Charger Preseason Venue Is Really Nice--and That’s Really Bad

You want to harden men for battle? Where do you take them?

Let me see.

Puerto Vallarta? Waikiki? Jamaica?

No?

Not exactly.

Tough guys come out of deserts or jungles or mountains. The prerequisite would be that there be no running water, no tables of any kind, no roofs and no beds they cannot carry on their backs.

George Patton had the right idea. He took his army to the badlands east of Indio.

Sid Gillman also had the right idea. He took his team to Boulevard, a place so remote that nowhere would be a better place to be. Don’t ask me why a place with no stop signs or curbs would be called Boulevard.

Boulevard, for those who have never gotten lost in the southeastern corner of San Diego County, was an excellent place to toughen young men. It also would be a great place to imprison them, which is what most of Gillman’s players think he did.

Sid called the place Rough Acres.

The only greenery within miles was on the practice field, and that was spotty. The only problem with growing grass was that it required water, and water attracted coyotes. Their howling made it hard to sleep, but hardened men eventually pay no heed.

Sid Gillman’s men were not criminals one step removed from Devil’s Island, though they probably felt they were on it. They were the 1963 Chargers.

“I don’t think the Marines train as hard as we did in that place,” running back Paul Lowe recalled a few years later. “We’d have to fight the rattlesnakes on the way to lunch, and fight bats and tarantulas in our rooms.”

That was the way to toughen men. Those Chargers won the American Football League championship, which was all they could win in those days. But they might have been tough enough to win the Super Bowl . . . or take Berlin, for that matter.

I make this point because I visited the Chargers’ 1989 training camp at UCSD this week.

This was Club Med without thatched roofs. I kept expecting to see grass skirts. I couldn’t find the Team Yacht, but I’m sure it was around somewhere.

Danger?

These guys don’t even have to worry about getting hit by a car. A bridge spans the only road between their dormitory rooms and the dining area, which happens to be on a terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Indeed, what would Lombardi say if he heard of a football team doing lunch under umbrellas in a restaurant called The Oceanview Terrace? He’d say fine, as long as the players had to scale a cliff to get there.

And yes, the food was excellent. It was a buffet, so the players had to stand in line. I presumed that probably replaced wind sprints.

What’s more, the whole place is air conditioned. Not just the restaurant, the entire campus. The ocean breeze is so fresh and clean that some people actually go to wearing sweat shirts with their walking shorts.

And the place is also pretty. Eucalyptus groves line the roads and sidewalks and create seemingly isolated communities within the sprawling campus. I don’t know how students concentrate on studies in such an idyllic atmosphere, much less a football team preparing for the Raiders or Redskins.

I never did see the beach, but I knew there had to be one nearby. They simply don’t make places like this without beaches. I figured the players were probably banned from para-sailing, though it would take the Constellation to get some of them off the ground.

The practice field itself was located a short stroll through the sunshine. This facility struck me as a perfectly bad waste of a perfectly good golf course.

You see, while the fields were a lush green and stretched seemingly forever in every direction, they were as flat as a pool table. Take out the goal posts and toss in a bunker or two, a few eucalyptus trees and a swale here and there and you’d have Torrey Pines Farther South.

That’s right. The practice field is that nice.

But these days, the Chargers populate the area. This would be fine were it a different time of year. UCSD would be a wonderful place to send them for a vacation after the season. You could reward them, if they merited reward, with a Caribbean cruise, fishing off the Great Barrier Reef or a few weeks at UCSD.

But UCSD is no way to get ready for a season. It’s a nice place for a summer camp, but not a training camp.

Training camps, after all, are supposed to create men who chew nails, use rattlesnakes for necklaces and eat in the kind of places Mike Tyson would visit at 4 a.m.

UCSD doesn’t cut it.

Naturally, I am not one to criticize without coming up with reasonable alternatives. If they insist on an appropriate training camp in the San Diego vicinity, I would suggest they look into (a) the canyons east of San Ysidro, (b) the sun bear enclosure at the zoo or (c) Boulevard. If, by chance, Boulevard is now a ghost town, that would be the way to go.

To get ready for a National Football League season, nowhere is better than UCSD.