Cruel Paradox of Camps

Football training camps have evolved ... thank goodness.

In 1954, first-year Texas A&M; coach Bear Bryant took 111 players to a speck of parched earth in West Texas for 10 days of supervised torture.

Seventy-six players quit.

Two buses wheeled into the hot-box town of Junction; only one returned.

Water breaks?

Not on your life.

Tackle Billy Schroeder became so dehydrated during one practice he collapsed face first into the dirt and turned blue.

There was no emergency-response team.

Instead, an angry Bryant kicked Schroeder’s limp body and ordered the player dragged off the field.

Schroeder was loaded into the student trainer’s Ford and rushed to the hospital, where he was packed in ice.

Schroeder almost died.

But he didn’t.

In 1959, first-year coach Vince Lombardi put the hapless Green Bay Packers through ungodly conditioning workouts.

Defensive tackle David Hanner lost 18 pounds in the first 48 hours and collapsed on the second day of heatstroke.

Hanner might have died.

But he didn’t.

Biographer David Maraniss writes that, with Lombardi, “It begins with the physical: throbbing, aching, piercing, dizzy, screaming, vomiting, fear-inducing and fear-conquering pain.”

At Arizona State, former coach Frank Kush ran the toughest camp east of Pendleton. Once, a dissatisfied Kush turned his wristwatch back three hours and started practice over.

“He motivated by negative reinforcement,” former ASU linebacker Bob Breunig recalls.

Kush eventually was run out of Tempe for allegedly striking a player.

Yet, in all his years of basting players in the Arizona heat, Kush says today, “We never had any kind of real dramatic problem, thank God, where we had heatstroke.”

All of which seemingly presents a paradox.

Few could argue sports medicine has not evolved since the barbaric days of Bear Bryant and “The Junction Boys.”

Trainers are more certified and qualified than ever. The USC trainer has a master’s degree in biomechanics. Players at all levels engage in year-round conditioning programs.

So why does it seem as if more players are dying now during conditioning--four in the last six months--than it did when camps were run by tyrants?

Statistics can be devilish, but you’d be hard-pressed to argue football at all levels is not safer now than it has ever been.

According to studies at the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, direct football-related fatalities in the year 2000 were 0.17 per 100,000.

There were three deaths in 2000, in contrast to 36 in 1968.

Yet, heatstroke numbers are more ambiguous. There were 103 recorded heat-related deaths in college and high school since 1960, but only five similar deaths from 1931-59.

According to the NCCSI charts, there were 17 heatstroke deaths from 1995 to 2000, as many as were recorded in 15 previous years.

A statistical aberration?

Were players in the old camps, as one of the surviving “Junction Boys” suggests, better suited to handle the heat?

Have massive changes in body size made players, especially larger ones, much more susceptible to sunstroke?

Have weight supplements such as Creatine, known to cause dehydration in some, compounded the problem?

What about use of a diuretic?

Is the increasing quest for scholarships, money and superstardom--as one former NFL star thinks, pushing players beyond physical limits?

Practices and procedures are being called into question in the wake of recent football-related deaths.

There are more questions than answers.

“I think it’s a fluke thing,” Claude T. Mormon, director of sports medicine at Duke University, says. “Remember we had a run of concussions a few years ago? I used to be the team physician for the Baltimore Ravens. Three summers ago, we went through an epidemic of hamstring pulls. You’ll get a run of these things sometimes.”

Others aren’t so sure.

Many trainers, coaches and former players wonder whether sports science can keep pace with players who are getting bigger and faster by the year.

Players today are better conditioned, and infinitely more informed, yet possibly more at risk.

“That’s a good hypothesis,” says Doug Casa, a professor and certified trainer at the University of Connecticut who has written position papers on heat-related issues for the National Athletic Trainers’ Assn. “I don’t have to research to back it up. We need to actually take a look at it.”

Dennis Goehring lived to tell war stories of Bear Bryant’s 1954 boot camp. He still lives in the College Station area, still considers Bryant a coaching god, still believes the end at Junction justified the means.

But, even he says, “It’s a wonder some of us didn’t die.”

Bryant did not allow water during practice.

In his book, “The Junction Boys: How Ten Days in Hell with Bear Bryant Forged A Championship Team,” Jim Dent recounts how players, mouths frothing, literally crawled off practice fields to their Quonset huts.

Dent writes: “Bryant believed the fastest way to whip a team into shape was to deny the boys water, even in the brutal heat.”

Smokey Harper, the Texas A&M; trainer, agreed with Bryant and told the coach, “Hell, you never pour ice water into a car’s hot radiator. So why pour ice water into a hot boy?”

The thinking is incredibly Neanderthal by today’s standards. Of course, players did die of heatstroke back then, but Goehring thinks there were two reasons why more did not.

First, players were carrying less body fat.

Goehring was a 185-pound lineman. He played both ways.

‘I couldn’t play today,” he says by phone. “I’d get killed.”

He also maintains players of his era were better equipped to handle the heat.

“In those days, we didn’t have air conditioning,” he says. “All of us were acclimated to the heat. We worked tough, summer jobs where the heat was. I worked in a steel mill, worked in a blast furnace, and the heat was 110 degrees. You had a little asbestos suit around you, picking up samples of iron ore. So the heat wasn’t that big of a factor.

“Today, golly bum, you never get out of the air conditioning. The body is a lot more suited to conditions that are comfortable.”

Because of player attrition, the 1954 Texas A&M; Aggies went 1-9, but the class of sophomore survivors from Junction formed the soul of the unbeaten 1956 team that won the Southwest Conference title.

The “Junction Boys” became cult heroes and Bryant soon became exalted.

Yet, you wonder how it might have played out had Billy Schroeder died. Would Bryant have survived to reach his coaching heights?

