Game Over 
Coming of Age in the Locker Room
What the players say about their life in the game.
(Page 4 of 6)
“This was followed by the grape race, they stuck grapes up our asses and made us crawl backward on all fours for fifty yards, and the guy who finished last had to eat everyone else’s grapes. Next they dumped us into a huge tub of ice water . . . and forced us to sink in up to our necks. They had hot shots about three inches over the water line, just to be sure we stayed in . . . they kept us in for three minutes and it became unbearable . . .”
Then the kicker, supplied by Rentzel, though I supply the supporting italics: “It was a preposterous initiation, barbaric, in a way, even though some of the coaches were there watching, just to see that it didn’t get too sadistic....
“The health and safety of our players are always uppermost in our mind.”
-Coach Darrell Royal
Should your son receive a football scholarship to a big-time school, don’t bet the rent money he’ll keep it. More hosses are recruited than a coach possibly can use, and even when he’s sweet-talking them the coach knows that some will be put out to pasture. He does not say so, of course. And if he can avoid it, he won’t say then—or later—that under National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, a recruited athlete is permitted to keep his grant-in-aid even should he fail to make the team. The ideal situation, as most coaches see it, is to encourage such surplus cannon-fodder to drop out of school. That way, the scholarship money is restored to the coach for new uses.
Gary Shaw tells of the plight of those Longhorns who—injured or otherwise found wanting—were judged expendable. A trainer first ran the human rejects up and down the steep steps of Memorial Stadium at dawn; survivors reported to a room where steam heaters pushed the temperature to 120 degrees. There, in addition to physical tortures, the unfortunates suffered the trainer’s quasi-philosophical outbursts on winning, manliness, patriotism, and religion: “He claimed it was impossible to be a good football player without being a good Christian. He was sure of the connection although he never made an effort to explain it.” Players who had missed church were called “heathens” and forced to perform additional work. They learned to lie rather than admit having shunned good Christian rituals.
Even the saintly were required to do exhausting jumping jacks and sit-ups, and to run while weighted by barbells; each exercise continued “until someone faltered.” Concrete floors rubbed knees and elbows raw, after which there was a punching bag drill with the trainer screaming hit it hit it hit it hit it hit it until Shaw felt “half-crazed.” Then the boys donned boxing gloves and fought each other. Should you at any point quit or refuse an order, dismissal from the squad followed.
Those stubborn enough to survive the trainer’s sessions graduated to “shit drill.” Misfits were segregated from meaningful practice sessions to do nothing but bash each other head-on after running long distances at high speed. “Those drills started out with forty-five guys and ended after three weeks with just five guys left . . . Everytime I looked over at those drills, some one else was down on the ground hurt. It was a constant reminder to put out and not fall below the fourth team.”
Consider the education of Chachie Owens, former Orange High star, who—largely, Shaw says, because UT coaches judged him “rebellious”—ended in shit drills carrying the ball without benefit of blocking help though fifteen players had been assigned to tackle him: “Five guys got there first and tackled me; the other ten ran over me. Someone’s cleats ripped my calf open. I didn’t get up fast and [Assistant Coach Pat] Culpepper came screaming for me to get up. He took one look at my open wound and gagged, then called the trainers who walked slowly over.” Owens walked to a doctor’s car, was driven to the hospital, and received about a hundred stitches. He already had a shoulder separation; the other shoulder was bruised. Before shit drills.
For the indestructible, there were other methods. Texas had a “brain coach” highly advertised by Royal when he talked to the parents of prospects. Presumably, the so-called brain coach scholastically guided young Longhorns. He seems to have spent much time attempting to cajole professors into generously grading team stalwarts, and in guiding top players toward snap courses. But should a given boy appear less than vital to Longhorn plans, he might find the brain coach requiring him to enlist in tough economics courses, foreign languages, or sciences beyond his capabilities. Flunking him out was a sure way to get that scholarship money back . . .
Rah. Rah. Raw.
“Well now”—you say—“all that’s plumb terrible and oughtn’t be condoned, but you’re a-talkin’ to me of ancient history. Hail fahr. Shaw and Rentzel and them ain’t played college football in a coon’s age. In this here more enlightened and sophisticated time, when kids smoke dope and don’t take no guff and seize school buildin’s and everthang, it’s bound to be a-heap better.”
Well, neighbor, perhaps to some extent. And yet, Giles Tippette’s Saturday’s Children tells of hard doings at Rice—“The Harvard of the Southwest”—only three seasons removed. One finds Coach Bill Peterson (since gone to the Houston Oilers, and more recently from there into limbo) holding sham elections. Players may vote as to whether suspended teammates may rejoin the squad, yes—but Peterson instructs his assistants to be damn sure everybody votes affirmatively should the suspended player be exceptionally talented. A certain Rice star “borrows” $50 here and $100 there from an assistant coach; neither mentions any repayment schedules. A player whose arm is broken in action is snubbed in his pain by coaches who felt that he’d been looking for an excuse to dog it. When a worried mother says that her son, LaRay Brashers, should quit because the family doctors fears that another hard lick might cause a melanoma, Coach Peterson assures her a special pad has been devised to protect the injury. Tippette writes, “Of course, they’d done no such thing, and Peterson later told LaRay, ‘Now, don’t you go to worrying your fine mother about that heel. It’s gonna be all right. We’ll get it operated on in the off-season and get it fixed up right. Hell, we ain’t got but four games left; you ain’t gonna get no melanoma.’” Peterson didn’t know what a melanoma was. “I bet that hick doctor they got don’t know himself,” he said. “Probably just some word he picked up somewheres to impress people.”
And what of the Rice “brain coach”? He, too, encouraged liberal marks for football worthies; cooperative faculty members were invited to share the glories of the Owl bench at home games. Attempting to dissuade the team kicking specialist from quitting football, the brain coach says the lad might earn up to $40,000 annually by kicking in the pro league.
“That’s not what I’m most concerned about,” the Rice kid responds. “I have other interests . . . I’m confused about the question of priorities. About what is important.”
The brain coach shouts: “Oh, f---! Don’t give me that shit!”
Football players aren’t people, who leave home and try to play football. They are football players, who come home and try to play people.
-Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty
Pete Gent and Lance Rentzel played for the Dallas Cowboys in certain corresponding years: notice I carefully avoid claming they played “together.” Despite all the certified hogwash about how each NFL team comprises a close-knit “forty-man family,” pro players are strangely alienated from each other. They form few close friendships and see less of each other socially than outsiders might imagine. Each man seems to be an island unto himself, if an insecure one full of potential volcanic eruptions. The cold, bloodless way in which players are traded, deactivated, or released makes each man wary of personal entanglements: it’s bad enough fretting over one’s own fate without assuming the burdens of a friend.
The “forty-man family” theory crumbles even in practice. Defensive units work apart from offensive units unless they scrimmage each other, and then the competition of survival precludes anything short of controlled hostility: look bad and you may be benched; benched, you soon may be discarded. As Gent and Rentzel competed for the identical flankerback spot, one may be certain they were never close.
Eventually, Rentzel—quicker, perhaps more naturally talented—would beat Gent out. This despite Gent’s reputation as a clutch player, one who would somehow catch the pass that had to be caught and leave you wondering how he’d managed to beat you. But there was never much doubt, in those happy days before Rentzel would be convicted of publicly exposing himself and later be charged with marijuana possession, whom the humorless Cowboy officials preferred to retain and whom they wanted to give the sandwich and the road map.
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