I took the long way to Ace Hardware Saturday morning because Denise wanted a specific kind of grout and the closer one had the wrong grout, and on that long way I went past Roosevelt High, where I have driven past August two-a-days for forty-one years, and I will tell you what I saw. I saw a tent. A white tent. Erected on the 40-yard line. With misters running off a generator. There was a folding table inside the tent. On the folding table were Gatorades sorted by flavor. A young man in a polo shirt was operating an iPad.
I pulled over. I sat in the truck. I watched for eleven minutes. The boys would run a play, jog to the sideline, and the polo-shirt fella would point at the tent like he was the maître d’ at a restaurant my insurance doesn’t cover.
Coach DiMaggio ran two-a-days in 1978 in full pads in 96-degree heat and the only piece of equipment on the sideline was a galvanized milk can full of warm water with a ladle chained to it. If you wanted ice, you had to be a Kennedy. He kept a roll of salt tablets in his shirt pocket and if you said you felt dizzy he would look at you the way a man looks at a screen door that won’t latch.
I stopped at Murphy’s after and Ray Kowalczyk was there, because Ray is always there, and Ray says the polo-shirt kid is twenty-two years old, just graduated from the state university, and his title at Roosevelt High School is Wellness and Recovery Coordinator. That is a real title. Ray’s nephew is on the team and showed him the team app. There is a team app. The boys log their sleep on it. They log their hydration. There is a section for mood.
Mood. Sixteen-year-old offensive linemen are logging their mood on a phone before they are allowed to do an Oklahoma drill, which they aren’t, because Oklahoma drills are now what is called a liability event.
Now look. I’m not unreasonable. Kids used to die in those August practices. Kids used to actually die, and Coach DiMaggio’s response to a heat-stroked sophomore was, and I am quoting, “walk it off and stop being a girl about it,” which we now understand was bad medicine. Fine. The misting tent is fine. Cold water is fine. I will even concede the Gatorade flavor selection, although I would like the record to reflect that Glacier Cherry is a crime against the concept of cherry.
What I object to is the polo shirt. What I object to is a 22-year-old with an iPad telling the head coach, who I happen to know is a man named Petey Corrigan who started at guard for Toledo in ’91 and has a Super Bowl ring from a season he spent on a practice squad, that maybe Tuesday’s session needs to be “dialed back to a yellow zone.” A yellow zone. In two-a-days. In August. At Roosevelt. Petey Corrigan once played a half against Findlay with a partially torn tricep and a hangover and the only thing anyone said about it afterwards was that he had been a little quiet at the team dinner.
The kids, though. The kids I leave alone. The kids are out there in the heat doing what kids have always done, which is run drills until somebody throws up and then run one more, and if the school district has decided that nobody throws up anymore, that’s the school district’s call, and the kids are still working. Ray’s nephew has a neck on him like a fire hydrant and he is fifteen years old. Petey Corrigan is doing the Lord’s work over there. The polo-shirt kid is doing whatever it is the polo-shirt kid does, and someday a long time from now he will tell his grandchildren that he was once a Wellness and Recovery Coordinator, and they will look at him exactly the way I would have looked at him if I’d had a clipboard of my own.
Denise is making chili tonight. She says it’s a slow-cooker recipe she got off a podcast about Tuscany. I’m going to eat it and not say anything.