Game Over 
Coming of Age in the Locker Room
What the players say about their life in the game.
(Page 5 of 6)
Rentzel tell us why: “The ideal player is a somber guy, preferably married, who hardly ever speaks except to say ‘Yes, Sir’ and who does nothing but think about football.” Gent, on the other hand, “had a clever wit and an extremely quick mind. He was the first player on the club to let his hair grow, and that was no small accomplishment in Dallas. He had a TV show late at night, and it was really wild. He’d come on dressed up like Abraham Lincoln, beard, stovepipe hat, but he’d never refer to it, he’d just talk football as though he were dressed perfectly normally . . . Pete was a rebel. He was his own man and he was true to himself. In the end, Coach Landry traded him to the Giants . . .”
When Landry decided to switch Gent from tight end to split end, he said, “Pete, I’m going to put you over on the other side this week.” Gent quickly reposted: “You mean I’m going to play for Philadelphia?” Landry didn’t think that was any funnier than when Pete Gent said of the complex Cowboy playbook, “It’s a good book, coach, but everybody gets killed in the end.” On receiving an impersonal form letter from management—saluting him as “Dear Player” even while dictating the seasonal particulars of his life—Gent responded with a like form letter directed to “Dear General Manager.” Gent read The Rubaiyat, quoted Camus, and was thought to be excessively inquisitive: a real smartass. All of which kept his fanny in the sling not only with the front office, but with his more traditional teammates. “They disliked me,” relates Gent’s fictional counterpart, Phil Elliott, “and I was terrified of them.”
Physical pain and injury are recurring themes. In Gent’s book as in the real NFL, players learn to live routinely with their major breaks and surgeries. They misrepresent themselves as healed to coaches or trainers, treating themselves on the sly or making it “on elastic tape and codeine.” This is because all physical facts are fed to computers. Once the computer shows “a piece of equipment”—i.e., a football player—to be wearing out, then that player soon will be gone. Thus the mental pressures become more sapping than physical problems. Football players constantly worry of survival, of making the team, of pleasing the coach or the front office. They are guilt-ridden, and fear that stripped of their football identities they will become invisible men, human zeroes.
Renztel, faced with up to fifteen years in prison if convicted of indecent exposure, curiously has as his first thought: “I would be nothing without being part of this team.” Gary Shaw quotes Longhorn teammate Rusty Workman of Arlington, who, after multiple injuries, is ignored by his coaches except as they attempt to force him off the squad: “It took me three years to accept the fact that though I had quit, I could still do other worthwhile things. And still, when I go back to see old players on the team or old coaches, I feel embarrassed, ashamed.” Gent concludes, after years of nerve wars, “I am a man who has learned that survival is the reason of life and that fear and hatred are the emotions. What you cannot overcome by hatred you must fear. And every day it is getting harder to hate and easier to fear.”
Once the fear takes firm grip, Gent’s fictional Pete Elliott accepts far less salary than his market worth because of the dangers of front-office retributions. The contract negotiation is “humorless, distasteful, totally frustrating”; he is humiliated and ridiculed in that losing battle, told in many ways that his value reposes in small coin. Reduced and surrendered, he begins tip-toeing around Authority as insurance against being scrapped or abandoned: “Time was my competition, and if I let down for a moment it would just go on increasing its considerable edge on me.”
To let go, or to be knocked away, from that foundation stone of tenuous personal identity—the team— would be to drop into that dark void where awaits anonymity and a job at the box-factory. Thus football players eat mighty pecks of dirt, taking abuse and manipulations and indifference. Gary Shaw spoke to Darrell Royal perhaps six times in four years, finding the private Daddy D—publicly advertised as personable and twinkly—to be cold and aloof; but when Shaw finally succumbs to injuries, he sheds guilty tears in feeling he’s somehow let Royal down. The Gent—Elliott composite communicates with Dallas coaches only when being lectured or disciplined; a rare kind word, however, sends him into unreasonable flights of euphoria and illogical fits of gratitude. Ditto for Lance Rentzel. After years of conditioning, they react as Pavlov’s slobbering dogs.
