March 22: Part One - First Impressions
Jeff Foley
Tuesday April 18, 2000
My wife grinned as she blew me a kiss and waved goodbye. Tina’s a rock, an immovable object. And believe it or not, she’s the main reason I was en route to get an apartment key and a roommate or two.
“It’s only for a couple weeks,” she’d said when we discussed the prospect of me rooming with other players. “We’ll get through it. And it sounds like it’ll be really good for the book.”
Don’t get me wrong – I know that spending every possible moment with the Albany Firebirds is the smart thing to do. But a large part of me doesn’t care. I like my house, and I like being in it with my wife.
At first, Tina agreed. Who wants to be stuck alone day after day, solely responsible for cleaning up after a cat and dog? However, when I mentioned that George Plimpton roomed with the Detroit Lions while doing research for Paper Lion, Tina’s stance shifted. She knows that Paper Lion, first published in 1966, is the inspiration for my project. And if it was good for Plimpton, she figured it’d be good for me.
“Besides,” Tina said, “if Coach Dailey is offering you an opportunity like this, how can you say no?”
I still argued, not wanting to commit completely to life as a football player. I wanted to hold onto some of my comfort zone. But when Tina reminded me that many players leave their families behind for five or six months at a time – not just two-and-a-half weeks like I was doing – I felt like a big baby. Those guys come from all over the country, packing suitcases and bidding farewell to loved ones each year. I wondered how much whining they do. Not a lot, I guessed.
“And it’s not like you’ll be far away,” Tina said. “Lake Shore is only a 10- or 20-minute drive from the house. We’ll see each other or talk on the phone every day. Just do what you need to do. We’ll be fine.”
With that, the decision was made.
So, at 1:45 p.m., I pulled up to Lake Shore’s rental office. I grabbed a notebook and headed inside, where I saw several men I’d played with in 1999. Jon Krick was there, still sporting a shaved head and broad shoulders. The Axe, also known as Mike Waldron, was again in full possession of tough-guy looks – a goatee making up for the intentional lack of hair on his head, a wad of tobacco pressed between his lips and teeth, and a neck as thick as a tree. Waldron was wearing a thick silver chain and matching hoop earrings. Leroy Thompson, a fullback/linebacker, was dressed in a sharp designer sweatsuit, which he had accented nicely with dark sunglasses. And Sean Tremblay, a lineman with whom I’d had several beers after the 1999 Milwaukee game, flashed a large grin.
Most of the players were picking through bagged lunches, provided by the team.I made my way around the room, saying hello to everyone. With the exception of Tremblay, they all seemed shocked that I was anywhere near professional football players again. Nobody seemed to know why I was at Lake Shore – perhaps I was doing a freelance article for the Albany Times Union? My teammates apparently hadn’t been informed that I was going to be one of them during the preseason. Only Tremblay knew.
“Hi, Jeff,” he said, pumping my hand. “You’re rooming with me.”As if I didn’t already feel like Mini-Me from the Austin Powers movie The Spy Who Shagged Me. Rooming with a 300 pounder wasn’t going to help my size insecurities. I could feel a Napoleon complex kicking in.
Tremblay directed me to a second room, where playbooks and room assignments were being doled out. Defensive coordinator Mike Wilpolt handed me a three-ring binder. The black book’s front cover was affixed with a white piece of tape that read “J. Foley” in black marker. I flipped through the playbook, looking for an itinerary, which was tucked inside the front cover. It said final cuts would be made April 8. Without a doubt, my last day.
“So that’s my last day?” I said. “I’m sure I’ll end up getting cut.”
Special teams coach Ernesto Purnsley laughed. “You never know,” he said. “You might show some promise.”
Yeah right. More like Coach Dailey might make me promise never to touch a football again.
I closed the playbook and took a set of keys from Wilpolt. The Firebirds had assigned me to apartment 9-1C, with Tremblay and Dale Koscielski, a wide receiver/defensive back from Pennsylvania. Koscielski had spent some time on Albany’s 1999 practice squad, but we’d never met.
“You’re all set,” Wilpolt said.
I was free until 7 p.m., when every member of the Firebirds was required to be at the Pepsi Arena in downtown Albany for a physical. I didn’t know what to do next. I had assumed that from the moment I reported to training camp, every second would be accounted for. I walked back to the front office and asked one of my teammates if we’d have spare time like this every day. He told me not to worry, saying that after this evening, “I’d be eating, sleeping and breathing football.”
