Black and Honolulu Blue: In the Trenches of the NFL
224
Black and Honolulu Blue: In the Trenches of the NFL
224eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617499340 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Black and Honolulu Blue
In the Trenches of the NFL
By Keith Dorney
Triumph Books
Copyright © 2003 Keith DorneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61749-934-0
CHAPTER 1
Welcome to the NFL, Rookie
The sweat pouring down my face stung my eyes as I got down into my stance. I was in the midst of my first NFL practice, and I was confused, tired, and scared all at the same time. I struggled to remember the instructions given to me just moments before by my offensive line coach. The quarterback barked out the signals, the ball was hiked, and I set up into my pass-protection stance the best I could. Before I had a chance to react, or even process what I was supposed to do next, I was on my back. Dave Pureifory had just crashed into me and knocked me off my feet, then smashed his helmet into my chest as he drove me to the turf. He had hold of my neck with one giant hand and the front of my jersey with the other. He hesitated a moment, allowing his own sweat to drip through his mask and onto my face, then picked me up off my back slightly before once again slamming me back down to the turf.
"Welcome to the NFL, rookie," he said disgustedly as he walked away. I heard the laughter of the other veterans as I picked myself up and made my way back to the huddle.
I awoke but kept my eyes shut. I knew it was morning and time to get up — I could hear one of the staff banging on doors on the floor below, waking up the masses for the coming day. I was on my side facing the wall on my tiny single cot. The damp bedsheet stuck to my back, the result of yet another night of record-breaking heat and humidity. The fan I had purchased at the local KMart the week before whirred on, blowing the hot, humid air around the room. It was sweltering even at this early hour and smelled of dirty laundry, flatulence, and horse liniment.
I rotated my right ankle, then stopped. Yes, it was still sprained, but only enough to impede my performance and make my life miserable. My neck, sore from countless collisions with one behemoth freak of nature after another, shouted out at me as I painfully rolled to my other side. Maybe if I kept my eyes closed I wouldn't have to get up, go eat breakfast, and pad up for the upcoming two-hour-plus morning practice, which would again be held in conditions akin to Hades in summer. I wondered if the weather in Michigan was always this unbearable in July or if possibly the summer of 1979 was setting new records for heat and humidity.
I finally opened my eyes. My roommate was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at me, his balls hanging out of his boxer shorts — not exactly the image you want to see first thing in the morning.
Welcome to Hill House, on the campus of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and my first professional football camp.
My roommate was a nice enough guy, hailing from the University of Louisville. That's pronounced Loo-a-vul, by the way. My northern tongue had trouble enunciating it correctly, but he made sure he drummed it into my head over and over again until I got it right.
"That's Looavul, Keith, not Loo-is-ville, you dumb-ass Yankee."
We already had been through a lot together. We had endured four weeks of "pre–summer camp," which was held prior to the one of which we were currently in the midst. Each of those days had consisted of merely a single three-hour practice session, without football pads, during which our offensive line coach, Fred Hoaglin, had tried in vain to prepare us for the time when the veteran players would show up and we'd start practicing in earnest. However, nothing could have prepared us — short of Navy Seal training — for what we had been through these last three weeks. I was amazed when I realized we had only been sharing this room for a couple of months. It seemed more like an eternity. And we weren't even halfway through yet.
Waking up every morning with him staring at me was starting to become a bit disconcerting. Needless to say, he was beginning to get on my nerves.
He was beat up worse than I was, and the mental stress of it all had him near his breaking point, his behavior getting more bizarre as camp wore on. I should have been more tolerant, more compassionate, but those were trying times. In addition, I had my own problems.
When we first arrived, I was the one that was delusional, not him, and for good reason. First thing, the coaching staff tested our speed, strength, and endurance. My roommate ran a 4.8-second 40-yard dash; I ran a 5.1. He bench-pressed 455 pounds; I benched 395 pounds. He did 15 pull-ups; I did 11. He beat me by 200 yards in the 12-minute endurance run.
The Detroit Lions, with their precious first-round pick and a desire to shore up their offensive line, had chosen me with the 10thpick over all the other offensive linemen available in the draft. That was quite a billing to live up to, and I was determined not to disappoint them. But here was this undrafted free agent offensive tackle, from the University of Looavul, doing everything better than me.
I had felt the coaches watching me, probably wondering what the hell they were thinking when they chose me. Were they already regretting their decision? At that point, I was having some serious doubts about my future as a professional football player.
Once we put the pads on, however, everything had fallen into place. I knew how to play the game much better than my roommate, although I knew I still had a long way to go.
"How long have you been staring at me?" I asked.
"I don't know. An hour or so. I've been sitting here trying to figure out what you're doing that's so different from what I'm doing. I've been watching you on the field, too. I'm desperate. They're going to cut my ass next week if I don't figure this thing out soon."
