t’s one big blob of purple — manly purple — as Northwestern storms the field.
Nobody cares that defensive tackle Luis Castillo is wearing a hand brace for a thumb “broken in a few places,” or that quarterback Brett Basanez is hiding a sore shoulder on his throwing arm.
And forget about the fact that at least a dozen freshmen are frightened for their lives, and that the fear even trickles into the minds of upperclassmen.
There’s fear and pain beyond human comprehension hidden within that blob. But there’s no room for those problems on the field.
The team helps Castillo to forget about the multitude of fractured bones, and it allows offensive tackle Zach Strief to laugh off the cast on his foot as a “Halloween costume.”
The only way for a player to survive on the field, where people handle fear and pain in ways that seem contrary to human reason, is to drive forward and fight for his brothers. Nobody wants to be the weak link. Nobody wants to be the wuss.
Fear factor
“My first impressions of football were that I was scared and I couldn’t believe the violence,” said NU coach Randy Walker, a former running back at Miami (Ohio). “It was a lot different from that game I was playing in the backyard. And people were trying to do real damage to me. They were all trying to do real physical harm to me.”
Soon the fear dissipated. It was still there, but it was under control.
Players teach themselves to deal with the fear because that’s the only way to handle a game in which men try their best to plant opponents in the ground.
“Part of me says it’s what the sport requires,” Walker said. “I’m not sure you do it naturally. I think you have to convince yourself. You have to brainwash yourself in this game.”
Either that or get hit hard.
“You have to beat the crap out of the offensive line,” junior defensive end Barry Cofield said. “But their coach is telling them to do the same to you. So it’s kind of like whoever is stronger is going to survive, and you have to look at it like that.”
Baseball and tennis players try to crush the ball, but football players try to crush opponents.
Football coaches have to teach an aggressive mentality, and they aren’t shy about it.
“With football, it’s, ‘I’m going to hit you right in the mouth,'” Walker said. “I’m going to knock your ass off.
“It’s not some of the time. It’s about every play out there. Someone’s fixing to get their butt rocked, and it needs to be those other guys.”
Such an aggressive mentality doesn’t come easily to most college students. And neither does the idea that players should play through all pain.
But it’s the get-him-first mentality that causes players to overcome the pain and fear they face on the field.
Football players learn that ignoring weaknesses comes with the territory.
“It’s very important in football to block out injuries,” Cofield said. “There’s a difference between being injured and hurt. If you’re hurt, you can play, tape it up, whatever. If you’re injured, you sit out. And there’s nothing in between.”
The reluctance to admit pain and weakness is the problem that sociologists and sports psychologists have with the football mentality.
“The way we train football players and the expectations around football players is dangerous,” said NU sociology Prof. Marika Lindholm. “The danger comes in the fact that you’re not supposed to feel pain. You’re not supposed to be in touch with your body.”
Manly mentality
Playing through the pain is tough for others to understand, and Castillo, a senior, knows it.
“Most people can’t comprehend and understand how you look into your teammate’s eyes and you can’t let him down, so you’re going to go out and play regardless of what you feel,” Castillo said.
“It is dangerous. You look at every guy on this team and a lot of the guys have gotten hurt and been told they can’t play, myself included. But we want to go out there and we want to be on the field with our brothers.”
To justify the pain they endure and the hits they dish out, football players develop an identity as part of a brotherhood.
And it all starts with the masculine nature of football, one of the few sports remaining in college athletics where women rarely show up.
“You can identify yourself as a man by being a football player, and there’s really no other sport where you can do that,” said Prof. Richard Keefe, director of the sports psychology program at Duke University.
The masculine nature of football stems from the physicality of the sport and the aggressive mentality that comes from that physicality.
“There is certainly an ideology or a feeling of somehow, football got men bonded together and thinking about how perhaps they are physically superior to women or to the average guy,” Lindholm said. “It’s certainly one of those places where men will be far superior to women.”
NU football players train nine months for a three-month, 12-game regular season, and the justification for so much of the training comes from being part of a group of men who spend virtually all of their free time together.
“When a player is getting up at five in the morning to run in March and he doesn’t have another game for six months, it takes a certain investment,” Keefe said. “Is this who I am? I’m a football player, and I’m connected with this other group of football players, and this is what I do.”
Without that team connection, the motivation is missing.
“When you block, you have to want to block, and a lot of that comes from the camaraderie that you build on a football team,” Strief, a junior, said. “It’s just got to be gratification from helping the people around you succeed.”
Based on physicality, masculinity and an almost sympathetic connection, the players’ bond helps them justify all the training and pain.
“There are a lot of players that have the talent to be great players that are just good players,” Strief said. “They never got that mentality of a football player and that mental toughness that you need to be great. The difference between a good football player and a great football player is the guy that can put together physical skills with the mental ability to play the game.”
Reach Teddy Kider at [email protected].