Before I could respond, Kyle Moore-Brown filled up an entire doorway. He was lumbering toward me. Within seconds, Kyle had me wrapped in a bear hug. Daylight all but vanished in the presence of his enormous body, and I gasped for air as the 6-foot-4, 298-pound lineman smothered me with an affectionate squeeze.
“Reporterman!” said Kyle, withdrawing from the hug but keeping a hand draped over my shoulder and back. “What you doing here?”
Silently, I wished Kyle would stop calling me Reporterman – it’s not a very creative nickname. And it certainly doesn’t imply toughness.
But Tremblay spoke up before I could get a word in. “He’s going through camp with us.” Sean’s laughter was on the verge of turning into a full-fledged snort. “And get this, he’s my roommate!”
“What?” Kyle said. He looked at me, grinning wide. His forehead wrinkled, the gold tooth in the front of his mouth shimmered as it caught light. “You kidding?”
“Nope,” Sean said. “He’s doing everything with us. Testing, two-a-days, preseason games. The whole deal.”
“Well, well,” Kyle said, drawing the words out slow and shaking his head. His face was suddenly bursting with energy; it was obvious that he was moving into ball-busting mode. He sat down to address me. “You just better not go deep and let somebody pop you. Somebody’ll take you out – POW! – and you’ll spend the rest of your life writing on a laptop.” Kyle lifted his feet, which are at least twice as big as mine, and wiggled his sneakers around. “Gonna be writing with your toes for the rest of your life. Tap, tap, tap.”
Moore-Brown moved his feet in time with the tapping. Everyone in the room laughed. Even I chuckled, but I also wondered if I’d be stuck with that vision – me pecking away barefoot at a laptop – for the duration of training camp.
“Naw, I won’t let that happen, Reporterman,” Kyle said. “I got your back. You know that, right?”
I nodded and hoped the conversation would shift away from me. If I had learned just two things about Kyle in 1999, they are – he would indeed protect me when the need arose; and once he starts to tease somebody, he can go on for days. The team’s funnyman certainly knows how to beat a dead horse.
I found an unoccupied chair and fell into it. Thankfully, Kyle turned his attention to Tremblay.
“Damn, Tusk,” he said. “Look at you. What you weigh now?”
Tremblay explained that he was tabbed with the nickname Tusk earlier in his career, when he weighed as much as 340 pounds. At the time, the back of his neck was thick and rounded, making it look like his posture was bent. His teammates said he resembled the long, protruding teeth or tusks found on elephants. But now he was downright slim, if that word can ever apply to a lineman, and his body was upright.
“I’m not sure,” Tusk said. “I think I’m under 300.”
“Oh, I can see it now,” said Kyle, his perpetual smirk in place. He slipped into an imitation of Coach Dailey, raising the pitch of his voice a notch and curling his top lip. It was a fairly accurate impersonation. “You look good, partner. You look like you’ve been working out. But aren’t you a little light? I don’t want to see you getting pushed around. We’ll have to put some weight on you.”
“Yeah right,” Tusk said. “That’ll be the day, when he tells me to put on weight.”He stretched, placed his hands at the base of his back and arched, groaning loudly. He moved across the room with an awkward stiffness, explaining to Moore-Brown that he’d already injured his back, less than an hour into the 2000 season. “I did it moving my stuff in. My back really hurts.”
“But you’re gonna be quick as a cat with all that weight you lost,” Kyle said. He rubbed his own ample stomach, which he also claimed was smaller than it had been in 1999. “Me too,” he said.
Tremblay paced the length of the room. “Plus my car broke down today. As soon as I got to Lake Shore.”
Tremblay had left his home in Long Island that morning and made the four-hour drive to Albany in one shot. But as he pulled into Lake Shore, a Watervliet apartment complex that consists of 50 eight-unit buildings, his rusty Jeep Wagoneer conked out.
He knew the garage that he wanted to take the Jeep to, but couldn’t remember the name of the place. “Can anybody give me a ride? I know where the garage is, just up the road.”
I volunteered, wanting to get off on the right foot with my new roommate.
“Are you going to fit?” I asked Tremblay as he opened the passenger-side door of my Dodge Neon.
