The Sneak Play : Excuse-Making Becomes Art Form Among Ranks of Junior College Football

Max McGee, one of the stars on the great Green Bay Packer teams of the 1960s and a self-confessed night owl, in a book told the story about how he tried to sneak back into his house at 6 a.m. after a night on the town and was confronted in the kitchen by his irate wife.

After she bellowed for a bit, McGee quickly formulated an excuse that went like this: “Honey, I got home just before midnight but forgot my key. I didn’t want to wake you and the kids, so I slept outside in the hammock.”

To which his wife angrily responded: “You no-good, drunken louse. We took that hammock down three weeks ago. It’s in a box in the attic.”

Feeling cornered, McGee came up with a Hall-of-Fame response: “Oh, yeah? Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Now junior college football isn’t remotely the same game that was played by the teams of the Packer dynasties. But they do have one thing in common. Excuses. Lots and lots of excuses.

As junior colleges begin serious training for the upcoming season, coaches get the privilege of listening to some really fine excuses that players or would-be players offer for being late to practice, missing practice, being out of shape and sometimes for being out of place.

Junior college players are masters of the the alibi for a variety of reasons. For the most part, the lives of their four-year counterparts are very structured: Players live on campus, eat together and take many of the same courses. Junior college players live off campus and often must hold jobs. Anyone over the age of 18 with college eligibility can try out for a junior college team, and coaches often spend the first days of practice separating the blue chips from the flakes.

Excuses begin shortly after the initial whistle sounds to commence practice. The most common is the dead relative excuse. Or, more commonly, the relative-who-has-died-many-times excuse.

“We have it all the time,” Valley College Coach Chuck Ferrero said. “We call it the dead-grandmother syndrome. We get guys whose grandmother has died three times. We have a rule around here to cover it: The third time she dies, you’re out of here.”

At Glendale, Coach John Cicuto has encountered the same excuse more than a few times.

“We had one kid this year who told us he missed practice because his dad had a heart attack that day,” Cicuto said. “So I called the family to give my condolences and the kid’s mother says, ‘What are you talking about? He didn’t have a heart attack. He’s sitting here, having dinner. He’s fine.’

“But that kid wasn’t so fine the next time I saw him. I think he’s still running laps someplace.”

Sometimes, a player doesn’t want to take that extreme step of saying a relative has died or has been stricken gravely ill. The next step down is a relative who is merely arriving.

“We hear all the time about having to pick up relatives at the airport,” Ferrero said. “Or his mom is going to the airport and he has to drive her there. We refuse to believe that one. We pretend that just doesn’t exist. This morning a returning tailback told me he had to pick up his aunt at the airport and he’d be an hour late for practice. I told him, ‘That’s OK. You just dropped from second to sixth string.’

“And you know what? He was here on time for practice. I guess his aunt must have taken the bus.”

Dead, dying or incoming relatives, of course, are not the only excuses coaches hear. After a few days of wind sprints and having large people slamming into them, some players will do just about anything to take a day off.

“Cars breaking down is a popular one,” Cicuto said, “especially for kids without a good imagination. ‘My car broke down.’ I hear that all the time. Once a kid was real late for practice and came up and gave it to me . . . ‘My car broke down.’ What he had forgotten is just the day before we were sitting around making small talk and he told me he didn’t have a car.”

All that had broken down in this player’s case was his memory.

“So I looked at him and said, ‘Yesterday you said you didn’t have a car.’ And now he panics. I see his eyes get real wide and can almost hear the kid thinking, groping for something. Finally he said, ‘Ah, oh, it was my mom’s car that broke down. I borrowed it.’ ”

For some coaches, no excuse will do. Or, at the least, it had better be original.

“I’ve heard so many excuses that now I just leave room for one each year,” said Brent Carder, the coach at Antelope Valley. “This year, for example, the only one I take is, ‘Sorry, Coach, I just got out of the service yesterday.’ ”

Other problems that add to the chaos of the first week of JC football practice are the walk-ons, the kids who come in unannounced and tell of their dreams of playing football.

“Sometimes we get kids who have never played football,” said Cicuto, an assistant coach at Glendale before taking the head coaching job this year. “One kid just wanted to prove to me that he was tough. He said, ‘Let me hit the sled a few times.’ I told him the sled had no pads on it yet, just bare metal. And we didn’t have any pads for him, either. And he just kept saying, ‘Lemme hit the sled, coach. Lemme hit the sled.’

“So we took him out and he ran and slammed into the sled. It didn’t budge. He made a strange noise and walked off the field. We never heard from him again.”

Another kid walked into Cicuto’s office recently and said that he wanted to be a lineman. Which was fine, except that the kid was much too short (5-foot-4), much too light (140 pounds), much too slow (6-plus seconds in the 40-yard dash) and much too weak (he couldn’t bench press a stack of towels).

After Cicuto informed the lad of these slight shortcomings, the would-be player responded, “Just give me a chance, coach. I can get better.”

Another student at Glendale, one with football-hero dreams, came into the football office with a new pair of shoes, designer jeans and an expensive-looking designer shirt. And he begged the coaches to watch him run.

“So we watched him run,” Cicuto said. “He looked like a kid running down the street in expensive shoes and designer clothes. We told him to get out of there before he got those nice things all sweaty.”

Sometimes a student will show enough speed or be big enough to warrant a session or two in full pads. And that, for many of them, is the end of the show.

“One kid put his hip pads on backwards,” Cicuto said. “He put the tail-bone pad on in front to cover, well . . . let’s say he didn’t think his tail bone was the most important thing to protect. That was a clue that perhaps he hadn’t played much football before. Not to mention that it would have made it very difficult for him to run.”

And sometimes, coaches must contend with guys who have never been coached before and don’t take instruction very well.

“We were running some tackling drills at East Los Angeles College,” said Pierce Coach Bob Enger, who spent more than a decade at East L. A. before taking the Pierce job before last season. “And we went over it and over it, showing how to hit the sled without turning their head to the side, because if you turn your head away, you can separate your shoulder.

“So we’re all done with a long instruction, and showing them over and over and over. And the first kid stands up, takes a few steps and slams into the sled with his head turned to the side and he separates his shoulder. And I told the other kids, ‘See what I mean?’ ”

But with all the first-week blues that a coach must endure, occasionally the real McCoy comes walking into camp. Enger has one this year.

“A guy came in and said he wanted to play,” Enger said. “He was a real big guy, so I listened. He said he had played Pop Warner football but hadn’t played at all in junior high or high school, but now he’s 21 and he wants to play again.

“To be honest, he didn’t really know what he was doing at all. But he was eager and tough and he just might make it. Right now he’s No. 2 on the depth chart at his postion. He’s big and strong with some basic talent. And because he never really played football, he has no bad habits that we have to break him of.

“And this guy just might make it.”