if I kept a schedule like these kids do, I'd probably consider popping a lot of greenies. I don't know what they do over there across campus, in a gleaming behemoth of a new training facility, bankrolled by the booster club that's now developing a series of strip malls and condos and drinkeries for alumni on the once-artsy industrial flatlands outside the football stadium. ("Collegetown," they're calling it.) Whatever our players do takes up so much physical and psychic energy that it's amazing they don't ever kill anyone, much less that they make it to class. But most of them are fine. There are dozens of successful, placid ones on the roster every year.
One of Derek's better-adjusted athletes said it wasn't the practices or the physical abuse that bothered him, but how the coaches force-fed him and his teammates. "They watch me clean the plate," the player told Derek. "'You let that settle and then go lift.'" That's in addition to the supervised supplement-swallowing, the pills and powders of who the hell knows what. "He looks down at me, this monster man, this beast, and now he's got kid eyes," Derek tells me, "and he says to me: 'Mister Derek, sometimes I'm not hungry anymore.'"
That wounded Seminole is now a successful NFL player.
We don't know what our role is in these players' lives. Do they even need our classes? Do they need to be cultural critics, or cogent writers? "You're gonna get 3,600 calories shoveled in you and then you're going to lift and run and hit each other. And then I'm gonna ask you to write an eight-page paper on Q-Tip ads?" Derek marvels. "That's a lot that they're leaving up to an underpaid staff to get these kids to do."
