Gotta have passion to keep on smashin’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/06/2011 (5540 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was bound to happen. A rookie at training camp asked me a question that gave me pause and put me on the spot.

An inquiry, in my mind, worthy of using this space to respond.

Smack-dab in the middle of a practice, a rookie strolled up to me and asked, “How, in the Lord’s good name have you been able to stay motivated and make it intact through 15 of these training camps?”

Now to the common observer, that probably seems like a pretty easy question to answer. Playing football for a living is a great gig if you can get it, especially in a community that is so passionate about its team. You only work from June to November and the game can reward you very handsomely under the right circumstances. It can open up opportunities that may not otherwise present themselves, and you get the rest of the year to explore other pursuits. Your contests are played on national television, and you have legal recourse and an outlet for every ounce of aggression you can muster.

But in the middle of two-a-days, when even the bodies of 20-year-olds feel like they are 36, and the sun is scorching down on you and the drills keep repeating over and over again, and the coaches are yelling and screaming at you because you can’t seem to do anything right, I understand how it can start to wear on players. When you leave your house at seven every morning of every day for three straight weeks and you don’t get home until close to 10 p.m., and every time you put your helmet on, you grimace from the bruised indentations in your forehead, it is understandable how a rookie could come up with such a question.

The first thing that came to mind was to relay to him that the pains of training camp are only temporary. Well, that’s not entirely true — the pain stays with you the entire year. Ah, who are we kidding — most of the rest of your life. But it is lessened by the thrills of the game and the satisfaction implicit in the job. Training camp is the football equivalent of boot camp in the army. You assemble a whole bunch of recruits and begin a multi-week process of breaking them down and weeding them out.

You are drilled until your actions become instinctive. You are thrust into the most stressful, heated, intense situations that your coaches can possibly fathom, just so the overseers can observe how you respond under extreme pressures and duress. And if you are tough enough, talented enough, durable enough and smart enough, you are afforded a chance to progress to the next level, which is the regular season.

But for an individual who has never experienced the realities and rewards of a professional football season, these concepts may seemed far-fetched and distant. So what motivates an individual in camp to continue to push and perform at their highest level possible on a daily basis without that promise of the regular-season carrot dangling in front of their face?

I think you will find with any football veteran some recurring characteristics and traits. The first and most important, I feel, is an insatiable appetite for competition. What is irresistible to so many of us is simply lining up across from another athlete and finding out who gets to impose their will on whom. How motivated are you to win, not only the game, but every play? And what are you going to do about it if you lose? If you can simply brush off failure and defeat and move on, then this game is probably not for you. But if, in those instances when you are defeated, you find yourself impatient for redemption, then you have possibly found the right game.

As long as you have that passion and desire to play against the best players on other teams and to challenge yourself in high-intensity, pressure-filled scenarios where every measure of a man is weighed and scrutinized and exploited if weakness is found, then training camp is merely a gauntlet and process you must travel through to reap the rewards of the season and what is to come.

Doug Brown, a hard-hitting defensive tackle with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and even harder-hitting columnist, appears in the Winnipeg Free Press on Tuesdays.