(Herb Carrerra, Run to Midnight [Miami: Gridiron Press,2004], PP 34-38)

Monday, March 15, 2010

“Two twenty six. T.K. You’re no fun at all,” says the Prospectors’ team physician. “You’re as consistent as my old maiden aunt’s bowel movements. I don’t think your weight’s varied a pound in the ten years I’ve been with the team.” The doctor taps a brown manila folder against the scale. “Your other tests look good. You’re in disgustingly perfect health.”

“I owe it to fast living and Clasp toothpaste,” joshes T.K., aping a Harv Matision TV commercial currently showing around. He steps off the scale, retrieves his practice pads from a bench against the wall and slips them on.

There are sixty eight men scattered around the locker room; twenty five are rookies. Since it’s only a practice, and an early one at that, the team hasn’t yet worked up to full armor. Instead, all are dressed in sponge rubber chest and back pads, blue shorts, rubber knee and elbow pads, and flat soled rubber shoes. All wear a training suit, a piece of apparel that duplicates the weight distribution of a set of football armor. At this point in their training, most players carry only around thirty pounds. Before the season starts, they’ll all be up to eighty pound suits, nearly twice as much weight as they’ll have to carry in a game, but Coach Carrerra is big on conditioning. The team’s rookies are required to wear their training suits twenty four hours a day until the first game. Invariably, a fanatical veteran or two will join them. Everyone present either carries, wears or is within reaching distance of a blue plastic practice helmet emblazoned with a gold letter P.

The rookies are a sullen, introspective bunch. They don’t talk much, not to the veterans at all, hardly to each other. All have been drafted straight out of college, the last bastion of field style football. They’ve never played street football. They’ve got a lot to learn. Their first task is to pick up enough street smarts to make the team. By the start of the season, the roster will be cut to fifty two men. Their next, and most important, chore is to learn how to stay alive once they get in a game.

The veterans are quite jovial. They banter freely, joke and laugh. They don’t waste their energy getting psyched up for practice. Nobody ever gets killed in practice. The knives are rubber, the bullets blanks. They save their solemnity, their single-minded concentration for actual games. That’s where it really makes the difference.