Pro Football / Bob Oates : Missing Training Camp Puts a Burden on Players

Picture walking, or even sitting, in a four-pound hat.

Then consider that a football player covers himself with nearly 20 pounds of equipment, including hip pads, shoulder pads and the four-pound helmet.

The heavy equipment sets football players apart from other athletes. They must learn to play a difficult game, one requiring considerable speed and agility, while encumbered in perhaps more armor than any warrior has worn since medieval times.

And they must relearn it each summer, after spending the off-season in tank tops and jeans.

Thus, each summer, holdouts and other National Football League players missing the training-camp grind usually fall far behind their teammates. Many never catch up. Few reach their potential in the year of a holdout. And, reinstated holdouts often have more injuries.

This year it is Raider Coach Mike Shanahan’s bad luck to have two prominent absentees. His team is playing the exhibition schedule without both starting running backs, Marcus Allen and Bo Jackson--one a holdout, one batting cleanup for the Kansas City Royals in the American League.

When they come back, how long will it take them to catch the other Raiders?

“Mentally, an hour or two,” Shanahan said. “Physically, days or weeks. The big thing is, you have to get used to carrying the pads.

“Marcus and Bo will both be in good physical condition when they come in--most football players these days are--but there’s a big difference between peak physical condition for a jogger and peak football condition.

“Before you can play football properly, you have to experience the discomfort and drudgery of contact--over a period of time--while carrying all those pads. It’s a different world. And if your (teammates) are ahead of you, it can be long and painful.”

Allen’s reason for holding out is doubtless both pressing and valid--he does nothing lightly--but it will be costly.

As for Bo Jackson, the marvel is that he can play competitive big league football after missing training camp each year plus half the regular season.

Jackson, of course, has it easier than Allen. Though heavier by 25 or 30 pounds, Jackson can’t block. He lacks both the toughness and aptitude for blocking, meaning that in a Jackson-Allen backfield, Allen must move to fullback, which in the NFL is a dog’s life for 200-pound converted halfbacks.

Is Jackson worth all this?

“Yes, I’ve never seen a back with more talent,” Shanahan said. “He has speed, strength, size and moves, and he can catch it. It’s amazing that he averaged 4.3 yards last year behind an inexperienced line.

“If Bo were with us through the off-season and training camp, he would become known as the greatest who ever played the game.”

Baseball people have reached a similar kind of conclusion.

“They tell you that you’ve got to hit year-round, more or less, to reach your potential as a hitter,” Shanahan said. “In the old days, baseball and football weren’t perceived that way. But today they’re both year-round sports--if your goal is excellence.

“That’s what makes Bo unique--that he can excel in both while losing months of practice time in both.”

Jackson’s goal is to be No. 1 in both. That once seemed impossible, but he’s getting closer.

The two most interesting physical specimens in the NFL are probably Bo Jackson and Herschel Walker, who resemble one another in size, speed and strength as well as effectiveness in getting the ball up the field.

Each is a sprinter with the build of a fullback--bigger than other running backs, and also, astonishingly, faster.

“I went against both in college,” Shanahan said. “And I don’t remember that we ever controlled either of them.”

But if the players are physically similar, they are viewed very differently.

The Dallas Cowboys appreciate that Walker is “a tough, hard-nosed leader who, if there’s a way to win, will find it.”

Nobody says this about Jackson, who is best described, by those who know him, as a finely-tuned machine.

Jackson nears perfection, his teammates in both sports say, except for one thing: a reluctance to play hurt. If Walker is a team man, Jackson is a Jackson man.

As football players, there is one other difference between them. Carrying the ball, Walker is a straight-ahead runner, whereas Jackson has the natural moves and elusiveness of a clever, small halfback--making Jackson much more valuable in the open field.

It is a measure of Walker, however, that he has set out this year to become more elusive. He is working on his moves with the same diligence that he works with the weights, and he has lost a few pounds to further the cause.

There was even one small payoff in San Diego Sunday when, on a short run, he seemed to make a Charger tackler miss.

Conventional wisdom is that elusiveness comes naturally or not at all. But the same was once said of a player’s speed. First the dream, then the accomplishment.

Like Jackson, Walker is a dreamer, though what he wants is a little less. Walker merely wants to be trickier. Jackson wants to dominate two sports.

As of today, strangely, Jackson might be closer to his goal than Walker is to his.

From New Orleans, David F. Dixon, father of the Superdome and founder of the United States Football League, says he will sue the NFL for interrupting his plans to get into spring football.

The NFL this year has been developing an international spring league, which it calls the World League, with four teams in Europe and six or eight in North America.

The NFL’s single-entity plan is similar to Dixon’s. Both proposed leagues would be owned by stockholders who would sell franchises to participating cities.

But Dixon doubts if America is big enough for two such new leagues. And, noting that the World League hopes to get off the ground first, he objects to an NFL monopoly of both spring and fall football, freezing out the competition.

“We hope you share our belief that the NFL’s monopolization of football should be a matter of concern everywhere,” he said.

He also calls the proposed World League player draft a violation of antitrust laws.

“The NFL draft is legal only because it was (authorized by the NFL Players Assn.),” Dixon said. “Does GE or GM or IBM have the legal right to draft its personnel? What gives the (World League) this right?”

He is asking Congress about that.

Both leagues seem to be shooting for a 1991 start-up.