Although every football camp I ever attended was hard work, this one was ridiculously difficult — exacerbated by several factors. Being "number one" — that's what a lot of the veterans called me — made me the center of attention, which I hated. The media was all over me, which was bad enough, but I was also the main focus of the Detroit Lions' defensive unit, which was downright painful.
I did have grounds for comparison. The very first football camp I ever attended was quite memorable in its own right. I was 14 years old, and in the part of Pennsylvania where I grew up, the high school freshman players attended camp with the rest of the football team. So, along with having to compete against my fellow ninth-graders, I would on occasion be lining up against a 19-year-old man who needed a shave. My 6'1", 130-pound body, which was still in the initial stages of puberty, made quite a target.
I vividly remember sitting in the back of John Hartzell's 1967 Rambler, Paul McCartney's "We're So Sorry, Uncle Albert" blaring loudly through the speakers on our way to one of our two-a-day practices. My time spent in the backseat of that car and in the backseat of Scott Stahl's 1968 Mustang and Dennis Fritz's blue 1964 Plymouth Fury (the boys, all seniors, took turns driving us from our homes in Macungie to the high school in Emmaus) was very special. That's because, given my druthers, I would have stayed there, curled up in the fetal position, avoiding yet another session where I was used as fodder for the seniors.
Yes, the similarities were there. I had no idea what I was getting into, I was outmatched both physically and mentally, and I was getting the living shit kicked out of me on a regular basis. But there was one big difference.
On one occasion, during the midst of that first high school summer camp, I fell asleep on the couch between practices and missed my ride. Those guys I mentioned were gracious enough to shuttle me back and forth to practice but weren't about to come looking for me. If I wasn't out on the street ready to go, they were gone. I tried in vain to hitchhike the five miles into Emmaus, but to no avail. I went back to my house in tears, dreading the next practice and the dire consequences I would surely have to face. The next morning, much to my surprise, no one said a word. I was just another face in a sea of over 60 freshmen trying out for football, and the coaches hadn't even noticed my absence.
Unfortunately, now there was no backseat to curl up on, no couch to hide out on, no mom to bring me a delicious lunch and dote on me. And I had the feeling that my absence might be missed if I decided to stay in bed this morning.
I got up and limped down the hallway to relieve myself in the communal bathroom. Every joint in my 21-year-old body ached. I had never been this stiff and sore in all my life, and I wondered how the hell I was going to endure the upcoming day, much less the upcoming weeks. We still had a long, long way to go. Plus, I was a bit unsettled about my roommate's peculiar behavior and wondered if I'd be able to sleep that night, envisioning him staring at me again from his bed.
Camp was tough enough, but I could only imagine what it was like with the threat of unemployment hanging over your head, the situation my roommate and countless others in the building were facing. I should have had more sympathy for him, but I was looking forward to the day when my double room became a single.
I limped back down the hallway to my room and started to get dressed in my standard camp gear — shorts, tank top, and thongs.
"I didn't sleep very well again last night," my roommate said in his Southern drawl. He showed me his elbow, painfully swollen to twice its normal size and still smelling of the DMSO he had applied the night before.
DMSO is a horse liniment that is illegal, at least for use on humans, and was just part of a cache of illicit and disputably effective supplies he had brought with him to camp, which he kept locked up in a briefcase. I wanted to point out to him that the use of some of these "supplements" might be the reason he wasn't sleeping at night, but I thought it best just to keep my mouth shut.
"How in the hell am I supposed to block that Pureifory with my arm in this condition?" he moaned, demonstrating the range of motion of his right arm, which looked to be close to zero.
"You figure it out — let me know," I countered.
Dave Pureifory, also known as "Orwell," "Low Rider," or one of a host of other nicknames he had inspired over his eight-year professional career, was the starting left defensive end for the Lions and the bane of our rookie class. Hell, he was the bane of anyone who lined up across from him.
The nickname Orwell had come from a character portrayed in an old Richard Pryor stand-up routine, dubbed by our other starting defensive end, Al "Bubba" Baker, a badass in his own right. Orwell was described by Pryor as the craziest, meanest, and downright nastiest brother in the hood, and that certainly rang true with Pureifory. If a vote was taken by the team to name the one person on the squad you did not want to fuck with, Pureifory would have won easily.
But I liked the nickname Low Rider the best. It described him perfectly. He stood only a little over six feet — puny by NFL standards. What he lacked in size, he made up for in quickness, agility, toughness, and dogged determination. His compact frame was thick and heavily muscled.
