A brief interlude. You will forgive me, please, if my comments about the airlines and air personnel and air travel border on the irrational. I hate them, you see. Not a mild dislike, but an active, blazing hatred. If any other business operated like this business does, it would be out of business. Torture, relentless humiliation, lies, hypocrisy, deception — they’ve got it all. The topper, of course, is when you’ve just completed some miserable, full-aircraft, mooing cattle drive, and you’re rushing to exit the plane like some trapped coal miner and you hear, “This is your captain. We hope you’ve enjoyed the flight,” etc. I can’t continue. I will point out little grace notes as they occur. One warning: If anyone mailbagging in a query chooses to take me to task for these sentiments — in other words, allies himself or herself with the airlines against your faithful narrator — I will take down your name and get even, somehow, somewhere. I’m not kidding.
Linda, bring me a glass of water, please.
Delta night flight from Newark to Fort Lauderdale. I don’t count the steps anymore, from entry to gate, in Newark terminals A and B (Delta terminal) because they’re all about the same, roughly 450-500 paces. Full flight. Lady in front of me tries to recline her seat. I’m holding it firmly in place. Sorry, no torture today, lady. She tries and tries, twisting in her seat to get a look at what the obstruction is. My eyes are on a far wall, my face a blank. I’ve gone through this drill before. A pro against an amateur. She gives up.
Finally we spill out into the muggy Fort Lauderdale air in various stages of stagger. We drive our rental car to our usual habitat, the Airport Hilton, only to find that in the space of a year something terrible has happened to this place. Filthy room, patches of stuff all over, gooey, grungy imprints of previous food, and hey, there’s not even any toilet paper in the bathroom. We can stand everything except the latter.
Have you about had it with all this whining? OK, I’ll hold off for awhile, repeat, for awhile. This is, after all, a football column.
Two figures dominate the Dolphins’ practice, the defensive tackles, Daryl Gardener and Tim Bowens, each a No. 1 draft choice in the mid-1990s. For years people wondered when they were going to bust loose, and now it looks like they’ve finally arrived. Gardener had some magnificent games on my charts last year. If he hadn’t gone down with a herniated disc in his back and missed six outings, he would have challenged Warren Sapp for the second spot on my All-Pro team. (The Saints’ La’Roi Glover was No. 1.) Bowens has established himself as one of the league’s sturdy two-gappers, a perfect counterpart to Gardener, who is probably the most remarkably built really big man I’ve ever seen. He looks like a gymnast, blown up to 6-foot-6, 310, with chiseled, rippling muscles and 8 percent body fat, a category that always has made me nervous, with the lurking fear that someday I’ll have to hold still for a measurement of that dreaded statistic. (“Seventy percent body fat? How could you let yourself get that way?” etc.)
In the locker room, we get into a spirited debate about the best tackle tandems in the league. I throw out the names of Glover and Hand in New Orleans.
“Hand was a great pickup for them,” Gardener says. “Glover works very hard, but he’s undersized. Sometimes the double-team will blow him off the line.”
I mention Sapp and McFarland on the Bucs.
“What helps them is that the defense is so exotic,” Gardener says, “and there’s so much slanting. Plus the linebackers are exceptional. I’ve seen that scheme just take out our offense and dissect us.”
How about Darrell Russell and, uh, Grady Jackson on the Raiders?
“I like Russell’s power and speed. To me he’s the total package — when he wants to be, and that’s the key to it.”
I’m running out of tandems. Siragusa and Adams on the Ravens? Defensive line coach Clarence Brooks happens to overhear.
“Fate put ’em in the right place at the right time,” he says.
To a man, the locker room choice is Bowens and Gardener, and this twosome just might be the best after all. It’ll certainly bear watching.
In practice that day I see a sad sight. Jamie Nails, a starter for the Bills at right guard last year and an early cut this offseason, is standing on the sideline waiting for practice to end so he can try out. In almost five months, no one has picked him up. He looks like a guy who has crash-dieted and lost a lot of weight too quickly, with unusual hills and declivities on his body. He is unrecognized. No one talks to him as he silently watches practice.
