by Mark Bowden
Every pro team has scores of top draft picks who never amount to anything on the pro gridiron, so it’s at least arguable that an equal number of kids who washed out by flunking some bizarre scouting test or failing to catch Coach’s eye could have become starters. Buddy didn’t have much faith in the process. He used to swear he could tell just by looking in a kid’s eyes, not only whether or not he could play, but often what position he should play. Richie made no special claim to prowess in this area. He handled evaluating talent the way he handled everything else—he wasted as little time on it as possible and never looked back.
For these four agonizing weeks of two-a-day practices and nightly film sessions, the rookies, all the superstars of Wherever, U.S.A., went to bed every night and woke up every morning listening for the footsteps of the Turk in the hall, waiting for the knock on the door.
Dave arrived in West Chester in ’87 as a fifth-round draft pick, unpacked his bag, and sat staring at the brick walls wondering what to do with the rest of his first evening in camp, when there was a knock on the door.
“Coach [Bill] Walsh wants to see you downstairs,” said a ball boy.
Shit, I’ve been cut and I haven’t even had a chance yet to put on the damn pads! he thought. Turns out the coach wanted the center to try playing tackle.
You stayed on edge until the final cuts were made. In the nightly meetings you could see the mistakes you made (there were plenty of those) and the things you had done well, and you could tell how hard a look the coaches were taking by how many reps you got in practice (how many repetitions of the day’s agenda of plays), but it was rare for anyone to pull you aside and say, You’re looking good, rook, keep it up and you might make this team! If you did well, you were threatening the job of some esteemed veteran. If you did poorly, you were held in contempt—no matter how many touchdowns you had scored or passes you had picked off back in those blessed rah-rah afternoons at the alma mater. Even the sunniest pinnacles of collegiate glory, just a few short months behind you, counted for nothing. Casey Weldon, the Florida State quarterback whose twenty-two touchdown passes kept the Seminoles and Bobby Bowden ranked number one in the nation for twelve weeks the previous fall, who had been favorably compared in a long and flattering profile in Sports Illustrated to none other than Joe Montana—what, just six months ago?—now sits on his helmet on the sidelines alongside the water boys, watching veterans David Archer and Jeff Kemp battle for the dubious distinction of being the Eagles’ third-string quarterback.
Weldon’s college exploits, along with those of top draft picks Siran Stacy, Tommy Jeter, and Tony Brooks, virtually guarantee at least a year on the roster, but for most of the rookies, training camp is high drama, a moment in which your fabulous football career—Pop Warner superstar, high-school all-American, college standout— knocks up against the final gate of the Pigskin Sluice, and some distracted bald guy with a cigar and pink visor who never once even looks at you or calls you by name decides on the basis of a few dozen chances on a broiling practice field or, maybe, one or two chances in an exhibition game whether in September you’ll be desperately looking for an entry-level job in the recession economy or, in some screaming concrete bowl of a football stadium, throbbing with excitement, you’ll be acting out the fondest dreams of your young life.
But for this one month, all eighty guys are Eagles, from Reverend Reggie to Randall to the last lowly free-agent camp invitee. The draft picks and free agents get to bang helmets with Seth and Andre, they get to pass rush Randall, tackle Herschel, and try to run with Fred Barnett. Afterward, they get to share tables in the cafeteria with these guys and then hang out on campus or in the dorm. They get to peek at the characters behind the wall of celebrity.
Keith Byars, who rooms with neat-freak Randall, has such elaborate video hookups that their room (to Randall’s chagrin) rivals Kenny and Willie T.’s as video central. Players are up until three and four in the morning battling against each other in electronic baseball and football. Electronic barks and beeps from the tube compete with the real-life taunts, shouts, laughter, and anguish of the contestants, who compete … well, the way they always do, as if their lives depend on it. Keith is a video junkie. At home in New Jersey he has three setups, in the basement, in the living room, and in the bedroom. For away games, he packs a system in his suitcase and hooks it up in his hotel room—he even does this when the team stays in the New Jersey hotel the night before home games. On the plane, he brings sophisticated handheld versions. In camp, Keith is the Commissioner and draws up charts for the tournaments, meticulously penciling in the totals, orchestrating the competition throughout the four weeks to a final championship, which he wins in baseball, and linebacker Willie T. wins in football. Seth is the champion in golf, which he plays considerably better on the screen than on the links.
