In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis (right) recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 5 of 10 installments (read Part 4 here) that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.The next day's workout begins quietly, Big Mike's absence has left a giant void, literally and figuratively. Kurt Hester senses the change in atmosphere brought on by Michael Oher's departure, and steps up his chatter accordingly. As we're running forty's, Hester encourages us. "This training is all about gaining an inch," he says, "I wish I could gain an inch. It would help my porn career." Greeted with laughter in between sets, Hester continues, "If I could keep gaining inches like you guys are gaining inches, I'd roll out to the bar in athletic shorts, hike my leg up, and say, 'What's up ladies?' "
As Big Michael Oher returns to college and J. Leman heads back to Illinois to rehab his ankle, two new players arrive to train at D1 -- Chris Brown, a 6'3", 250 pound tight end from the University of Tennessee, and Weston Dacus, a 6'1", 232 pound linebacker from Arkansas. Both men arrive at the first moment of real controversy for combine training: our yoga instructor, Paige, a forty-year old brunette who weighs 100 pounds with eight yoga mats strapped to her back, is too tough for the guys.
Player after player approaches Kurt Hester and complains about how strenuous the yoga workouts are. Hester pulls me aside during our afternoon lifting session, "I've got to have a talk with Paige," Hester days, "she's killing these guys. Is she that tough?"
"No," I say, pretending to be tougher than I am.
"P*****s," says Hester, shaking his head.
Nevertheless, Hester has a discussion with Paige during which he emphasizes that he needs her to work on our flexibility and not our strength. As such, there should be less holding of the plank position, no push-up related moves, one arm balancing, and one-leg twists. Less pain, at least in theory. He returns to me and says, "That should take care of it." Then he walks into the locker room and announces to us, "Y'all p*****s should make it through yoga now, I got her to ease up on you."
That afternoon, as we kill time between lifting and yoga watching Maury Povich's Who's Your Daddy episodes, Marcus Monk regales the group with stories of the renegade beaver on Coach Houston Nutt's Arkansas property: "Coach Nutt had this big pond on his place, but they had this old beaver, see, and they couldn't get rid of him. One day we were out there fishing and his wife and he were paddling around in a canoe trying to shoot the beaver, but they couldn't hit it. Because if they got close he'd just go underwater. I told Coach Nutt I could hit him, and he gave me the gun. All them other dudes (players) been shooting at the beaver, and they couldn't hit him. But they was gangsta shooting, sideways with the gun, nowhere near the old beaver. Beaver just stood there on the log looking back at them while the water was popping around him. Took me three shots. Third one, bang, that mug fell straight off into the water and started flapping around. A week later it came back up to the surface and Coach Nutt said it was huge."
From beaver stories, it's on to modified yoga. Weston Dacus, newly arrived linebacker from Arkansas, with a shaved head and a neck as thick as the average man's thigh, meets Paige for the first time. "Weston," she says, "That's like the opposite of Easton." Dacus is silent for a long time after the comment. "Yeah," he finally drawls.
Despite his recent arrival for training, Weston Dacus' laconic southern drawl has already drawn the attention of Bowling Green center Kory Lichtensteiger and Wake Forest center Steve Justice. In particular Lichtensteiger has decided that Weston sounds just like Mathew McConaughey. And once it's pointed out, it's impossible not to recognize how true it is. Dacus doesn't appreciate the comparison. "Y'all are crazy," he says. "Is that line from Failure to Launch?" asks Lichtensteiger.
Thanks to my limited amount of muscle, I'm more flexible than most of the guys. This makes me a yoga all-star. As part of the new, more lenient yoga class, while sitting down we're supposed to put our right arm over our right shoulder, fingers facing down, and place our left arm behind our back, fingers facing upwards. The goal is to have your fingers touch midway into your back. Paige asks if anyone can touch. No one answers. Monk speaks up on my behalf, "Bookman can. Go on Bookman, let Paige know what you can do."
I receive much commendation.
And derision.
