. In the off-season, he is up every morning at four-thirty to jog before driving to UCLA, where he is an assistant strength coach, for an hour of serious track work, doing sprint intervals, and (several times a week) endurance training. This is followed by four hours of intensive weight lifting—maintenance reps, auxiliary lifts, power movements. Then after driving home for lunch and a rest at midday, he undertakes an hour-long martial arts workout. Ken finishes off his day by either running the hills behind his suburban home in Thousand Oaks or surfing on the beaches of Santa Monica Bay. And that’s his off-season regimen. Ken hates the off-season. He counts the days till training camp. He’d play football every weekend of the year if he could—in fact, one year he nearly did, finishing up a full training camp and season with the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League in time to plunge into the then-Oakland Raiders’ training camp three days later. He remembers the experience fondly. To him, the spartan dorm life, fellowship, and unrelenting physical demands are soul cleansing. He has his training camp mentality, which is like living blindered, or what Ken thinks of as serving a short prison term, where the entire focus of his life becomes football and Team. He and his roommate and protégé, second-year linebacker William “Willie T.” Thomas, have two TV sets in their dorm room, and each TV has two video games attached, so their space is the primary game room in Gertrude, where energetic contests often stretch into the wee hours. They hop up after two or three hours of sleep, eat a big breakfast (Ken has the cook whip up special protein-enhanced dishes), then spend the day supplementing the two-a-day practices and meetings with
Ken’s weight-training routines; over two seasons, Willie T.’s physique has begun to resemble Ken’s uncannily, same bulging trapeziuses and deltoids, same proportions of chest, arm, and leg muscles—as if they’d been assembled in the same factory.

  The one irreplaceable benefit of camp, even for the supremely fit, is the chance to play football. You can work alone till you drop, but to play honest-to-goodness football, you need twenty-two guys, pads, helmets, and a staff of trainers to patch everybody up when you’re done. Old-timers like Ken know there is being in shape, and then there is playing shape, and the only way to achieve the latter is to play. Ken is always eager to see if some new off-season training technique he invented actually enhances his play. He has a very methodical mind and plans to coach someday—either football or physical fitness or both—and his body is his lab.

  Beyond that, the tradition of herding the entire roster, along with about thirty draft choices and free agents into a cloister—that’s more ritual than necessity.

  Living arrangements are why most players, unlike Ken, Jimmy Mac, and a handful of others, hate camp. The university tries. It outfits Gertrude with extralong mattresses and window air conditioners and gives the club the run of its campus. West Chester itself rejoices to receive them. The Eagles’ arrival every summer is a major event here, a leafy village three miles square dominated by the campus and a redbrick Georgian center. About thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia, West Chester is the government seat of Chester County, a traditionally rural but increasingly suburban province where Amish farms and tony Republican suburbs coexist in a landscape captured by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. During camp, the village becomes a minor tourist destination, with thousands of football fans crowding in daily for an early glimpse at their fall warriors.

  What they see are mostly unknown rookie free agents, an annual batch of hopefuls, survivors of the Sluice, the extensive sifting mechanism for the Great American Cult of the Pigskin. It works just like the winnowing device at a gold mine, washing raw material down a network of chutes, passing it through an ever-narrowing series of gates, until out of the tons of dross are strained a few nuggets of pure ore. The Pigskin Sluice has arms reaching into every city and small town in every county in every state in America, with Coach manning the gates at every narrowing level of the chute. At the Pop Warner level, just about every teenage boy in America gets a chance to play the game, so that’s where literally millions of youngsters splash into the mouth of the thing. High schools provide the first great winnowing, where Coach sorts the hundred or so boys who show up for tryouts into prospective behemoths (linemen), monsters (linebackers, tight ends, and big running backs), and artists (quarterbacks, receivers, defensive backs, return men, and pretty little running backs). Through a few weeks of hard workouts and sadistic gut checks, he sifts the raw material with potential to his roster. There are roughly 14,000 highschool football teams in America, which means about 600,000 boys each year make teams, and about half that number earn starting jobs. Four years on comes a much narrower gate. Only about one in every 23 of those boys (approximately one starting player per high school) will ever start for a college football team. There are about 2,000 fouryear colleges in the United States, and roughly 600 of them field football teams, making a college pool of first-string players numbering about 13,200—each of whom may be assumed to possess some real football talent. Out of this number, the 28 teams of the NFL each chose a dozen (the draft would shrink to just six rounds in ’93), or a total of 336 (about one in 40 and, remember, these are all starting college players). Fewer than half that number will ever actually play pro ball, and fewer than half of that total will ever be starters in the pros. Broadly estimated, out of every 2,000 high-school heroes, one will someday hold a starting job in the NFL.

