I turned on the local sports report Tuesday night and a man in a quarter-zip told me, with a straight face, that the team had a ‘light Wednesday’ planned. Twenty-two minutes of walkthroughs. Helmets optional. Two starters listed as resting, which the team’s official injury report described, and I am not making this up, as ‘general maintenance.’ That’s not a football term. That’s what the dealership says when they want $400 for an oil change.
Coach DiMaggio used to run us until somebody threw up, and then we’d line up on the puker and run again, because the puker was now part of the drill. Practice in August started at 6 a.m. and ended when Coach decided his coffee tasted right. We did not have a ‘maintenance day.’ We had a Tuesday, and on Tuesday you hit a sled until the sled apologized.
Ray Kowalczyk called me about it before I’d even finished the segment. Ray played one season of small-college defensive line in 1971 and has been a credentialed expert on football ever since. ‘Duke,’ he said, ‘they had a guy in a vest standing behind the quarterback holding what looked like a shower curtain.’ I asked what the shower curtain was for. He said it was a ‘visual barrier’ for ‘mental reps.’ I told him I needed to sit down.
Apparently the modern professional football player does something called pre-hab, which is rehab you do before you’ve been hurt, in case you get hurt later, which you might not. There’s a guy on staff whose entire job is to make sure nobody pulls anything. His title is Director of Performance, and he has a podcast. Of course he has a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. My dental hygienist has a podcast and she only has fourteen teeth showing.
Petey Corrigan played fullback for a semi-pro team sponsored by a steel mill in 1972. Broke his hand on a Sunday, taped it to a wooden spoon his mother used for gravy, played the next Sunday, scored twice. The wooden spoon is in his garage. I have seen it. There is a brown stain on it that he insists is gravy. Petey did not have a Director of Performance. Petey had a wooden spoon and a wife named Linda who told him to walk it off.
The new vocabulary is what kills me. ‘Soft tissue.’ ‘Availability.’ ‘Workload.’ A quarterback in California sat out the team’s voluntary throwing session because his ‘arm care specialist’ wanted him to focus on ‘rotational hygiene.’ Rotational hygiene. That’s two words that should never have been introduced to each other, and now they’re married and have a $1.2 million practice facility.
My grandson, who is twelve, came home from his middle school football practice last week and told me he’d done his ‘activation work.’ I said, son, when I was your age activation work was the bus ride. You activated by being yelled at. He said his coach gave them resistance bands. I asked where the resistance bands came from. He said the booster club bought them after watching a TikTok. I went outside and stood in the yard for a while.
The team I grew up watching practiced in pads on Wednesday because Wednesday was the day you found out who was tough. Coach used to say if you couldn’t go three hours in full gear in the heat, you sure as hell couldn’t go three hours in November when it counted. Now Wednesday is for ‘film and flexibility,’ which sounds like a yoga retreat for accountants. The starters do twenty minutes of jogging and then disappear into a room with curtains and music. I’m told there are smoothies.
I’m not saying these guys aren’t athletes. They are. They run faster, lift more, and can identify a Cover-2 from a parking lot. But somewhere between Petey’s wooden spoon and a 22-minute practice with a shower curtain, somebody decided the goal of football was to not play football until absolutely necessary. The whole sport is now in maintenance mode. The starters are saving themselves. For what, nobody seems to know. The Super Bowl, I guess. Or possibly retirement.
Denise is bringing chili over tonight for the Thursday game. She says it’s from a podcast. I asked which podcast. She said it didn’t matter, the chili was the same. That’s the most football thing anybody has said to me in a month.