I’d never met Jamie Nails, but I was filled with this feeling of sadness as I reflected on the jarring world of pro football and its sudden crash landings. One day, top of the world, chartered planes, locker room attendants to handle your gear, kids fighting for your autograph, and then in a heartbeat it’s over, and you’re just another guy wondering if you’ll ever make a living at it again; you’re out on your own. If I were a beat man covering the Dolphins, I might have done some kind of sidebar feature on this phenomenon. Instead, I went over to Nails and introduced myself and did a quickie interview and took some notes, just to let him know that at least one guy knew who he was.
Our Delta night flight back home was delayed an hour. “Weather in Newark,” we were told, which could mean anything. Five raindrops, backed-up traffic, equipment failure, you name it. Then we got in the plane and sat at the gate for another two hours. Seems that a small aircraft had made an emergency landing and spilled some fuel on the runway. Those little blower things over the seats were barely functioning. The heat became crushingly oppressive. No drinks were provided. Why not, I asked the male flight attendant.
“We only have enough for our in-flight service,” he said.
“Why don’t you bring some more on board?” I asked.
“If you want to write a letter, you can,” said this guy, whose name, I found out, was Ed.
“He’s goading you,” The Flaming Redhead said. “He’s trying to get you to blow up and lose it. Stay calm.”
Ed was way ahead of us. He took my name. He asked me if I was sitting in the seat I’d originally been assigned. How well I knew this drill. A race to see who could get off the first letter. I noticed that the passenger in 19D was loud and offensive and disturbing the other passengers, etc.
God help you if you get mad and raise your voice. Then that becomes the only issue. Unruly, antagonistic, a danger to himself and others. We strongly recommend, your honor, that the individual be immediately committed. Oh, I’ve been through that one about a million times. And they wonder why we hate them so much.
Wednesday, Aug. 8: A night flight to Rochester aboard a tiny US Airways prop plane. Destination: Bills camp at St. John Fisher College in Pittsford, N.Y. I like these little prop jobs. They seem like a throwback to a less complicated, happier era. I like Rochester, too, with its old-world elegance and the Eastman Kodak Museum, which Linda and I toured with great enjoyment last year. I like the little craft shop she found this time, Craft Company No. 6, which had a wonderful collection of signature kaleidoscopes, which are among the 800 or so things I collect (and yes, I did pick up a few exotic numbers).
I spent a shockingly long period of time with the new coach, Gregg Williams, a lover of football history, particularly on the defensive side of the ball, his specialty. We swapped Buddy Ryan stories — he’d studied under Buddy — and he laid out the complete plan for the Bills’ new 4-3 defense, which involved more of a gap-penetrating style than the old 3-4, two-gap, and yes, new schemes are great — if you have good players.
Later I talked to one of my favorites, left defensive end Phil Hansen, a sturdy 11-year veteran who’s seen more styles than Schiaparelli.
“Well, they still have me sinking down to a tackle on the nickel defense,” he said, “at 262 pounds.”
“What do you say to that?” I asked him.
“I say, ‘Bring it on!’ Oh, brother.”
Yep, new style, and that’ll solve
everything. On offense it’s once again the “New West Coast Offense” that everyone seems to be turning to — or away from. Except that their QB, Rob Johnson, at 6-4 and a skinny 212, seems like anything but a quick-read, quick-drop guy. But he says he’s perfectly suited to it — hell, he’d tell me that if they put him in at blocking back — so who am I to argue?
I enjoyed watching tiny defensive line coach John Levra getting madder and madder as he put his guys through a three-man read and recognition drill conducted at a slower-than-desired pace under the sultry heat.
“See that?” Levra screamed at a rookie who took the wrong lane and got caught inside. “Do that and you’ll get caved in and walled up and you’ll foul up everybody.” After practice I told Levra that that was exactly the story of my life. He gave me a “Who the hell are you?” look.
