Let your eyes close. “Aaaaaah! ssssh. Aaaaaah! ssssh.” It might be surf breaking. Row after row, again and again, they run forty yards full out at Camp Columbia: tackles, guards, tackles; tackles, centers, guards; offensive backs; linebackers; defensive backs. This is the awful time, windsprint time. Some scream while they run, getting a jump on their own agony. Nostrils sear with inbreath; throat linings come apart. When I was a kid they called pre-season training the barf squad: each day three or four of us would throw up all over our face masks. Now they stagger off, too busy with pain in the lungs to care about coordination in the feet. You stand clear: they exude a virulent, moist warmth. It fingers you, claustrophobic, visible almost as the heat waves that dance across a tenement roof in July.
Uniforms sag over wire clothesline between morning and late afternoon practice. Sweat clots on fabric in the August breeze. Tape wreckage all around: a gross or more of ankles wrapped twice per day. Ah, the tedium of it. Here and there you come across plaster mouthpiece molds, lower jaw fossils from some glass-chinned civilization. They go well with the empty helmet crania. It’s so quiet you can hear a hamstring stiffen up. Columbia’s camp is in northern Connecticut where there’s no night life and the only native manufacture seems to be pre-colonial history. The five-dozen-odd football players sprawl on grass or sleep in dorms; a few, ruthless with their energy, play horseshoes.
Comments