Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday from a folding chair outside Cowboys camp, where he’d paid forty-two dollars and a parking surcharge to watch grown men in compression shorts walk at three-quarter speed through a route tree. He said there was a smoothie bar. He said there was a podcast tent. He said somewhere, in theory, there was a football.
I asked him if anyone had hit anyone yet. He said no, but a rookie wide receiver had given a fourteen-minute interview to a man in a bucket hat about his “process,” and a tight end had walked off the field with a Bluetooth speaker still playing. Ray, to his credit, sounded like he was about to drive home and never come back. Ray will be back tomorrow. Ray bought a ticket package.
Coach DiMaggio used to run two-a-days in full pads in August in a part of New Jersey that had no shade and no mercy and one trainer named Wally who treated cramps with a salt tablet and a hard look. Camp was the punishment that earned you the season. You came out of it sixteen pounds lighter and twice as mean, and if you couldn’t take it, you were honest enough to quit before September and become an electrician, which a lot of guys did, and which honestly turned out better for most of them.
Now camp is content. There is a podcast tent. I want to be clear about that — there is a structure, with sponsors, where players go between drills to talk into a microphone about how training camp is going. The training camp they are currently at. While it is happening. I asked my grandson if this was normal and he looked at me the way you look at someone who has just discovered fire.
One rookie quarterback — I won’t say his name because he hasn’t done anything to deserve me yet — showed up to camp with a documentary crew. His own. Three guys, a boom mic, and what Ray described as “a kid carrying a light on a stick.” The crew is reportedly embedded for the season. They have credentials. They have catering. They have, presumably, a streaming deal pre-negotiated by an agent who has never once been tackled.
The Eagles have a “sleep coach.” The Bengals have a “recovery suite” with cold plunges and red-light therapy and something called a NormaTec, which sounds like a Norwegian appliance brand and is in fact a pair of inflatable pants you wear on a couch. A nose tackle in Cincinnati told a reporter the pants “changed his life.” My father wore the same pair of work pants for nineteen years and they didn’t change anything except color.
Now — I’ll give credit where it’s earned. I watched about ten minutes of Ravens camp on the league’s app, which I am told is free if you don’t read the terms, and there’s a left guard out there named something like Vlasic or Vlasov who is moving people backwards on every snap and not saying a word about it afterwards. No podcast. No lighting guy. Just a man with a job and a forearm shiver. I would let that man marry into my family. I do not know his first name and I don’t need to.
Petey Corrigan, who scouted high school tape for thirty years out of a duffel bag, said something to me once that I keep coming back to. He said you can tell who’s going to make it inside the first hour of camp, and it’s never the kid with the entourage. The kid with the entourage has already been told he made it. The kid you want is the one rotating in second-team and not looking at the sideline. Petey is dead now. He’d have hated the podcast tent. He’d have walked through it on principle and pretended he was looking for a bathroom.
The preseason starts in ten days. The documentary, I’m told, drops in October. Denise is bringing chili over Sunday. She says it’s from a podcast.