And he was tough — incredibly tough. I'm talking run-full-speed-into-a-brick-wall tough. The man started most days during the season by soaking his entire body in a tub of ice for a half hour at 7:00 in the morning. Tough. The year before, I was told, the Minnesota Vikings decided to run a quarterback option on Pureifory, with their quarterback Fran Tarkenton pitching the ball out to their running back at the last minute. Now, you have to wonder what the Vikings were thinking running the option with an 18-year veteran quarterback, but that's another story. Anyway, Pureifory smacked Tarkenton in the mouth so hard that he knocked out a good many of Fran's front teeth. The legend goes that Pureifory stood there laughing, right in Tarkenton's face, as the quarterback cussed him out, all the while spitting his broken teeth out onto the field. Really tough. It was rumored that a few years earlier, stricken with painful hemorrhoids but too embarrassed to approach the medical staff about them, he went ahead and removed them himself. Forget about the fact that the wound got infected and he had to be rushed to the hospital. Really, really tough.
And there were those eyes. He would look up at you from his stance with those big, wild, and crazy eyes, the whites of them always slightly bloodshot, accentuated by his dark, ebony skin. At the snap of the ball, he exploded off the line, a whirling, compact package of destruction.
Another rumor circulating around camp was that the year before he had stuffed a fellow 6'7", 270-pound defensive end into his locker, supposedly because he had asked to use Pureifory's comb. No one on the team messed with Pureifory, and that went double for rookies, whom he seemingly hated with all his soul.
The first two times I lined up against him during "individual pass rush" — a sadistic no-holds-barred drill that pitted an offensive and defensive lineman one-on-one against each other — I never even touched him. The ball was hiked, and before I got out of my stance, he was in the backfield annihilating the "quarterback" — a tackling dummy for the sake of the drill. The next time, I anticipated his quick upfield rush, set too far outside, and he again reached the tackling dummy untouched, this time to the inside. The third time I was so confused I didn't know what to do, so he flat ran me over, despite the fact that I outweighed him by 30 pounds. Later that day, he purposefully picked a fight with me during a scrimmage. I assumed that, for whatever reason, he hated me with a burning red-hot passion. I tried to act tough and unafraid, but deep down I was fearful he might kill me.
As my roommate and I walked across the campus to the cafeteria, the sky started to darken, taking on a slightly greenish hue, and the already impossibly thick humidity seemed to get worse.
"That looks like a tornado cloud," my roommate remarked, pointing at a particularly nasty-looking cloud formation.
"If only we could be so lucky," I said.
Certainly we wouldn't practice during a tornado, would we? A tornado didn't postpone practice that day, but a few days earlier, we had been awakened in the middle of the night by Tim Rooney, our director of player personnel. He was going from room to room, getting everyone out of bed and to the basement for cover. Apparently, the next town over had just been hit by one.
I had listened to the blaring siren outside my window and the frantic warnings, then rolled over and went back to sleep. It would take a lot more than a tornado warning to get my pitiful butt out of the rack. Besides, I figured my chances of being killed were much greater out on the football field; the Detroit Lions' defensive line loomed much more dangerous than a mere act of God. And if a tornado did hit the building? I imagined myself being pulled out of the rubble, taken to a nice, clean hospital with pretty nurses, fresh sheets, and lots of bed rest, while my teammates practiced on in the relentless heat and humidity.
I huddled with a group of my fellow rookie offensive linemen during breakfast — we stuck together like wood rats for protection — and mulled over the day's schedule. Meetings, a two-hourplus practice, conditioning, lunch, more meetings, another grueling practice, dinner, then three more hours of meetings. That took us up to 10:00 at night, giving us a whole hour off before 11:00 bed check. Then we got to do it all over again. Day after day, for four more weeks.
"Are we going out for beer today?" inquired a free agent center from the University of Oklahoma.
"Damn right!" I replied enthusiastically.
A bunch of us had figured out the previous week that if we rushed off the field after the second practice, frantically ripped off our pads, tape, and equipment, and then took a cursory shower, we actually had time — a whole half hour, in fact — to go into town and grab a beer. But what a half hour it was! That first beer never tasted so good. The second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth weren't bad either.
"I vote for the Oceania," bellowed another rookie, this one a guard from West Virginia.
Ah, yes, the Oceania. Heaven could be such a place. The Japanese restaurant was close to camp, was dimly lit, and had the coldest beer in town. The owner had taken a liking to us and would actually put a case of beer in the freezer for us, anticipating our arrival at precisely the same time every day, like clockwork.
If we missed a day because of a change in venue — the local 7Eleven for a cold quart — or a late practice, the owner would act offended, forsaken even, like a shunned lover. "You not come visit me yesterday. You come every day and then you not come. We miss you. Don't not come again!" he would chide us in broken English. As we weren't getting much appreciation anywhere else, we took it anywhere we could get it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black and Honolulu Blue by Keith Dorney. Copyright © 2003 Keith Dorney. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Joe Montana,Acknowledgements,
1. Welcome to the NFL, Rookie,
2. Broken Bones!,
3. The Morning After,
4. Women of the Game,
5. JoePa,
6. Three Bowls in Three Weeks,
7. Hey, Big Guy!,
8. Bark like a Dog,
9. Greatest Hits,
10. *%@$# Kickers!,
11. Built Ford Tough,
Epilogue,
Photo Gallery,