Getting rough and tough in ... Mayberry?

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© St. Petersburg Times
published July 29, 2002

CELEBRATION -- Look. No one wants to be the first to gripe. Bucs training camp is 1 day old, after all, and things are going along swimmingly. As they say here in Celebration, things are a sensation.

But, um, is Jon Gruden absolutely certain that Spartacus did it this way?

This is the fire that is going to forge the Bucs into something mighty? Here? In Pleasantville? Where the local time is always 1957?

You wander up and down the clean streets of a Pleasant Valley Sunday and there are Osmonds everywhere you look. Even the police officers wear a fixed, 32-tooth smile and wish you a nice day. The suspicion is they are some sort of robots, like the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. If I see one that looks like Yul Brynner, I'm coming home.

Anyway, this is not exactly like the boot camp from Full Metal Jacket. The lawns look like the 18th green at Augusta. It's Wally and the Beav's neighborhood. Or Tom and Huck's.

The houses look like a movie set. You want to rush up and push against one just to see if it will fall over. If there are street gangs, they are somewhere else, probably working on their choreography.

There is a Barney's on the corner. If things get real strict, if Gruden wants to really crack down, rumor has it they will remove hazelnut as an option. That'll teach them.

Here we are at Camp Chucky.

So far, everything's ducky.

The Bucs checked into training camp Sunday, and let me tell you, it promises to be one of the most grueling experiences that a bunch of men staying in a resort hotel with air conditioning, cable television, minibars and room service ever had. Also, there is a pool.

In other words, if Dr. Joseph Alexander was still alive, this would kill him.

Maybe you don't remember Alexander. Back in 1926 Alexander -- sadistic soul that he must have been -- invented training camp. Perhaps Alexander was frustrated because the team movie wasn't a talkie. Who knows? Anyway, Alexander took his New York Giants to Aeriel, Pa., for training camp. To work on his aerial game, no doubt.

"He probably just wanted to isolate his team and build up their testosterone level until they were about to explode," Bucs safety John Lynch said.

"I imagine he was trying to use the military plan for building a unit," general manager Rich McKay said. McKay might be onto something. You can never tell when another team might start Der Kaiser at quarterback.

Anyway, training camp quickly became the rage in the NFL and in college football, where some of Bear Bryant's recruits from Texas A&M still haven't been found.

It made perfect sense, of course. In those days there was no such thing as an offseason conditioning program, no such thing as a minicamp. When football season was over, players went onto their lucrative offseasons as pro wrestlers and carny workers. When training camp rolled around, players hadn't seen a football in six months. Many of them had forgotten it wasn't round.

Aha, Doc Alexander thought. Why not take them away from the friends and the wives and the bill collectors and have a training camp? Alexander even barred cell phones by making sure they would not be invented for another 60 years or so.

Things have changed. So does training camp still make sense? Are there things the Bucs can gain from 31/2 weeks together? Possibly. Wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson, for instance, said he had forgotten 80 percent of what he learned in minicamp.

The point is training camp gives players a shared focus and a common goal. For instance, Sunday the players were able to stare out their windows at the media, whose members were wobbling in the midday heat. Some called it Reporting Day. Some called it Get Back at the Media Day. Again, common goals.

There are such wonderful slices of moments at training camps.

For instance, there was the story of Bucs tight end James Whalen, who once walked onto the field to see Randall McDaniel and Jeff Christie tossing the ball to each other. One of them threw the ball into a large cylinder that the tarp wraps around. Naturally, Whalen, the rookie, was sent after it.

Once Whalen was inside, of course, the players began rolling him downfield. Whalen could only hold on. Finally he yelled that if the players didn't stop, he wasn't going to give them back their ball.

"Fine,"McDaniel said. "We have a whole bagful out here."

There was the training camp in Minnesota, for instance, where Monte Kiffen and defensive tackle Keith Millard had an argument. So the two decided to stir up things. Next thing you knew, Millard and Kiffen were on top of a 12-story building, punching each other. They disappeared, then Millard appeared with a mannequin -- dressed exactly like Kiffen -- and tossed it from the building.

Training camp is the place where someone placed a live skunk in Arizona's Jake Plummer's room, where the Saints under Bum Phillips used to reward mistakes by making players wear a metal bucket on their heads instead of a helmet, where veterans put black ink into the shower pipes. Training camp is where rookies sing. Just think of it, the NFL is responsible for karaoke.

Alas, training camp is where Mike Ditka's Saints made rookies run a gantlet while the veterans hit them with bags of coins. In other words, training camp doesn't always build character. Sometimes it merely exposes it.

This, then, is where we find the Bucs in their very first training camp away from home. There is an offense to retrain, a defense to maintain. Players have to be introduced to each other. Over at Andy's place, Aunt Bee has to pickle some preserves.

It's going to be tough. It's going to be vicious. It's going to be merciless.

So hold the foam on my mocha, would you, Barney?

After all, I'm in training.

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