Living in the rec room is tough on Randall, not just because it’s hard to sleep, but because he is inordinately fastidious about his things and his space. He’s like every college freshman’s nightmare roomie. He accuses Keith of snoring and farting too much, which makes everybody laugh, but Ran-doll is serious. He’s got this spray can of room deodorant that he uses liberally, and more. David Archer is playing video games with him one evening when he hears the sound of something plastic hitting the tile floor under the desk across the room. It’s a room deodorizer that has come unstuck. Randall hits the pause button,crosses the room, and affixes the thing back up underneath the desk. They resume playing, and Arch hears another thud. This time, Randall doesn’t even hit pause. He reaches down deftly to scoop another deodorizer off the floor and jab it back up underneath a bookshelf. Before he leaves, Arch counts two more of the things in the room.
The accommodations are a big comedown for the veterans, whose standard of living began climbing at warp speed after they signed their first pro contract. Mike Schad, the veteran left guard who has missed almost all of the previous season with a bad back, who has spent months with chiropractors, MDs, and team trainers to nurse himself back into playing shape, wakes up after his first night in the dorm with a stiffness in his spine and panics—he gets excused from practice (which is risky in this competitive environment) and drives into downtown West Chester, where he locates a bedding store, bursts in, all six-five, 290 pounds of him, and announces, “I’m Mike Schad of the Philadelphia Eagles and I’m leaving here with the best mattress you’ve got!”
Sleep is critical for the big men, who feel the toll of two-a-day practices much more than their smaller teammates. Midway through camp, linemen are snoozing all over the dorm whenever there’s a break in the schedule. Defensive backs, receivers, ballcarriers, and quarterbacks may have time for video-game tournaments and extracurricular pursuits, but the big guys are wrung out.
If there is one person who loves training camp without reservation it’s Jimmy Mac, who finally arrives two weeks late after settling unhappily for a one-year $846,000 deal. Jimbo comes equipped with a well-traveled giant air mattress that about covers the floor of his dorm room from wall to wall. Once he arrives, a running game of Bones ensues that lasts, between practices and meetings, for the length of his stay—and none of the rookies are safe. The veteran has a devious arsenal of ploys for delivering water, shaving cream, and sundry other unpleasant surprises to unsuspecting victims, buckets rigged to spill over opened doors, water balloons delivered from high angles, shaving cream lathered inside shoes and helmets—every annoying adolescent stunt five years of life in a college dorm and eleven pro training camps can teach.
Camp means open season on rookies. It’s annoying having to practice with these cocky kids hell-bent on making the team, so veterans more than even the score. On the field, the old-timers consider it their duty to initiate the youngsters to authentic NFL violence, so the few who make it know what’s in store, and those who don’t can further amplify the legend— Man, you don’t know what being hit is until you’ve had Wes Hopkins take your head off coming over the middle. But the on-field hazing is just part
of it. Sure, there’s the simple and time-honored humiliation of having to stand on a plastic chair in the cafeteria and warble through your school fight song, with the veterans throwing food at you, and there’s the standard dodging of spitballs and wads of paper throughout the evening meetings. But there are also other hazards, like groin wraps laced with stinging heat balm, a friendly offer of some chaw spiked with hot pepper, getting your pockets picked in Broo and Bones by wily veteran operators (often working together), or being carried out to the practice field to be ceremonially taped to the goalposts and used for target practice by the kicking team. Former backup quarterback Matt Cavanaugh, a veteran of more than a dozen pro training camps, would post an official-looking sign outside the locker room that read HELMET RENTAL FEE… $12.50 and do a brisk rookie business until the new guys found out helmets were one of the few things the club issued free.
