My cell phone sat atop a dresser in a cramped dorm room at Lehigh University, where I was covering Eagles training camp one July day in 2008. I was getting ready to go to dinner with Les Bowen, then of the Philadelphia Daily News, when it rang.
What followed was the rough equivalent of a call dozens of players receive every summer, at every training camp throughout the NFL: Coach wants to see you … and bring your playbook.
After 28 years of sportwriterin’ and five years at the outlet for which I was then working, I was being laid off – a sad reality in a business that was then cratering and has since gone positively subterranean.
So don’t ever tell me that lives aren’t altered in NFL training camps. While certain logistical matters have changed – the Eagles, like most other teams, now hold camp at their training facility, as opposed to a remote site – that part never will. Guys are always scrambling, always looking to grab a roster spot or solidify one. It’s a fascinating process, and it plays out over several sweaty days and weeks, the desperation almost palpable.
And as much as fans and journalists play the numbers game, figuring out which guys make the 53-man roster and which guys don’t, the players do it more.
“Everybody does,” a cornerback named Joselio Hanson told me one day in 2006, as we stood alongside Lehigh’s practice fields.
Hanson had been out of the league the previous year, after spending his rookie season with the 49ers. But he managed to stick with the Eagles in ‘06, and in all played six years in Philadelphia, and another in Oakland. Seldom started, but seldom missed a game, either, while being deployed as an extra DB or a special teamer.
A tribute to persistence, that.
Also in 2006, the Eagles traded with Minnesota for an unheralded wide receiver named Hank Baskett. As noted by my buddy Geoff Mosher over at PhillyVoice, Baskett dazzled in training camp that summer, one year after Terrell Owens had spread his special brand of toxicity all over Bethlehem. Baskett caught everything, and looked like he might be a budding star.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. While Baskett made the team and fashioned a career that saw him play for three teams over five seasons, he never made a consistent impact. He is better known as the guy who married Playboy model Kendra Wilkinson in 2009 (a marriage that has since dissolved), and for starring in a reality show about said marriage.
At the other extreme was veteran fullback Jon Ritchie, who came to the Birds as a free agent in 2003, after five years with the Raiders. Three games into the ‘04 season he blew out a knee on a special-teams play against the Lions. When he appeared at camp the following fall, he was clearly not the same; it was a particularly bad sign that he played in the final preseason game, which is typically reserved for expendable guys.
Sure enough, he was cut, never to play in the league again. Now he does radio in Philly.
So yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty at this time of year, as I learned for myself in ‘08. After the ax dropped I came to miss the other two dozen guys on the beat – the inside jokes, the daily give and take, the movable feast from one city to the next as the regular season unfolded. (I’d like to think we got some work done, too.)
I missed my yearly one-on-one interview at Lehigh with Andy Reid, who always seemed more relaxed and forthcoming than in group settings. That was no doubt because he understood I was no threat, but also because there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye.
Example: The first time I sat down with him, I asked how he would begin his postgame presser after winning a Super Bowl. Would he be exultant, or merely start as he always has, by intoning, “Injuries”?
He was happy to play along, saying he would surely start in his usual fashion (though I’m not sure that’s actually true, from what I remember after he won the first of three with Kansas City. No matter.)
Another time he related a tale of thwarting a guy who was about to abscond with his travel bag as he dozed in the Detroit airport, en route from Green Bay, where he had been an assistant, to his interview with the Eagles. And he told off-the-record stories about jobs he held before entering coaching – driving a limo, umpiring the gay softball league in San Francisco, etc. He also said one guy he had cut in Philadelphia “sucked” – a surprisingly frank assessment (though in that case, not an inaccurate one).
I also came to miss some of the little moments, like the time after practice when someone informed me that Brian Dawkins wanted a word with me.
“That can’t be good,” one of my writer buds said.
So I tiptoed up to Dawkins, who I had quoted that day in a story about Dan Marino and his Hall of Fame induction. And Dawkins, far from angry, said the following: “I think I misquoted myself.”
Uh, come again?
And then he explained that he mentioned facing Marino in a game years earlier, but after thinking about it didn’t think that was true, because one of them was injured.
Then there was 2005, when TO decided to burn it all to the ground. He and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, argued that he had outperformed his contract the year before, and indeed Owens had been vital to the team’s Super Bowl run in his first season with the team.
The Eagles declined to re-do his deal, however, and that led to all manner of silliness on Owens’ part. Potshots at Donovan McNabb. Driveway sit-ups. A refusal to speak with any of the coaches other than the one overseeing his position, David Culley. A locker-room fight with team ambassador Hugh Douglas, a former player who referred to himself as a “badassador” before that skirmish, but was less inclined to do so afterward.
Finally Reid suspended Owens at midseason for conduct unbecoming a wide receiver.
Before all that, there was one other strange moment – a small one, but strange nonetheless. After Owens took part in his first practice of camp, he repaired to the basketball hoop in the parking lot outside the building housing the team’s locker room. He began shooting, albeit with a ball that wasn’t fully inflated: Shot … swish … thunk.
I looked on with several other writer types as TO silently went through this routine for about 15 minutes. I can’t even begin to discern his purpose, only that he wanted – that indeed he craved – the attention.
He departed without addressing us, and the season unraveled from there. His next stop was Dallas, which seemed about right. Eventually he wound up in Canton, too. Good for him.
Many of the rest of us wound up back in Bethlehem the following summer, knowing that as always, lives would be altered. That indeed that’s always the case this time of year, at camps all over the country. At least one of us might not have believed how widespread those changes would be, in the very near future.
But the other thing about camp is, you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel. You just never know what might be coming your way.