  A large percentage of those chosen are black, which for some tends to buttress racial stereotypes about black males; but, in fact, when you look more closely at most of those who succeed, players like Wes Hopkins, Seth Joyner, Byron Evans, Andre Waters, Ben Smith, and others, the distinguishing feature is more often tenacity than sheer talent. With few exceptions (on the Eagles the exceptions are standouts like Randall Cunningham, Reggie White, Fred Barnett, and Eric Allen), the player who makes it to the pros was not the best athlete in his high school, or even on his high-school football team. He is, rather, the most determined and focused. These are young men who decided at a very young age exactly what they wanted to do in life and pursued that goal for a decade or more with ferocious, even foolhardy, intensity. In a sense, you can only make it by refusing to admit what to everyone else is obvious—that you almost certainly won’t make it. Most don’t. For every player who does get all the way to a pro training camp, there are literally thousands of players with the same dream who don’t. Of course, the ones who do feel certain they made it by virtue of superior talent and desire. But talent and desire are only part of the story. A boy also needs luck, a lot of it. Luck is the one essential component of success that players rarely admit to themselves. To make it through a gate is to leave all those other poor bastards behind and to further inflate your own legend, building confidence you need to pass through the next gate, and the next. So those who do make it to the final gate tend to exhibit truly breathtaking vanity. It is, simply, necessary. That fearless, can’t-touch-this mien has become one of the distinctive features of the modern pro athlete, encountered in every locker room and virtually every postgame show, infecting youth culture everywhere. The fact that a disproportionate number of these undeniably remarkable and very fortunate young men are black says more about paucity of opportunity and the heroic impetus of desperation than it does about haunches and animal reflexes.

  For the pro sifting, NFL clubs rely on scouting services that rate virtually every college football player in America. For the Eagles, it is NFS (National Football Scouting), which divides the country into eleven regions and employs scouts (usually former college coaches) to evaluate every college player in their region. This is done by attending a lot of football games, but mostly by—what else?—schmoozing college coaches. Each player is assigned a value between one and nine by NFS; those rated lower than eight wash right out of the Sluice. The eights and nines are herded into the annual scouting “combine,” a critical gate, where they are asked to run, jump, and perform a wide variety of tricks designed to measure the skills that could translate into success on the pro gridiron.

  It’s an honest effort to turn what is ultimately an art into a science, and most football players think it’s just ridiculous. Anyone who has ever played the game knows that the fastest man on a track often isn’t a particularly good running back or receiver, just as the strongest man in the weight room isn’t necessarily a good blocker. The only way to tell how well a kid plays football is to watch him play football… but, of course, this isn’t possible. Even if it were, you’d have to weight a prospect according to whom he has played against, and not just what teams, but what individual players on those teams. A mediocre wide receiver playing against a lousy cornerback can look like Jerry Rice for an afternoon. So scouts weed out most college players in conversation with coaches. The rest they try to watch and then test with their own methods. The most agreed-upon methods are tried at the combine, where prospects demonstrate agility, vertical leaps, speed, strength, and other easily quantifiable things. The art of judging talent reaches its most eccentric levels when scouts follow up on the combine results by personally visiting the players who interest them most. That can get weird.

  Dave Alexander, the Eagles’ veteran center, remembers one visit from a Packers scout when he was a senior at the University of Tulsa. Dave had been through a number of these sessions. Each scout wanted to see you do something different. Some were happy just to recheck the combine results on their own, timing you in the forty-yard dash— as if that had a lot to do with how well you could hold off a charging three-hundred-pound lineman—measuring your jumps or seeing how much iron you could bench-press. Some would time you
through an obstacle course of their own devising, usually an arrangement of orange cones, hurdles, and tires out on the practice field. The guy from the Packers wanted to see Dave’s pass-blocking technique, but there was nobody around for him to work against, so the scout had Dave pass block the stadium wall. He had him assume a three-point stance, and then lunge at the wall with his hands up. What the guy hoped to divine from this performance was beyond Dave, but being an obliging fellow, and playing in the NFL being sort of a goal … well, Dave obliged. He just hoped nobody was watching. Then the guy showed Dave, who had been snapping the football now for nine years, how to hold the ball. “It was some dumb way of holding it,” Dave would remember later. “It was silly. I couldn’t get a decent grip on it. I snapped it a few times like that for the guy but it would just dribble out on the ground or go flying over his head.”

  In ’92, the league drafted just 335 college players (the Cardinals broke precedent by picking Eric Swann, a defensive lineman who had skipped college to play in a regional semipro league). So the young men who show up with their overnight bags and stereo headphones in West Chester in August—a dozen draft picks and twice that many free agents (either the cream or the most determined of the un-drafted)—represent the paltry pebbles of gold nugget that make it into the straw-thin sphincter at the ass end of the Sluice.

  And they still haven’t made it.

  At that final gate stand the High Priests of the Pigskin, presiding over the last four weeks of a decade-long process that isn’t, at any of the Sluice gates, particularly objective or even fair. Coach is forced to make snap judgments about kids every step of the way; in fact, one of the traits of a true temple devotee is total faith in his own judgment. It is essential. Every rookie in a pro football training camp, even the most unknown free-agent hopeful, is a damn fine football player. Now, sorting out which of them possess that extra something, which of these hunks of precious ore are 99 percent gold and which are only 98 percent, is no more scientific than the process was at the start.