A snappy 232 steps from entrance to gate in the Rochester Airport. Fort Lauderdale had been only a few paces longer. Thank heavens for small airports.
Thursday, Aug. 9: That was not the case, unfortunately, at Newark for our 6:50 a.m. flight to Indianapolis and Colts camp at Terre Haute, Ind. This time it was Continental, which meant Terminal C and the dreaded Gate 91, a grueling 1,032 steps. Newark gates in the ’90s are particularly dangerous for overweight air travelers shlepping two carry-on bags, and the prospect of it put both Linda and myself into a nasty mood. The trouble began in the always-under-construction parking area when a female security officer tried to get me to back up into a spot that had just opened up.
Cars shot by, my back-up was a zigzag. “Just back up like she’s telling you!” the Redhead yelled at me.
“The rear view mirror’s fogged up,” I said.
“You’re fogged up,” she said.
Things got worse on the plane. “Our flight time in the air will be one hour and 32 minutes,” the captain cheerfully announced, which is a deliberately misleading statistic because you spend half an hour on the ground, so the total time is really the scheduled two hours or so, all of which I made known, in grumpy 6:50 a.m. fashion, to the stewardess.
“What are you bothering her for?” the Redhead said.
“Because I want honesty,” I said, “and she’s part of the scam.” And so for the next half hour, it was the cold, mad face, stare-straight-ahead routine for us, and when breakfast came around, I made my stand by declining the single muffin, minus butter. Later, of course, I grabbed two of them when the hunger became insurmountable, which caused peals of laughter from the Flamer and ended the war. A short, 289-step walk in the Indy terminal helped to restore me to my usual jolly self.
The Colts practice at Rose-Hulman Institute, which marked the third school that nobody ever heard of that we visited. It is held in a weird climate inversion kind of bowl that keeps the humidity way up there, so you are drenched in sweat even when the temperature is fairly reasonable. During my interviews I had to keep the notebook well away from my head because when I forgot the sweat dripped onto the pages, blurring the writing. The night practice was better, in a way, but marked by other hazards, namely mosquitoes. Last year I saw two of them drag a ballboy off the field, and one of them said to the other, “We’d better hide him before the big ones get here.”
This time I was well-prepared, having liberally dosed myself with a can of bug spray, making a nice slippery time of it. The odor still clings to my notebook.
Easy angle on this team. Great offense, suspect defense, how’s it going to change? Talked to every defensive player I could lay my hands on after first touching base with Peyton Manning, of course. A fine chap who will discourse meaningfully on any topic, with, thankfully, a lack of the usual cliches. I go back quite a ways with Peyton, back to the days when he was a small child listening to an interview I was doing for a piece on his father, Archie, in New Orleans.
“Who’s your favorite player?” I asked him.
“Freddie Solomon,” he said. “But my father is my favorite Saint.”
The comments from the defenders I talked to pretty much revolved around the fine collection of athletes the club had put together. The most sensible came from Jeff Burris, the left cornerback (“Until you can control a game, you can’t make a name for yourself, and so far the only names on this club are on offense”) and Chad Bratzke, the right end (“Well, we have the athletes, but this is a hard game, a fast-paced game. It’s a fight the whole way. We’ll find out what kind of fighters we have.”)
Terre Haute? Well, you won’t find fine dining there. In the two blocks on either side of the Holiday Inn where we stayed, we counted 21 chains. Arby’s, Hardee’s, Long John Silver’s, Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald’s, of course, Rally’s, Denny’s, the list is endless. Two China Buffets, Applebee’s, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, why go on? We ate at the hotel, at the Outback Steakhouse. I grabbed a bunch of the delicious, homemade cherry bars at the training camp. We got by. What the hell, I’m too fat anyway.
I don’t want to label Terre Haute as a depressed area, not on two quick visits, but the real estate ads were stunners. “Beautiful large white Victorian, three stories,” I read. I asked the Redhead to guess how much. “One hundred and seventy five,” she said. “Sixty-two, five,” I told her.