On this day I have my first revelation during yoga training: There are an awful lot of really athletic guys who can't sit Indian style. Seriously, can't do it at all. Plus, they get really frustrated at the ease that other, less-athletic people, manage to sit Indian style. These guys can bench press 350 pounds without breaking a sweat, sprint faster than anyone else near their size, but ask some of them to sit Indian style and they look at you like you've just asked them to translate Osama Bin Laden's most recent terrorist tape. I'm sure there's a physical reason for this, but watching maulers on the football field struggle to bend their recalcitrant knees is pretty entertaining. It's probably not just football players, either. The best man at my wedding, Ian Scott, played three sports in college: track, basketball, and soccer. He could dunk in 8th grade. He regularly destroyed us in every sport we ever played. But he couldn't sit Indian style. It drove him crazy. We'd sit down on a couch to eat lunch, and I'd pull the table all the way up to the couch to rest our sandwiches on while we ate. Then I'd watch him struggle to sit. Usually he ended up sitting on the ground with his legs stretched out in front of him while he complained about people who could cross their legs and sit down. It's the same now with the football players. Particularly woeful in sitting Indian style is Wake Forest center Steve Justice. Everyone in the room makes fun of his futile attempts to bend his legs. "When we leave here Bookman," he says calmly, "I'm going to kill you."
Aside from Justice's death threat, yoga is much more relaxing today. We end with a very easy maneuver executed to Enya, putting our feet high on the wall above our heads while lying on our backs to allow the lactic acid to sink down our legs. We're to hold this position while trying to think of nothing at all. It's eerily quiet in the room, so quiet that I almost fall asleep. Kurt Hester's talk with Paige has worked wonders.
******
As the third week of combine training dawns, several of the guys return from the East/West game and a large contingent of players depart for the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama. The Senior Bowl is the premier post-collegiate game on the draft slate and typically features the highest projected senior draft picks. Underclassmen are not eligible to participate. The truly top seniors, the Matt Ryan's and Glenn Dorsey's of the 2008 draft class, those that are projected to be among the top 10 picks, won't participate. For just about everyone else, this week can have a huge impact on their draft standing.
From our group Peyton Hillis, Dorien Bryant, Jason Jones, Brad Cottam, and Steve Justice will be playing in the game. Hillis expressed initial surprise that the other guys were also invited, "Wait, y'all are going too?" So for the past week guys have been calling the Senior Bowl, the Peyton Bowl. Hillis, not surprisingly, takes the self-aggrandizing ribbing in stride. "Hey Bookman," he says, "you're still going with Peyton's Place as the title of the book, right?"Hillis's surprise over their invite notwithstanding, Lichtensteiger and Justice are the top two centers on Mel Kiper's board. Frequently, while we're eating lunch together, Kiper's NFL draft ratings will scroll across the ESPN screen and both men's names will glide past on the television, one name immediately after the other. When I mention this to them during a workout, both men claim not to know this fact, "Who's ranked higher?" asks Justice.
"You're one, Kory is two," I say.
Lichtensteiger smacks his hands together. "I hate Mel Kiper," he says.
Prior to their arrival for training neither guy knew the other. Already, they've become inseparable friends, Lichtensteiger's going to stand in Justice's wedding next summer. Justice baby sits for Aiden, the Lichtensteiger's son, and the Lichtensteiger's help take care of Dallas, Justice's dog. Although this has not been without some measure of controversy.
"Last weekend," says Kory, "Dallas popped Aiden's inflatable Spider Man toy and ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwich." Justice looks pained. "He didn't mean to do it," he says. "He was trying to play."
Steve Justice, All-American center from Wake Forest, is from Port Orange, Florida, the third, and youngest, son of two teachers. He's dark-haired, barrel-chested, and has a serious girlfriend in grad school at the University of North Carolina, Lindsey Jaco, a former soccer player at Wake, who he's planning to propose to during combine training.
The two first met in class. "She didn't really know me, but we had this class, where you were supposed to sit where your nametag was. Every day the teacher would move the nametags around. I started going to class ten minutes early, before anyone else was there, and switching the nametags so Lindsey and I would sit near each other ... At first she wasn't that interested in me because I'm a big, fat lineman, so I had to win her over with my personality."
