the whistle between his teeth and he was striding up and down the rows in which the team was arrayed and running in place, his great thigh muscles rippling and relaxing with each step. When Johnson blew the whistle, we stopped our running, kicked our legs out behind us, and threw ourselves at the ground as though we were going to hit luscious feather beds. It was, he proclaimed, only the beginning of the second quarter—we’d just begun the drill—and we would have to push much harder if we expected ever to win a football game, if we ever expected to survive a football game alive and standing.
Someone passing by would have seen the arresting sight of sixty bodies, dressed a little like astronauts, a little like gladiators, heads and shoulders expanded, waists waspish, tightly feminine, all of us suspended for a moment in the air, as though by magic, on invisible carpets. Then down to the ground we went, onto the dusty near-concrete surface. There was the thud and the bounce, then up again onto our feet, and running, running in place, as Mace Johnson orated. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun roared in the sky. We sweated and strained and watched Johnson, and hated him and adored him with about equal verve.
Doing grass drills at the end of what has already been a vicious practice, pushing toward what you know will be your far edge, you enter a hallucinatory state; you see the world as a gross illusion, the way grinning, half-mad convicts are supposed to. Nothing out there—not the chanting players pounding on their thigh pads or the bawling coaches or the stands that line one side of the practice field—is entirely real, and so your pain is part illusion too. But it’s got to be dealt with, so you drop down inside yourself, stumbling and uncertain, and what you come upon is pooled rage, good octane, high-combustion stuff. I didn’t have great physical skill or remarkable strength, but I had enough hot rancor to push myself through this drill and plenty more like it.
As we sweat, Mace Johnson’s rhetoric is climbing higher, into the provinces of Christopher Marlowe and Herman Melville, masters of swelling poetic style. Johnson is launched. Up and down in front of our military rows he strides, hollering out to us that it’s getting later in the game and that the team that guts it out is the one that will win; he tells us that we’ve been pussyfooting all day, we’ve been pussyfooting through our hit-and-shed drills, dogging it during wind sprints; that we’ve lived our lives in obscene luxury and that now it’s time to wake up and become men. He tells us that in not too much time, many of us will be soldiers; some—the best of us—may be marines. He never mentions the Viet Cong by name, but it is after all 1969 and somewhere on the far side of the Hormel Stadium practice field, the Cong and the NVA are waiting, and they are doing something more drastically preparative than grass drills.
He bellows out one of his favorite injunctions: “You’re gonna be lean, mean, agile, mobile, and hostile.” Then a scream: “I mean hostile!”
Running in place next to me, wearing his helmet with the signature white-plastic face mask, Rick Cirone, my fellow philosophy student, rounds off Johnson’s litany: “How ’bout infantile?” Rick can clown well enough, but he can also play. Neither of these things can be said with confidence of me.
Up-downs are like a collective madness; you get high, the whole group does, and you hear yourself say things, hear yourself call out injunctions to yourself and the other players, scream the baseline phrase “Get ’em up!” and bellow the line that will be with us for the first month of the season: “Beat Somerville!” “Beat Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” Somerville is our local rival, the team that broke the Medford Mustangs’ winning streak last season in a game where player after Medford player was carried off the field,
Someone passing by would have seen the arresting sight of sixty bodies, dressed a little like astronauts, a little like gladiators, heads and shoulders expanded, waists waspish, tightly feminine, all of us suspended for a moment in the air, as though by magic, on invisible carpets. Then down to the ground we went, onto the dusty near-concrete surface. There was the thud and the bounce, then up again onto our feet, and running, running in place, as Mace Johnson orated. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun roared in the sky. We sweated and strained and watched Johnson, and hated him and adored him with about equal verve.
Doing grass drills at the end of what has already been a vicious practice, pushing toward what you know will be your far edge, you enter a hallucinatory state; you see the world as a gross illusion, the way grinning, half-mad convicts are supposed to. Nothing out there—not the chanting players pounding on their thigh pads or the bawling coaches or the stands that line one side of the practice field—is entirely real, and so your pain is part illusion too. But it’s got to be dealt with, so you drop down inside yourself, stumbling and uncertain, and what you come upon is pooled rage, good octane, high-combustion stuff. I didn’t have great physical skill or remarkable strength, but I had enough hot rancor to push myself through this drill and plenty more like it.
As we sweat, Mace Johnson’s rhetoric is climbing higher, into the provinces of Christopher Marlowe and Herman Melville, masters of swelling poetic style. Johnson is launched. Up and down in front of our military rows he strides, hollering out to us that it’s getting later in the game and that the team that guts it out is the one that will win; he tells us that we’ve been pussyfooting all day, we’ve been pussyfooting through our hit-and-shed drills, dogging it during wind sprints; that we’ve lived our lives in obscene luxury and that now it’s time to wake up and become men. He tells us that in not too much time, many of us will be soldiers; some—the best of us—may be marines. He never mentions the Viet Cong by name, but it is after all 1969 and somewhere on the far side of the Hormel Stadium practice field, the Cong and the NVA are waiting, and they are doing something more drastically preparative than grass drills.
He bellows out one of his favorite injunctions: “You’re gonna be lean, mean, agile, mobile, and hostile.” Then a scream: “I mean hostile!”
Running in place next to me, wearing his helmet with the signature white-plastic face mask, Rick Cirone, my fellow philosophy student, rounds off Johnson’s litany: “How ’bout infantile?” Rick can clown well enough, but he can also play. Neither of these things can be said with confidence of me.
Up-downs are like a collective madness; you get high, the whole group does, and you hear yourself say things, hear yourself call out injunctions to yourself and the other players, scream the baseline phrase “Get ’em up!” and bellow the line that will be with us for the first month of the season: “Beat Somerville!” “Beat Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” Somerville is our local rival, the team that broke the Medford Mustangs’ winning streak last season in a game where player after Medford player was carried off the field,
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