Such methods are indigenous to military training. There, too, young men are abused, worn to fatigue, propagandized, herded like cattle, subjected to mass punishments, taught blind obedience. The object is to strip the individual of any independent identity or dangerous non-conformities, to convince him that he is a zero outside the group, that his superiors—by definition—are always right. Enough of that, yes, and the old trained pig will jump right in the slop: remember Lieutenant Calley?
Part of the mold of being the sort of guy that’s tough enough to be a winner meant that there were only certain things we could talk about. Sports, but not how they affected us; sex, but not how we felt . . .
-Gary Shaw
Americans are outstandingly up-tight about their sex lives. Not that they fail in large numbers to do just about everything possible. No, it’s more that they are reluctant to admit it, even unto themselves, or—worse—are so haunted by guilts and myths they miss many of the pleasures while going through the forbidden motions. There is a great deal of skulking about, and much hypocrisy. This man or that woman, given the right opportunity away from home, may indulge in enjoyable affairs or kinky group satisfactions and then—back in their home bedrooms—perfunctorily perform plain vanilla acts with the lights out. Don’t do that, Elmer, the kids will hear.
Don’t worry: I won’t attempt to place blame for all history’s sexual hang-ups at the feet of football. Our primitive shames begin with the teachings of home; they are vigorously aided by the pulpit, the classroom, the stated standards of our friends and neighbors. Probably people are more compelled to misrepresent themselves sexually, in order to attain some mythical norm, than in any other pursuit. So whatever miseries, misconceptions, or malpractices are to be found in the beds of Waco or El Paso, they owe their roots—hah!—to many sources. The teachings and practices of football, however, have made outstanding contributions and I ain’t of a mind to grant amnesty.
Lance Renztel, tormented and damaged, strangely seems only marginally aware that his old compulsions to flash himself may have been more than indirectly related to the degradations of the playing fields. I have particular reference to those officially condoned and sexually-keyed pranks (with the emphasis on the anal and the oral) constituting the initiation rites of the football fraternity: what do you think all those inserted grapes and “record races” and strings tied to privates signified? What all might that rattle in a fellow’s head, bruising his id, maybe? Especially if it were already sore.
There’s an astonishing preoccupation in NFL locker rooms with games of grab-ass and with aping (a bit desperately and roughly, perhaps) those with homosexual preferences. Players shake their gadgets at each other, mock-kiss in the nude, mince and prance, or otherwise parody what they think of as tutti-frutti-ism. Verbal invitations to teammates accentuate the oral.
Locker room references to women are base. They are exclusively represented as pigs, bitches, sex objects. Tales begin, “I made her do such-and-so,” or “I grabbed her head” or “I forced that bitchin’ dolly to . . .” It is the language of violence, of hostility, of sex crimes. Gent’s book treats this subject openly and honestly; Rentzel’s pointedly does not. I have witnessed some few heterosexual group hi-jinks involving NFL players; my main impression was one of uncontrolled manic exhibitions of machismo bordering on the worse explosions.
Poisonous preachments begin early. Schoolboy coaches warned of the sapping qualities of girls: sex would harm the athlete more than all the world’s cigarettes or carbonated waters, strip young men of their strengths as surely as did Delilah when she conned Sampson into getting that haircut. Gary Shaw invokes “emotional barricades” carried into the sexual relationships of UT studs: “Here, too, spontaneity and involvement were prevented by a total faith in the rules of masculinity. Since being a winner depended on a strict obedience to the right rules, any uncertainty about them could not be tolerated . . . To make certain I avoided any involvement, the maximum number of times I dated a girl was five. Dating a girl any longer meant to possibly lose control of the situation; to lose control of the situation was to be weak. To be weak was not to be a man. As a result, I never really knew a girl in my four years of college.”
Coach Bill Peterson, initially addressing his Rice squad: “For the next three months I want you to think about football. And nothing else. See? I want you to put that girl out of your mind. I don’t know what else you like besides girls, but give that up.” And later: “Now, I know that you know better than to go out and drink beer or something. You’re smarter than that. But you’re going to get out with the girl friend, and . . . and . . . and—well, just remember . . . don’t . . . just don’t dissipate! See? Don’t dissipate.”
Consistency apparently being the hobgoblin of little minds, we see a different view as Rice assistant coaches discuss how to retain a valued dissident:
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