Recently, Justice bought an engagement ring, but he's sworn me to secrecy. He plans to propose to her in a few weeks. Recruited as a tackle to Wake Forest, Justice had never played center in his life. "They needed a scout team center, and they threw me in there. I'd never done it before, but I've been there ever since." Justice has been projected anywhere from the end of the first round to the late rounds of the draft. He says he has no idea what to expect. "It could be anywhere," he says.
No matter where he's drafted, Justice's ascension to the NFL is a miracle of sorts. An older brother, Danny, born with half-a-heart, and an older sister, Rosemary, born extremely premature died within a two-year period several years before Steve was born. During this time the family lived in the Ronald McDonald house and struggled to stay afloat. "My dad had a motorcycle, and if he drove the motorcycle to work instead of the car, they'd have enough money to eat dinner. Otherwise, the car used too much gas." As if the financial stresses weren't enough, there was no operation that could cure Danny's heart. "The doctors told my parents when Danny was several months old that they'd just have to wait for him to die. He only lived for nine months."
Both children are buried in Pennsylvania under the same gravestone. "For a year my mom said my dad wouldn't talk hardly at all. He just stayed in the basement doing woodwork," says Justice.
Despite the loss of two infants, Steve's parents had a healthy child, Doug, and after that Steve was born two years later, in May of 1984. Both babies checked out okay after inspection by the doctors, but when Steve was a couple of days old his mom noticed that his breathing was strained, similar to Danny, the brother born with a half-a-heart. She rushed Steve to the hospital and insisted that the doctors run a full battery of tests. After testing, doctors discovered that Justice had a pinched aorta. "Doctors said if she's brought me in days or hours later, I would have died. The amazing thing is that they had a doctor at Hershey hospital who'd developed a new technique to fix this. It used to be that after the surgery all the kids were weak and could never play any contact sports. He replaced the heart vein with a vein in my left arm. I can't get a pulse reading in my left arm now, but I can play sports."
Twenty-three years later, Kory Lichtensteiger and Steve Justice are competing to be the first center taken in the 2008 draft. In theory each man should be loathe to help the other. Yet, I've already noticed that even players of the same position offer constructive feedback and criticism to one another during drills. "You can't get caught up in individual competition, you can only control yourself," says Justice. Lichtensteiger agrees, "We aren't competing against each other, we're competing against ourselves." Kurt Hester has a role in encouraging this dynamic. One of his constant refrains is, "Y'all don't need to worry what anyone else is saying or doing. All you can control is your own effort and your own getting better. Nothing else matters. Nothing else."
Instead of fomenting internal competition between players of the same position, Hester has managed to fashion the NFL teams and their scouts as the enemy. To whit Hester gives this advice to the guys on the eve of their departure for the Senior Bowl: "Look them (the scouts and coaches) straight in the eyes, shake their hands, smile, give them a good greeting, but in your mind be thinking, 'F**k You, and F**k You, and F**k You,' while you shake their hands. Because they don't care about any of you at all. You're pieces of meat to them, and all week long all they're going to be looking for is reasons not to draft you. Walking around with a clipboard and marking down all the little things they don't like about you." He pauses for a moment, "Don't really say, 'F**k You,' though to the guys, just think it."
Justice and Lichtensteiger, two of just four centers on the Senior Bowl roster, will be rooming together at the Senior Bowl, a fact that is not lost on Eastern Michigan defensive end Jason Jones. Typical of the conversations that ensue during lifting workouts is this one, about room assignments at the Senior Bowl. Kory: "We asked J. Jones if he wanted to room with us too."
J. Jones: "I'm not down with that stuff. Three dudes is too many people in one room. Especially if one of them is Justice."
Justice: "Really? I told them we could share a queen."
Later when Justice does 21 bench press reps on 235 pounds, I walk over to J. Jones as he prepares to do his own set: "Right before he started I whispered to Justice that y'all could share a bed if he got over 20 reps."
