Padres in Good Hands : Dick Dent Got His Training Under Fire

“LT”--that’s what most of the Padres call Dick Dent. It’s the abbreviation for lieutenant.

Lieutenant Dick Dent, second platoon leader, Delta company, Vietnam, 1970.

‘LT’--that’s what the medic called him in a foxhole in a Cambodian jungle that night. For six hours, the medic had been lying over Dent’s legs, and another soldier had been lying against Dent’s side.

For six hours they had been hiding underneath the bullets when something finally hit. The soldier cried out. He had been shot in the stomach.

The medic climbed over Dent to attend to the soldier. Something else hit. The medic cried out. He had been shot in the eye.

“LT, LT,” he screamed at Dent. “Get my eye so I can take care of this guy.”

Dent grabbed a bandage. He climbed out of

the foxhole and, while listening to several variations of hell, wrapped the medic’s head.

“You could hear the bullets breaking the sound barrier over me,” Dent recalled. “I don’t know how or why I wasn’t hit.”

He got the bandage fitted. It was his first. He doesn’t know how or why that happened, either.

“Funny how that works,” Dent said recently, sitting in the safety of the bullpen on a sunny spring-training afternoon.

Dick Dent, Padre trainer and conditioning coach, 1976 to present.

He is 40 now. He is paid to fit bandages. He does it with expensive bandages, in an air-conditioned room. He does it wearing pressed slacks and a laundered shirt and standing up.

He hasn’t set foot in a jungle in 18 years. He is never closer to danger than a foul ball.

When he talks about the war, he sometimes puts it in baseball terms--”I threw a grenade from about left field to the dugout”--and it doesn’t sound real.

But his Vietnam remains.

It is on his office wall, where two photos hang: one of him and his top sergeant, another of him after a successful battle.

It is in his top desk drawer where an unsuspecting snooper would find himself looking at the belt buckle of the first man Dent killed in combat.

“I wish I would have made something out of that buckle,” Dent said.

And he still thinks he’s in a fight. Only now it is fought in the training room, through his players, who have loved and despised and ultimately respected him enough to annually become the healthiest team in baseball.

“He intimidates you. You get madder than anything at him,” Padre veteran Tim Flannery said. “Twice I’ve walked out on him during treatment. When I was having arm problems, he told me I would never have enough strength to throw a ball again. Told me I wasn’t tough enough. I just said, ‘Forget it,’ and walked out.

“But in the end, you play for him. You believe in him. Hey, today I can throw.”

For three consecutive years, beginning with the 1984 championship season, the Padres led the league in fewest people on the disabled list--two, two and three. In the average season, the average team has more people on the disabled list than those numbers combined .

Part of it is a result of one of the most extensive off-season conditioning programs in baseball. For three days a week, three hours a day, every week during the winter, the Padres voluntarily put themselves in Dent’s private jungle.

“It’s a workout you respect so much, you won’t go out the night before,” veteran pitcher Andy Hawkins said. “There’s been a couple of times I’ve ended the workout on my knees in the bathroom, with LT laughing, saying, ‘Yeah, I got another one.’ ”

Former Padre pitcher Goose Gossage, now with the Cubs, says: “Compared to his winters, anything we encounter during the season is cake.”

Once the season starts, the players say, Dent gets tougher, if that is possible. His trainer’s room plays no favorites and babies no injuries.

If a player is late for a pregame treatment, he may not be treated. Stars and rookies are treated the same.

If a player wants somebody to share in his misery, he has come to the wrong person. Bad knees and fingernails are treated the same.

“LT is flat tough,” Gossage said. “That’s the best way to put it. And if it wasn’t for him, a lot of us wouldn’t have the career we’ve had.”

Ask Dent about this and you get the glare, no different from the one he gives the guy who wants to sit out because of a stomachache.

“It’s the players; they do it,” he said. “They make me look good or bad. It’s all them.”

Then he shrugs. Padres, second platoon Delta company, same thing.

That medic with the eye wound, he lived. That soldier lived. For eight months in the jungle, Dent says, nobody in his platoon died. With the exception of a piece of shrapnel that nicked an ear, Dent was never wounded.

“That was dumb luck, but I guess a lot of what I do now is predicated on what I did then,” he said. “Yeah, I consider these my guys, like my platoon. I want them to get the most out of themselves in the short time they have here.”

That’s why the players, through gritted teeth and restrained tempers, end up so close to their tormentor.

For every time he has chided them into doing one more leg press, he has fought with a manager who didn’t believe that thigh hurt in the first place.

“Yeah, I guess I have had some problems with managers over that,” Dent said.

For every time he will throw them out of his training room for not giving 100%, he will guard them against the media and the public who would accuse them of the same thing. Few training rooms are as adamantly off limits to outsiders as Dent’s. Few trainers will consistently avoid or ignore questions about his players’ health.