The incident even shook Bryant.

“That’s what broke up camp, when Billy Schroeder had his heatstroke,” Goehring says.

That Was Then

Frank Kush was one of the most unforgiving college coaches to prowl a training camp sideline.

His workouts at Camp Tontozona are embedded in lore and his “hamburger drill” still evokes night terrors in former players.

Why is it that no one died at Camp Kush?

Kush worked his players unmercifully, three times daily, yet he insists there was a method to his madness.

He was sensitive to the heat issue. It was Kush who moved camp to cooler temperatures in the mountains.

He fancied himself a fitness guru and kept up with the literature on heat-related illness.

Arizona State players were never denied water and practiced only mornings and evenings.

“If a kid started getting white around the mouth, you knew damn well,” Kush says.

He says he knew how far to push his players because he did physical tests on himself.

“I did an experiment once,” he says. “I ran through the desert about 12 miles and I didn’t drink any water. When I came back, I urinated and it was blood. That was telling me something.

“I think it gave me a criteria of how much the kids could take.”

Kush believes we may be seeing more cases of heat-related incidents today because players are in a different kind of physical condition.

More than weights, players in Kush’s era emphasized cardiovascular training.

“I’m talking about running,” he says. “We used to run, God Almighty. They talk about players being in better shape. Like hell. What shape are they talking about?

“I think they’re more concerned about weight training, in contrast to endurance.”

Kush is not alone in his opinion that there is a correlation between increased size and muscle mass and a higher rate of heat-related incidents.

The New York Times reported this week that, 10 years ago, there were 38 players in the NFL who weighed 300 pounds or more. Last year, there were 280.

Geoff Schaadt, head athletic trainer at UCLA, and Russ Romano, USC’s director of athletic training, believe increased size is a factor.

“We have several freshman linemen who are over 300 pounds,” Schaadt says. “They’re 18 years old. Even in smaller guys, they have significantly more muscle mass. Every percent of body fat you pick up you put additional strain on organs.”

Says Romano: “The human body has adapted so much, but has it become more fragile in the process?”

Casa, a training consultant to high schools and colleges, says it’s a simple equation.

“Larger people obviously have more muscle in their body, and heat is a by-product of muscular work,” Casa says. “These people are getting larger, but they are not, correspondingly, increasing their capacity to cool themselves.”

A Complex Issue

Why and how are players getting bigger?

Strength-training technique, obviously, has improved. Most college and pro football programs employ full-time strength coaches.

Many players have also become enhanced by supplements, many legal.

No one knows whether supplements were involved in recent player deaths, but trainers see the issue as a growing menace.

In fact, the NATA commissioned Casa to study the effects of Creatine, a popular and legal supplement, as it relates to exercise and dehydration.

“For the next seven or eight months, that’s all I’m going to be looking at,” Casa says. “I’ll know a lot more come April or May.”

USC’s Romano says the NCAA has made the issue more difficult because of a new rule forbidding legal supplements to be administered by trainers.

Romano is not a proponent of Creatine, but says the NCAA ruling now forces players to go elsewhere to purchase the product.

“If you buy it at a health-food store, it may not be Creatine,” he says. “This is a complex issue. I think it’s going to unfold.”

It’s too early to say what impact recent deaths will have on training camp procedure, but some worry too much reform will undermine the process of getting players ready for brutal competition.

“It must take place for a team to get itself in shape,” says Breunig, who left Arizona State to become a three-time all-pro with the Dallas Cowboys. “I don’t know if there’s any way around it.”

Many argue football is a vicious game and that drastic diluting of conditioning will only make players more susceptible to injury.

The addendum to the “The Junction Boys” at Texas A&M; was that the camp weeded out the weak and forged champions.

“We developed a sense of pride in ourselves,” Goehring says of his 10 days at Junction. “There was no doubt we were going to be winners. They were tough times, kind of like the Marines, but once it’s over and done, you’re pretty proud of it.”

Lombardi, of course, did a pretty fair job whipping the Packers into shape and Kush was a perennial winner at Arizona State.

“The game is very physical,” Kush says. “It’s not for everybody. It’s very demanding and you have to be able to endure that. If you back off, it’s going to get worse.”

More Can Be Done

UCLA and USC open training camps this week with a new perspective.

“We’re not going to revamp policies and procedures, I think they’re solid procedures,” Romano says, “but your whole awareness has reached a different height now.”

Schaadt says UCLA trains under favorable conditions.

“The biggest difference we have is our climate,” he says.

He keeps charts of temperature and humidity with graphs that indicate danger zones for players.

“We never get in danger zones in Westwood,” he says.

Football trainers have evolved . . . thank goodness.

In 1954, Bryant fired a competent trainer to bring in a “yes” man, Smokey Harper, who guzzled brown booze from a flask and did not question authority.

Romano and Schaadt say they work in concert with their head coaches, Bob Toledo and Pete Carroll.

“These kids can’t turn around without tripping over a water bottle,” Schaadt says. “But you have to count on the kids to communicate. It’s just the culture. They don’t want to show weakness. It’s all about the ability to play in pain.”

There remain problems.

Schaadt says he knows of one major college coach who, as recently as five years ago, did not allow his players to drink water during practice.

“I could not work there,” Schaadt says.

Casa of the NATA says a “truck load more” can be done.

“Over half the high schools in America still don’t have an athletic trainer,” he says.

Casa says policy and procedure at many high schools and colleges is very “nonspecific.”

Casa says ground rules for practice as it relates to heat need to be set in writing before training camp begins “so when it comes up, there’s no arguing.”

Romano agonizes for the trainers who have had to deal with recent player deaths.

“We don’t do this for the money,” he says. “We want to help people.

“Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do. Every day we leave practice and nothing major happens, there’s a big sigh of relief.”