Wounded Must Keep Walking : It’s a Good Thing Team’s New Trainer Likes Challenges

“Go ahead,” Gill Byrd said. “Have him tape your ankles.”

The door to the trainer’s room was a few feet away, off in a corner of the Charger locker room. Somewhere inside, Keoki Kamau, the Chargers’ new head trainer, was working on a few wounded players. Rod Stewart was blaring from a stereo.

And Byrd was recommending a tape job.

Byrd, starting his seventh year with the team, was at San Jose State when Kamau was an assistant trainer there in the late 1970s through 1980. And Byrd’s most vivid memories are record-setting tape jobs.

“He would give you the fastest tape job ever,” Byrd said. “And quality, too. We used to time him.”

Byrd said Kamau was clocked in 30 or 40 seconds per ankle.

And what would be normal time for an ankle taping?

“Time him, and whatever it is, multiply it by three,” Byrd said.

Thousands of rolls of tape later, Byrd and Kamau are together again. Kamau, 30, was brought in this year by Steve Ortmayer, the Chargers’ director of football operations, at the request of Coach Dan Hennings. He had spent the last eight years as an assistant trainer with the Washington Redskins, with whom Hennings served two twice as an assistant coach.

The tapings remain the same.

“I’ll give myself five minutes to get to a meeting,” Byrd said. “And I’ll give myself three minutes before that to get taped. He likes challenges.

“Go ahead. Have him tape your ankles.”

Challenges. Kamau said his wife is always telling him he thinks he is invincible.

“I say, ‘No, but put a task in front of me, and I’ll do my damnedest to get it done,’ ” Kamau said. “Gill hit it on the head. I like challenges.”

Not every one. When told of Byrd’s suggestion, Kamau just laughed. Then he declined.

That’s OK. Kamau took on his biggest challenge when he accepted his first head trainer’s job with the Chargers June 5. He has been to three Super Bowls in eight years with the Redskins and is respected enough to be the AFC representative on the executive committee of the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society.

The NFL’s new rules on roster limitations during training camp and on when players can be activated during the season have made the trainer’s job particularly crucial. Kamau is under constant pressure to heal players and get them back onto the field.

To do that, a guy has to be able to do more than tape.

“His No. 1 attribute as I know it, and the reason I was excited to get him, is that he is the best man in rehabilitation I have ever been around,” Henning said. “He has a way of taking a guy with an injury of any kind and getting him back to work and liking it. You might say he has tremendous bedside manners.”

Henning should know, because he underwent knee surgery during the 1982 NFL players’ strike when he was an assistant coach in Washington. He spent a few weeks rehabilitating under Kamau’s direction.

“I know he can get you back on the field without getting you (angry),” Henning said. “He used to get me on a stationary bike and make me do interval training. He did it in a comical manner. Someone else, I might have said ‘Hey, the hell with this.’ But I knew I wanted to get the leg better, and he gives you the feeling that it’s important for him as well as for you.”

Kamau heard that and chuckled.

“I kicked his butt,” Kamau said. “I worked him through my normal rehabilitation program and hammered him as much as I could. Still, he came back every day.”

Thus, a relationship was born. When Henning went to the Chargers, and the NFL changed the roster rules, he remembered Kamau.

“I think with this particular series of rules regarding the number of players you can keep and the number of players you can practice with, it is essential that you keep players on the field and healthy,” Henning said. “He’s very intense and dedicated to what he is doing, but with some levity about him.”

Levity? This is a guy who will stand on the weight stacks and laugh while a rehabilitating player is lifting.

Rod Bernstine, who suffered a season-ending knee injury in Week 14 last year, was one of the first rehab patients inherited by Kamau. This summer, Bernstine worked each day from 8 a.m. until noon.

“He’s a hard-nosed guy in general, but he goes about it in a way that you don’t mind doing the work,” Bernstine said. “The way he goes about it is different than most.”

Such as?

“In my case, I lift a lot of weights to strengthen my leg,” Bernstine said. “He’s standing on the bar laughing at me.”

Ah, a masochist.

“I’ve heard him called that before,” Bernstine said, laughing. “Sometimes I’d rather go to practice than be with him. He’s that tough.”

Henning brought Kamau to San Diego for a couple of reasons. He was familiar with Kamau and respected him. Also, the Charger facilities are different than the ones Henning worked with in Washington.

Henning said he could walk from his office to the training room “in about five seconds” in Washington. In San Diego, the training room is three levels downstairs from his office in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

“I don’t go down there as much as I normally would,” Henning said. “So I need an expert trainer and administrator.”

That’s Kamau.

“He’s strict,” Bernstine said. “If you’re one minute late, you’re going to pay for it. Extra work, extra money . . . depends on what kind of mood he’s in.”

Said Kamau: “The owner wants to win, the coach wants to win. How does Keoki and his staff fit into the picture? Our job is to get 45 players on the field. The program we’ve set up is aggressive, mixed with 90% common sense.”

Another milestone in the Kamau-Henning relationship occurred before the start of training camp this year, when Henning showed his new trainer the practice schedule. The Chargers were to play an exhibition game in Chicago on a Saturday and another in San Francisco the following Wednesday. Henning wanted to practice twice on the Monday between games. Kamau zapped the idea in a hurry.

Later, during training camp, Henning was heard to say he wanted to practice twice on that Monday, but “if we do, Keoki will kill me.”

“True statement,” Kamau said. “When he showed me the practice schedule, I said, ‘Wait a minute, coach. There’s no way you can do that.’ We debated, and after about two minutes, he said, ‘Fine.’

“A lot of these guys feel like they have been in a wreck the day after a game. They’re sore, their bones ache, their muscles ache. My point to Dan was, with back-to-back games, the productivity level will be down because those guys will be hurting.

“I think I have one of the greatest relationships a trainer could ask for with a head coach. Dan and I are two different people thinking along the same lines regarding our players when they are hurt. We treat players as professionals, not meat on hooks.”