Sean assured me that he’d be fine. He squeezed into the car and pushed his seat all the way back, but his knees still touched the dashboard. His head was just inches from the roof.
I followed Sean’s directions to the garage. As we sped into Latham, I had to keep cranking the steering wheel to the left. The passenger seat of my car had never dealt with so much weight – Tremblay weighs almost three times as much as Tina – and the car was pulling to the right as a result. The Neon seemed to lift off the ground and breathe a sigh of relief when Tremblay got out and went into the garage. He returned just a couple minutes later, however.
Sean asked me to drop him off at the Wagoneer, so he could wait for a tow truck.
“So is training camp going to be tough?” I asked.
“No,” said Tremblay, a third-year pro who graduated from the University of Connecticut. “It’s kind of easy actually. Ask some of these guys what they went through at college. I remember at UConn one time, we had something like 18 straight days of two-a-days. We were gone for two-and-a-half weeks.”
By comparison, the Albany Firebirds 2000 training camp would also be 18 days long, but it would include just seven two-a-day sessions. For two-a-days, players are required to practice twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon or evening, usually for at least two hours at a time. The rest of camp would consist of preseason games and the occasional walk-thru (a light practice usually conducted in street clothes the day before and after a game). There would also be team meetings and meals.
“Coach told me to take the single room,” Tremblay said as we drove past building No. 9, a hint of apology in his voice. “You and Dale get to share the double. But don’t worry, there’s two big beds. I guess you can call it a veteran pulling rank.”
I wasn’t about to argue. Instead I said, “Well, if I get on your nerves, let me know.”
“You’ll be fine. I’ll be asleep or reading most of the time.”
I dropped Tusk off at the Wagoneer and headed back to the apartment. Entering, with my one suitcase and briefcase in hand, it was easy to see how Sean had thrown his back out. The first room I walked into, the dining room, was packed with his gear. There was a green duffel bag, emblazoned with the words “Peach Bowl,” and filled to capacity; black garbage bags, so crammed with clothes that they looked ready to rip open; and a television, towels and toilet paper.
“I’ve got to move up here for the entire year,” Tremblay had said earlier.
The apartment’s interior was bland. The walls were white, the carpets brown. The dining room consisted of a glass table, which would at least be good for writing. There was no artwork in the living room, just a couch, a chair and a small coffee table. The kitchen featured an empty refrigerator and a few glasses and cereal bowls. It was the same story in the bathroom. The only extra seemed to be the shower curtain.
I was going to miss home.
In the apartment’s double bedroom, I dropped my suitcase on the bed on the right-hand side, and realized almost immediately how unprepared I was. All I’d brought were clothes and a few toiletries – shaving cream, shampoo, the basics. But there were no sheets or blankets on my bed, just a single pillow. And there were no towels or washcloths in the bathroom. No toilet paper, no rug on the floor.
Fortunately, it was only 2:30 and I had time to run home and grab the rest of the essentials. I had four-and-a-half hours before I was due at the Pepsi Arena for a physical.
At 6 p.m., I arrived back at Lake Shore and carried a duffel bag into the apartment. Tremblay was in the living room with Kyle, Leroy and Dale, the guy I’d be sharing a room with. Tremblay introduced Dale and I.
Dale is only 6-foot-1 and 210 pounds, small compared to some of the others, but his T-shirt fit snug to his stomach and bulged a bit in the chest. It only took one look to see that the 23-year-old is packed with muscle. Dale followed me into our room and I dropped the duffel bag, full of everything I hadn’t thought to bring earlier, onto my bed.
“I felt like an idiot when I first got here,” I said. “I had no idea that they weren’t going to give us blankets and sheets and stuff like that. I had to run home and get them.”
Dale twisted his head to the side, like a puppy studying something he doesn’t understand. He scratched his skull, rubbing his curly hair, and squinted. “We get that stuff. Didn’t you see the two big boxes in the kitchen?”
“What?”
“The two big boxes, sitting on the kitchen floor? You didn’t see them?”
“Oh yeah. Yeah. I just assumed that was Tusk’s stuff.”
“No,” Dale said. “That’s where all the towels and blankets and pillows are.”
Duh. Nothing like making a good first impression.
Jeff Foley was a writer for ArenaFan Online from 2000 to 2001.