“Here’s one,” I said. “Two bedroom home with three-year-old furnace and 24 x 24 detached garage.”
“Thirty thousand,” she said, hitting what she thought was rock bottom.
I dropped the bomb. “Nine thousand, nine hundred.”
There was a picture of a beautiful brick Presbyterian church, 9,800 square feet, priced at $149,900. Were they actually selling a church? This we had to see. So we drove over to look at it. A magnificent structure it was, occupying almost an entire block, complete with stained-glass windows and a huge pipe organ. Why were they selling it? Departed congregation? Moving to new location? What? I called the real estate company and talked to someone who told me, “They’re just selling it, that’s all. Of course, you’d have to do something about the two people who’re living there. Kick ’em out, let ’em stay, whatever you want.”
How about that beautiful big organ?
“I guess you could use it for parties if you wanted to.” It was all so depressing.
Well, there were good things in Terre Haute. We found a country antiques place, and Linda bought three big cowbells. Why cowbells? “I’ve always wanted them,” she said. “I love the sound they make.”
For the second straight year, we bought a load of secondhand books at a fine store called Wabash Books. We visited the museum that once was the home of one of my heroes, the old labor leader, Eugene V. Debs. A wonderful place, uncluttered by those insulting Do Not Touch signs. They simply presented the objects and relied on your good judgment to leave the stuff alone.
On Saturday night I caught the Seahawks-Colts exhibition game. I sat in the scouts section, my favorite area in the press box. Next to me was a young Packers scout who’d had a brief career as an NFL linebacker. How did we differ? During the national anthem his right hand was on his heart, mine was on my stopwatch. I caught Colts cheerleader Sarah Steele in a depressingly long 1:56.87. “That might be the longest I’ll clock all year,” I told the scout.
It was Mark Rypien’s night. Listed No. 3 on the Colts’ depth chart, the 38-year-old former Super Bowl MVP, who’d been out of football for three years, saw more action than he or anyone else expected because the No. 2 guy, Billy Joe Hobert, went down with a concussion. Rypien responded with a masterful two-TD night, and boy, was it fun watching an old pro like that teach the youngsters all the tricks, picking the defense apart with short, quick stuff over the middle. Pick, pick, pick, surely the defenders would catch on and make him go outside, but they never did, and in the locker room afterward, he laughed like a kid as he showed me a weirdly swollen elbow.
“I’m getting hit again,” he said. “Isn’t it great?”
Yep, there are great things, for sure, on the camp ci
rcuit. If only you could avoid those damn airlines.
* * *
The Long and Winding Road
This column appeared on SI.com on Feb. 6, 2007.
My serious playoff action on the road began with a lonely trip to Indianapolis and ended in the rain in Miami. Why was the Indy trip lonely? Because usually The Flaming Redhead makes these journeys with me, at least to the championship round, but there were one-thousand-one-hundred-and-forty-eight reasons why she didn’t make this one. That’s right, $1,148 was what Continental Airlines wanted, round trip from Newark, when you don’t book at least a week in advance.
“But how was I supposed to know ahead of time New England would knock off San Diego and the AFC championship would be in Indianapolis?” I asked the Continental ticket agent. “You’re the expert … you’re supposed to know stuff like that,” she said. Yeah, I guess so.
(Just kidding … no one really said that … c’mon … I told you I was just kidding.)
So since I’ll be going on a six-month sabbatical (from the magazine, not the web site), at half pay, we can’t afford to start throwing around four-figure tariffs for 80-minute plane rides, and the Redhead stayed home.
What she missed was a trip out there on a plane filled with teeny bopper cheerleaders, heading to Indy for the Jamfest Cheerleaders Super Nationals, with 8,000 strong. It was like being on a plane filled with demented mice. Same thing on the plane ride home. Same thing in the hotel, the lobby, hiding behind potted palms, everywhere.
“Where’s the newsstand?” I asked the desk clerk at the Hyatt, which was the press hotel.
“Through the lobby,” he said, “if you can get through the cheerleaders.”
Dr. Z Page 11