“The manager gives the information. I stay out of all that,” he said. “My responsibility is to my guys.”

He uses that term a lot, my guys . It comes from his days in Vietnam, a place where for every 100 that were lost, one like Dent was found.

“I’m not ashamed to say it was a very positive experience for me,” Dent said. “Over there, I became a man.”

A man, from a sassy college wrestler who entered the Army only because he flunked out of school and was scheduled to be drafted. Through every step, from joining officer’s candidate school to taking engineering classes, he tried to avoid going to combat.

“Then one day this guy, Lt. Young, told me I was a scumbag and would never make it even if I did go to Vietnam,” Dent said. “That really burned me. That really got into my head. It taught me to get into these guys’ (the Padres’) heads.”

In January 1970, he landed in Vietnam. He was told he would be given a platoon of 24 men. For eight months he was in the jungle with never more than 18.

“It taught me to improvise, to do the best with what you had,” Dent said. “Same thing I try to teach my guys today.”

Improvise. Like bombing every potential ambush site with grenades instead of getting closer to see if there is any real danger.

“One officer called me a baby for doing that,” Dent said. “But four out of 20 times, I would see blood coming out of those bushes, so it was worth it. Anything to save your butt.”

Fear? Dent says Vietnam didn’t so much scare him as teach him to understand fear.

“You are not scared during combat. You are scared when it’s over,” he said. “You are scared when you realize what could have happened. You are scared when you think what might happen next.

“Unlike the movies, Vietnam was hours and hours of waiting around separated by minutes of combat. The waiting around was the hard part.”

Thus his players have learned. They will play hurt because he has taught them to believe it will not hurt until later. Related Flannery: “Last year, I would come in complaining about my ankle, and Dick would say, ‘Hey, c’mon, two or three hours and you’ll have it in an ice bucket. You’ll forget it for two or three hours, then we’ll get it.’ He was right, and I played.”

Dent has a way of getting the players to listen, perhaps because he had a way of getting his troops, when faced with a second assault in 30 minutes, to do the same.

“I remember once we did a heck of a job in a fire fight and held off our position, and now we were relaxing, cleaning our weapons,” Dent said. “Suddenly we get a call that another convoy has screwed up, and we have to go rescue them.

“I had to go to my guys and say, ‘Buckle up, let’s go back.’ They all started complaining and all I could think to say was, ‘Hey, those are our guys we’re saving.’ It worked.”

It’s not so easy anymore. The younger players don’t understand Dent’s stories. When told they don’t understand the ease of baseball compared to Cambodia, they say Cam- what?

“I used to get mad at some of the guys who wouldn’t listen, but not anymore,” Dent said. “I’m smart enough to realize that I’m not going to reach everybody. I know my shtick gets lost on the younger guys. They can’t relate.”

He laughs. “That’s OK. It’s their career. If they can do it without me, fine.”

Said pitcher Mark Grant, 24: “At first, you get the impression that Dick thinks he knows everything about everything. Then you know him more, and you can understand why he acts like he does.

“The bottom line for the young guys is, he will never ask you to do anything he doesn’t do. That much we understand.”

Dent can’t run as much with his team anymore because of bone spurs in his heel. “So I don’t make us run as much,” he said.

But other than that, “Yeah, I’ve got to do what they do. That’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the only fair way.”

Sort of like the night Dick Dent killed his first man. His platoon was pinned down, and somebody had to blow up an enemy hut to free them. Rather than debate the issue, Dent says he pulled out a grenade and threw it 100 feet through a tiny window.

“I know, you don’t believe it, but it happened,” Dent said, laughing. “I’ll never forget seeing it go down.”

If it sounds as if Dent loved the fighting, consider that he may be baseball’s only trainer who once considered becoming a mercenary.

“It’s not bad money, seriously,” he said.

Instead, while wrestling at Mesa Junior College in 1971, he discovered that his shoulder had been separated from his previous days as a wrestler, and he hooked up with Bob Moore, then the San Diego State trainer.

“I was so interested in how he was treating me, I started going to seminars and things,” Dent said. “I liked the medical and the physical part. I liked the leadership part. If I couldn’t fight for money, this would be the next best thing.”

Yet even today, he sometimes gets bored.

“There’s no pressure here,” he said, watching fans shuffle in during that recent spring afternoon. “In all my years in the game, I have never seen pressure. I tell my guys they haven’t seen pressure yet.”

Oh yes they have. Such as his trademark, those off-season workouts, which usually attract no more than a dozen Padres and other local professional baseball players.

They run. They do abdominal exercises. They do Nautilus. They do dumbbells. They throw a football. They run some more. They throw and hit a baseball.

For three hours a day. On a winter off-day.

“That’s the funny thing about what Dent does,” Flannery said. “He’s the trainer, but the way he makes us stronger is not physical. It’s mental.”