J. Jones shakes his head. "Justice is one sick dude," he says.
Justice can also be merciless with his humor, particularly when he has Kory as a running mate. Of late the top two centers on Mel Kiper's board have focused their attention on Arkansas linebacker Weston Dacus. First, they pointed out how much he sounded like Matthew McConaughey and led a roundtable discussion about which of McConaughey's acting roles was most impressive (A Time To Kill narrowly beat out The Wedding Planner in our rankings). When the McConaughey humor dried up, Lichtensteiger and Justice discovered that Dacus drove a brand new black Cadillac Escalade. Bang, new material. No matter what Dacus was doing, he was en route to the Escalade. Dacus taking a shower after a workout? In the mind of the comedic duo of Lichtensteiger and Justice, "Dacus is showering so he can go to the Escalade." Going to lunch? "Dacus is going to lunch so he can go to the Escalade."
******
Today is 235 pound maximum rep day on the bench press. We've worked our way up from maximum repetitions of 225 last week. Before we max rep we do bench presses with red stretch bands tied to the bar and the supporting bench. These stretching bands, working against the repetition, make bench presses much tougher than they normally would be. You not only have to push up the weight, you have to fight against the bands seeking to push the weight back down into your chest.
"The goal is to control the weight. Own it," says Hester.
We do eight sets of three repetitions, and commence the sets at 45% of our bench press maxes. Right now my bench press max is 225. So I put a 25 pound weight on each side of the bar and do my 8 sets. At 95 pounds, this is a little less than 45% of my bench press maximum (102), but I'm nervous about the bands and the added difficulty they bring to bear.
On my first set the strength of the bands almost pins the bar onto my chest. For a moment I think I'm going to have to call out for help. With 95 pounds on the bench. I'm sure there are more embarrassing things that one could do while training with future NFL players, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Mercifully my body adjusts and I push the weight up three times in rapid succession. Racking the weight, I sit up and scan down the weight room to see if anyone noticed my near disaster. No eye contact. I breathe easier.
My next seven sets go much easier. I begin to feel stronger as I learn how to control the bench press even with the resistance provided by the bands. I'm springing more off my chest, exploding on the bench press in a way I have never done before. Suddenly, I have confidence. For the first time in my life I start to think that I might actually be strong.
As the guys crank out their maximum reps on 235, Kurt Hester stands behind the bench, their own personal spotter, a drill sergeant of bench press mechanics. "Come on, push, push," he screeches, "don't bring the weight down that far. Even it up. Lock it out, you got another one. Yeah!" The muscles in Hester's biceps, uncovered thanks to the sleeveless shirt, ripple with intensity. I'm charged with keeping the tally. Brad Cottam, Tennessee tight end, does 20 reps on 235, and Marcus Monk, wide receiver from Arkansas, does 7. Both men are pleased with their numbers, they've done the same amount of repetitions that they did last week only with ten more pounds of weight. Their strength is improving.
Not to be outdone, I step up to the challenge.
I line up on the bench beneath 235 pounds. All the players gather around to watch. "Let's go Bookman," says Marcus Monk, clapping his hands. Other sundry cheering ensues. Before I can get going Mark Sutton and Kurt Hester want to bet with me on my reps. Hester eventually says, "Okay if you get this then I want a free night at the strip club. That will only cost you $800."
I lie down and take several deep breaths. Kurt Hester clambers behind the bench press to spot me. I've never attempted to bench more than 225 pounds before. I nod and pull the weight off the bar. It's overwhelming for an instant, but then absent the resistance provided by the bands, the weight feels alarmingly light, almost as if it's not that much weight at all. My chest constricts and I bring it down with confidence and bang it off my chest ... I get up one rep on 235.
Everyone cheers. When I come up the first thing I say is: "Strip club lap dances aren't nude in Nashville." Hester is apoplectic: "Not nude? What's the point? What do I get out of this thing?"
I'm drained but we're not even close to finished. After the maximum bench we go to pull-ups. We're to do four sets to exhaustion, as many reps as you can manage while hanging down from the pull-up bar. Immediately after a max repetition day on the bench, we've got four sets? Unless you've actually done this before you have no idea what it does to your body.
My arms are shaking after the second set. I do 7, then 6, then 6 and finally finish with 5 pull-ups. The guys are swearing around me, sweat dripping off their faces and slamming into the weight room floor. Next come 21s, so called because that's three sets of 7 reps each with dumbbells. You lift 7 from your waist to your shoulders, 7 straight ahead from your waist to your chin with the dumbbells out in front of you, and then lean over with your chest splayed out and knock out a set of flies (bringing the barbells to the center of your chest and then spreading them out) with a final set of 7's.)
