Rich Tosches : Players Get Fill of Blood Sweat, Fears

Those wonderful days of August are upon us. Days when the mercury threatens to burst the thermometer and walking barefoot on the pavement is nearly as painful as watching the Goodwill Games. Days when the smog gets so bad that people with respiratory ailments are told to stay indoors, and people without respiratory ailments will soon have some.

But for teen-aged boys, these are the days that make nine months of listening to a middle-aged woman with thick glasses, silver hair and a flabby neck drone on about Shakespeare seem at least tolerable.

These are the days of youth, days spent lounging by the pounding sea, trying to pick up girls. Or lounging by the pool, trying to pick up girls. Or hanging out in a video arcade with a handful of quarters, trying to pick up girls. And then meeting the guys at night to lie about the girl you met last week, the girl you say looks just like actress Jacqueline Smith of “Charlie’s Angels” but who actually looks more like shortstop Ozzie Smith of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Yup. These are the days of which dreams are made. Unless, of course, you’d like to play high school football this fall. Then, these lazy, hazy days of summer are about to become the days of which nightmares are made.

Summer football practice. Two-a-days. Hell Week. More frightening even than a pimple on prom night. Instead of spending a day being pounded by the surf, you spend the day being pounded on the side of the head by a man whose body is covered with hair and whose stomach hangs over his shorts.

You call this man Coach. You do whatever he says to do.

Sure, the brownish air is more dense than a combination of Mr. T and Bo Derek. But Coach tells you to run a mile, so you run a mile. And Coach says wind sprints, so you run wind sprints. Each of the twice-daily summer workouts can last as long as three hours.

The running is broken into two classes. Distance runs can be a mile or longer, and Coach often adds a special twist to make it interesting. They force the kid who finishes last to run the course again. This is called incentive. When I was in high school, my teammates and I devised an anti-incentive device. We would all finish last. Or all finish first, however you want to look at it.

The key was to all finish at the same time. Using that method, we were all able to run very, very slowly. The coach quickly understood that if he tried to invoke the “last kid to finish runs again” rule, he would not be the football coach. He would be the cross-country coach, which paid considerably less money.

After the long run, you need to run sprints about as badly as Tina Turner needs caffeine. Your body is begging you for a major oxygen infusion. You have a headache. Your eyes are a bit blurry. If the blurriness gets any worse, the freshman team manager, usually a short guy with thick glasses, will begin to look strikingly like Morgan Fairchild.

At this point, an assistant coach tells you to take some salt tablets to replenish what has flowed out of your body in the form of sweat. The tablets, he tells you, will make you feel much better. A moment later, another assistant coach tells you not, under any circumstances, to take any salt tablets. The tablets, he tells you, will make you throw up and/or fall over dead.

Next on the agenda are the real favorites.

One exercise consists of slamming yourself to the ground and quickly standing up again. This is repeated many times. The exercise is called the grass drill. Sometimes players slam themselves to the ground but don’t stand up. This is called passing out.

Then come the squats, in which you move rapidly left and right according to Coach’s directions while you are in a squatting position. Try it for three or four minutes. Then try to describe the feeling in your thigh muscles without using more than five really disgusting swear words.

Later, Coach marches you into the weight room. It is usually very small, always very hot and at all times smells amazingly like a sack full of damp, filthy socks and underwear that has been locked in the trunk of your car since the day Sandy Koufax retired. In this pleasant atmosphere you will be required to repeatedly lift more weight than you can lift--from one station to the next, with five seconds to rest between exercises. Your head throbs, your shoulders ache, your legs burn. And always, you hear the voice of your father rambling through your mind; a voice that you should have listened to; a voice that says “Play golf. You can use electric carts.”

But it’s too late for that now. You’re committed. If you tell Coach you’re too tired to continue, you will be ridiculed. You will be advised to take up something more befitting your character. You will be advised to knit. Or do women’s hair.

And for all this enormous suffering and abuse that might have made Gandhi lash out with a left hook, what do you get? Well, you get in shape. And come this fall, maybe you get to suit up and take the field every Friday night for the glory of your school.

Just don’t expect to pick up on the cheerleaders. They’re going out with guys who stayed at the beach.