There’s not much leisure time, but more traditional all-American recreational pursuits also thrive. In the three hours between the end of afternoon practice and the mandatory evening meeting there are enough bars and restaurants near campus to afford at least an early and abbreviated nightlife. The window of opportunity here is small, but doable, and into it step eagerly the deliciously contoured, fullbreasted, blow-dried fräuleins who sprout like lively wildflowers along the paths trod by pro athletes.
These are the Sis-Boom-Bimbos, the sorority of athlete-worshiping females distantly related to the juicy cupcakes in matching sweaters and bouncy skirts who grace every high-school, college, and pro sideline in America, only these girls have graduated from pom-poms and backseat postprom humps to meatier pursuits. White ones, black ones, ones in shades from beige to sienna to mahogany, ones with quality soft-porn chests and taut, silky thighs, all of them straining with diet and exercise and makeup and elaborate coiffure to achieve that ultimate Platonic ideal of American Goddess, guaranteed to make any red-blooded young male citizen of these United States leap at first sight to … well, if not love, then full priapic salute.
It’s an accepted part of the Great American Cult of the Pigskin, with roots in the ancient chauvinistic rituals of rape and plunder— We win; we lay your women. The glamorous sweeties huffing and puffing in full makeover and glittering cleavage-and-buttock-baring costume on the sidelines of every NFL game are just modern vestiges of the age-old sexual-spoils contest. In Philadelphia, as in most cities, these cheerleaders are actually skillful dancers who work through professionally coordinated routines and keep up an active roster of off-field public appearances, most of them hoping to parlay the exposure and experience into some more serious level of stardom. They are discour aged from fraternizing with players and are all but ignored as they grind through their numbers on the sidelines, through rain, sleet, and snow, heedless of the score or the mood of the hometown fans. But they remain inexplicably popular, for no other reason than that, at bottom, their role as symbolic plunder gives them a certain boosted erotic appeal. Note the glossy cheerleader calendars sold by nearly every NFL club, posing members of the squad in minimal attire before Vaseline-smeared lenses in effusions of soft light, a cleaned-up but clear knockoff of Playboy’s pulchritudinous flavors of the month. We love our exploitative sexual fantasies in America. It’s no coincidence that the Cowboys’ cheerleaders are a standard part of touring USO shows for our military boys based overseas. The young women grow indignant at the suggestion—as do cheerleaders everywhere—that they represent nothing more than ripe, erotogenic prizes for the oafs out there banging heads, but there you have it. Surviving well into the second generation of NOW and postfeminist liberation ideology, we have, in Odessa, Texas—as detailed in H. G. Bissinger’s profile of the Permian High School Panthers, Friday Night Lights—the Pepettes, high-school girls “assigned” to specific members of the beloved local high-school team for a full season, required to minister to their needs, in practice good clean fun, for sure, but a ritual with sexual implications that are plain. (Eagles linebacker Britt Hager, a graduate of Permian, is married to his former Pepette.) The pornographers who made Debbie Does Dallas zeroed right in on the theme, cutting through the proprietous haze, turning the salacious power of the premier Sis-Boom squad, the Cowboys’ cheerleaders, into a feature-length hardcore romp, which did predictably boffo box office and is now almost as standard a feature in American hotel rooms (courtesy of in-room video) as Gideon’s Bible.