We're miserable by this point, cursing and gasping for air. I take a break because my arms are cramping and walk across the field for water. My head is pounding and my skin is clammy. My mouth tastes like salt. After the three sets of 21s we're back to the bench to do close-grip bench press at lower weights. (The same as regular bench presses only your hands are much closer together on the bar). Every single player's chest is shaking as they finish these sets. After one set I fight back the urge to retch.
When we finally complete the close-grip benchpresses we collapse on the field as a group to stretch. Hester struts above us, a peacock in UnderArmour. I feel like I'm going to throw up or pass out, I'm so drained I almost feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience, watching myself splayed out on the indoor field from far above the ceiling. I have never, in my entire life, ever felt like this after a workout.
"Y'all need to quit being p*****s," says Hester as he surveys us splayed out on the field, "I went easy on you today."
******
The only real asset I bring to the NFL Combine training is my knowledge of Nashville bars. Some would say that wasn't a very valuable asset at all. Others would call me a hero. By the first Friday, some of the guys are looking for an escape from the stress of training for the draft. We go out as a group. Soon, my bar knowledge is treated as infallible. Tennessee tight end Chris Brown has a couple of friends visit town and they make a suggestion for a downtown bar I've not frequented. "If Bookman, don't know it, we're not going there," says Chris Brown.
My wife is very proud of me for taking guys out to drink who are in the process of training for the most important athletic event of their lives. Before I head out that first night my wife, Lara, says, "Clay, you're going out with guys that are younger than you are. They can probably drink more than you can now because they're in college. You need to stay out of trouble." At the end of the Friday on third week of training, I'm out on Nashville's Demonbreun Street intending to meet up with Tennessee tight end Chris Brown and Purdue wide receiver Dorien Bryant. Brown, with dark skin, bright eyes, thick legs, and teeth so bright you could see him in a room without lights if he smiled, came to Tennessee after growing up in Louisiana and served as a team captain in the 2007 season. Recently Brown has been giving me grief about the photo of Florida football players ending up at the top cover of Dixieland Delight.
"Bookman, you let the Gators get at the top of your book, I can't believe you did that."
I tell him the reason Florida got such prominent placement was because UT had managed to squander a 17-7 second half lead against the Gators. "If you guys hold on to that game," I'd said, "Florida doesn't even win the SEC East much less the national title that year. What happened?"
We're jogging around the track side-by-side and Brown shakes his head. "Don't ask me about that game, Bookman," he said. "I still can't talk about that without getting upset."
Brown "wasn't a top recruit, I was a two-star guy," who committed to Tennessee and then had second thoughts about whether or not to stay there after visiting Auburn. "Coach Fulmer called and talked to me about how important keeping my commitment was, and I agreed with him. So I went to Tennessee."
As a freshman Brown was arrested for shop-lifting clothes at a local mall and suspended by Coach Fulmer. "I was just young and dumb. Coach Fulmer gave me another chance." As a senior, Brown was a team captain who finished the 2007 season with 41 catches and 6 touchdowns. Not highly ranked on most draft boards because he lacks top-end speed and height, Brown needs to improve his forty time to get a shot somewhere.
Around 11:30 I receive a text message from him asking me where I am. I text him the name of a bar, and tell him to meet us there. A few minutes later this text from Chris Brown arrives, "Alright, well they wouldn't let me in OTR because they said my clothes were too baggy."
I read the text, scrunch up my face, and move on to drinking a few beers. I text Chris to let him know that we'll meet him at the Tin Roof, a bar just down the street. I'm with two other white guys, and when we emerge from the bar we stand outside in the cool night air. I check out the doorman. He's a white guy with a goatee. There is a sign outside the bar that says, "No baggy clothes or baseball caps." The baseball caps rule is easy to enforce, but the baggy clothes description is entirely at the discretion of the doorman.
When we get to Tin Roof I immediately see each guy, sitting at a front table, drinking from their own individual pitcher of beer. After greetings, Chris Brown stands up and says, "Bookman, look at my clothes do they look too baggy to you?" Brown is wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt. His jeans are no baggier than mine and the sweatshirt is not form-fitting, but Brown weighs over 250 pounds. The sweatshirt is larger than necessary, but not baggy. "They told me my clothes were too baggy and they wouldn't let me in the bar," he says with a discomfiting grin, a false grin to help mask his hurt.
I follow his cue, attempting to make light of the situation. "Sometimes bars in Nashville won't let me in when I wear my flip-flops or shorts," I say. But the comparison falls flat, as I knew it would. Dorien Bryant steps into the conversation then, "They didn't mean too baggy. What they really meant was too black." Dorien's racial background is unique. His father is Portuguese and his mom is black. He's light-skinned but he says some of his siblings are lighter than he is and some are darker. "When we go out I'll see us get treated completely differently," he says, "and we're in the same family."
Now, Bryant is upset. "When they told us the clothes were too baggy I couldn't believe it. I'm from New Jersey so I'll make a scene about shit like that but I was just too stunned." We order some shots and sit down to drink, cycle off the baggy clothes discussion for a few minutes so my forty time can be made fun of. Dorien has yet to hear exactly what my time is and Chris Brown is about to end that, "Bookman, tell Dorien what you ran the 40 in." I tell Dorien, "6.16," I say. Hilarity ensues. And by hilarity I mean they both laugh. Heavily. At me. But only for a minute or so. Then we return to the baggy clothes.
Chris Brown stands again, "I mean, tell me Bookman, is this really baggy?" I tell him again that it isn't. Dorien speaks again, "I called my mom and told her what happened and she said not to make a scene and not to fight ignorance with ignorance. She also said, remember where you are. I think I like Nashville and then some stuff like this happens."
As a New Jersey native who hasn't spent much time in the South, Dorien has previously spoken to me about his reticence about the South. "Back home when I tell people I'm in Nashville, they just roll their eyes." I've spent lots of time telling him that Nashville isn't a racist city, and now I'm confronted with a situation that seems entirely based on race. It's uncomfortable and disappointing for me as a white man. For Dorien and Chris, it's chilling their night.
Thirty minutes later, Dorien approaches me again about being refused entry at the bar. He's wearing black sunglasses in a dark bar, already preparing for the life of a professional athlete. "Bookman, I wanted to tell them that in four months, I'll buy their damn bar. I wanted to so bad. But I just kept my mouth shut. I listened to my mom, didn't want to make a scene." He takes a long swig from his beer bottle. "Fuck them," he says.
At times like these it's hard not to like Dorien. He's smart and combative and arrogant and brusque but he's also disarmingly honest. He's not worried about whether or not you like him or whether or not what he says makes you angry. As we stand there I can't help but think about these two guys, on the precipice of potentially being drafted by the NFL, yet still so young that when confronted by racist bouncers they call their mothers and ask for counsel. It's a jarring feeling, knowing how much different their own lives are than my own, but also realizing how thin the line is between youth and adulthood.
We stop talking about the baggy clothes and head to the back of the bar where we drink more and listen to the music. But the subtext of the night remains the same. As we carry on with our drinking, Chris Brown continues to come up to me and says, large brown eyes open wide, at least four or five more times, "Bookman, they're really not that baggy are they?" Each time I tell him his clothes aren't and each time Chris Brown nods and we knock our beer bottles together. Eventually I tell him, "I guarantee you they would have let you in if you'd come in with the three of us." He nods. "I know that Bookman," he says quietly.
The band is playing Tennessee's unofficial fight song, Rocky Top, and all around us people raise their bottles and sing along. Brown's mood brightens, "Hey Bookman, now this is a song I got used to hearing. Can't go wrong with Rocky Top." He puts his arm around my shoulder and we sing along, voices rising loud enough with the crowd that eventually it's impossible to distinguish either of us from the sound of the cascading music.
When morning dawns, it's one month until the NFL Combine.
One of FanHouse's newest additions, Clay Travis is the author of Dixieland Delight and the forthcoming On Rocky Top: A Front-Row Seat to the End of an Era. For several years he wrote the ClayNation column for CBS Sportsline, worked as an editor for Deadspin.com, and practiced law, where his love for the billable hour rivaled only his love for the WNBA. He's convinced that his 40 time is much better than yours.