It’s no coincidence that most of the wives and girlfriends of the players cultivate the same glamorous, flaming-haired, taut-haunched, pert-breasted, wholesome but hardly virginal look of the professional cheerleader, or that the real camp followers of the sport (out of which at least some of the wives and girlfriends ascend) follow suit. The true Sis-Boom-Bimbos, as opposed to the symbolic ones, offer wares that are far from symbolic. They specialize in making fantasies real. They know exactly where to be and when, usually the same dozen or so girls in every city, some of them not too choosy about which of these burly prizes they commune with from night to night, some of them actually vying to improve their totals as the summer wears on, sort of a XXX-rated version of the football-card craze. They come after players as aggressively as the street whores in Third World capitals, positioning themselves to literally latch onto an arm or a jacket as a star player emerges from the stadium or hotel or front door of any advertised public event. The richer and more famous the player, the more determined the Sis-Boom-Bimbos become. David Archer spent a year watching the trials of Jimmy Mac when they were both on the Chargers’ roster in ’89. His most vivid memory is of exiting the Hoosier Dome directly behind Jimbo, on their way to the team bus down a path cordoned off through the usual crowd by the police, when a woman, the familiar type, aurora hair, leather pants, probably a looker when she wasn’t in full carnivorous heat, jumped out in front of Jimbo and grabbed a fistful of his neatly pressed, button-down oxford. “Jim, just let me—”
A cop jumped out and grabbed the woman’s arm, but she refused to release Jimbo’s shirt. The cop was dragging her, but she kept her grip on the shirt until bam!—the quarterback smacked the woman smartly on the forehead with the palm of his right hand, and she let go and just folded into the arms of the cop.
“Works every time,” Jimbo confided on the bus.
The more sophisticated Sis-Boom-Bimbos find out a player’s home phone or address and bombard him with mail, flowers, phone calls, fetchingly lewd photographs, candy, balloons, and so on. Needless to say, it is the rare player, married or unmarried, rookie or veteran, who maintains a perfect record in this regard. For the long list of rookies, most of whom are attending their first and last pro training camp, the Sis-Boomers are one of the quality perks of summer. If you walk into the bar with Randall or Seth or Jimbo or any of the team’s other big stars, you are going to get laid that night, and not just by some let’s-get-this-over-with Molly, but by one of the wildest and sweetest male-fantasy squeezes of your young life. If you go alone, it might take longer to establish your credentials, especially if nobody in the Pack has noticed you and written or aired a report about you, but even then your chances are good—certainly a helluva lot better than they would be back in Podunk, Nowhere, stocking shelves at the Piggly Wiggly.
Beyond the pickup trade, some of the veterans have their standard training-camp chippies—a step up the ladder for every selfrespecting Sis-Boom-Bimbo—girls who live out here in sleepy Chester County, or who move in for the summer to offer a little fleshy solace to the hardworking boys, condemned to months of sleeping alone, away from wife (or regular girlfriend) and family, locked in that silly dorm. Many of the veterans, those with homes nearby or girls waiting for them in the local motelry, wink at the team’s so-called curfews, and so long as they get back in time for morning practice sober and able, what’s a couple-hundred-dollars fine to a guy making a half million or more a year? The players’ wives know that camp is the most hazardous time of year for their marriage—a precarious thing at best with these guys. Many kiss their men good-bye and really don’t wa
nt to know what goes on out there in West Chester, with all those pro hormones percolating under pressure inside old Gertrude.
Richie tries to keep the lid on, but who can watch all these guys twenty-four hours a day? He, of course, devoted football monk that he is, loves camp. Always has. Four weeks of total cloister, up at the crack of dawn, a small army of young men in his thrall, two sessions on the practice field broken by film study and planning sessions, piecing together the team for another assault on the league—what’s not to like? But in this, his second training camp as head coach, Richie seems to be withdrawing from the close-knit coaching circle. He has his good buddy from Staten Island, Matty McEntyre, who lives in his shadow now the way George Azar lives in Harry’s. Matty, a cheerful retired electrician with a belly big as a keg, just moved on down when Richie became head coach (every High Priest needs his loyal factotum) and does what Richie’s wife, Liz, never could—he shares the temple life. Matty isn’t on the payroll, but he travels with the team, attends practice (balancing his own oversized Havana), bunks in Gertrude, stands alongside Richie on the sidelines during games dressed in full Eagles regalia—he even flies down with Richie and the other coaches on their annual trip to the Senior Bowl, helping (unofficially) to scout talent for the draft.
When the other coaches and scouts get together in the evening to toss back a few beers, discuss strategy, kick around observations about personnel, Richie is often by himself up in his room or hanging out with Matty or off somewhere in his Caddy. Sometimes he leaves after dark, slipping out alone, and shoots out Route 202 to the strip mall at Painters Crossing to see a movie by himself (his favorite way to go).