Gridiron Boys: College Edition - Part I

“Are you good with your hands?” Tim tips his hat back and scratches at his forehead. I’m sitting on an old, old loveseat in the Purdue Football equipment room, nodding eagerly.

I’d allegedly come up to Purdue today for my Day on Campus: the day where I meet my guidance counselors and get a tour of the College of Technology. I’d been accepted to the Computer Graphics Technology program, where I’d study, among other things, web development. But the real reason I wanted to be here today was to sit in this room and talk to Tim.

Tim nods back. “I think we’ll have you be an inside guy. That means you get to work with me,” he smiles like this is a major perk. I like Tim, he’s got bright blue eyes and a laid-back demeanor. If you stuck him in overalls and gave him a red cap, he’d look an awful lot like Super Mario. He speaks with the nasally jabber I’ve since come to associate with northern Ohio. Imagine a Fargo elocution without all the dontchas and you-betchas and you’ll be pretty close.

I’m down to do whatever for the team. I’ve spent the last four years being an equipment manager, and love it so much, I want to do it professionally. At this time, Purdue, helmed by Joe Tiller, is a pretty decent program. The university’s also an hour away from home. They have an excellent technology program. My grandfather and several of my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side were Purdue grads. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, two of the guys on staff went to elementary and high school with me—as the cliché goes, it’s about who ya know. Purdue Football is a perfect fit.

“You’ll work on the helmets. Distribute gear. Help pack the trucks for away games. Laundry. A lot of laundry,” Tim explains. He smiles at my mother who was invited to come in with us. She was just going to wait in the parking lot for the ten or so minutes this was supposed to take. She was pleased to get a glimpse of the locker room, but mostly, thankfully, stays quiet.

“What do I do during practice?” I ask.

“Oh you’ll be in here. There’s lots to do in here,” he says. This is a little disappointing; getting to watch the drills and hear coachly wisdom is one of my favorite parts of practice. But I’m not all that put out. I’ll have a new group of boys to take care. Boys who play on TV, even.

“Sorry Mike’s not here,” Tim says. I’d been emailing Mike over the summer about a position on the equipment staff; he’s the head of all equipment operations for Purdue Athletics. Tim, his assistant, focuses entirely on football. Capitalistically speaking, football is Purdue’s most important sport and logistically its largest: there are a hundred players on the roster when you add in the walk-ons and other backups who may never get to see the field. “But I have a guy who probably won’t be back in the fall, and it will be just you and Schmie. He’s a good guy. Yeah, I think you’ll be an inside guy.” Hell yeah, I’ll be the inside guy, where do I sign? “Just email Mike and me when you move into your dorm. Send us your schedule. We’ll have you come in a few days a week. Work a couple games. We’ll figure it out.”

We shake hands. I’m excited.

“This sounds fun,” Mom says with a grin. She knows I’m pumped. She also knows I’m eighteen and too cool to discuss it much more, so she doesn’t force me to. We go to the student union so I can get my school ID card. There’s no going back now, I’m a Boilermaker.

Come August, I’m visiting the Intercollegiate Athletics Facility (IAF) a couple times a week to help with laundry and other jobs. Mike and Tim show me the ropes. Mike is tall, athletic, laid back. He speaks in an easy drawl and has kind eyes but won’t tolerate any nonsense from anyone if you push him. Tim is nothing like he was during my initial interview. He’s high-spirited and fussy and uses the word “fuck” like normal people use punctuation marks. Tim is fond of making checklists for gear to make sure nothing gets missed and I soon get in the habit of keeping a sharpie on hand so I can check and doublecheck whatever it is he wants me to tabulate. Tim is one of the most thorough and anal people I have ever met and so he’s perfect for being an equipment manager.

There’s a lot to do.

The equipment room at Purdue is larger than my high school’s by a factor of 50. The south side is dominated by a wall of 100 cubbies that are locked on one side, like a giant mail room. These allow us EQ guys to pass gear to the players, and one of my daily activities is passing out “practice loops” to the guys. These are big mesh bags attached to a nylon-and-plastic belt; the players load the bags with their socks and sweat bands, and loop the belt through their shorts, girdles, and practice jerseys. This way all their stuff stays together in one big wad while we wash it and pass it around. Doing everything loose would require way too much manpower.

There are two more rows of cubbies, spaced about 40 inches apart; just enough room for two people to sidle past each other. One cubby contains the game gear (jerseys, pants, a golden “game loop” containing their gloves and gameday socks). The other cubby contains travel sweats that the guys wear on the bus and plane and for walkthrough drills the night before the game. The western wall has stacks of nike boxes filled with all manner of cleats; further down are racks containing stacks of armor like shoulder pads. Facemasks and huge plastic crates ring shelves around the top of the room, and there are boxes and boxes of backup gear for when someone inevitably loses or breaks something.

I’ll spend most of my time on the north end of equipment room. Here, we have giant wooden chests that are shoved together to make a big 6 foot by 20 foot folding station. It’s ringed by a set of big metal lockers stuffed with extra gloves, cold weather gear, and gameday polos. There is a big window on the east wall with a roll-up metal gate on it that players visit before and after practice to joke with us, or more likely complain about a piece of equipment they want replaced. I’ll never forget the day an enormous defensive end stalked up to the window, completely naked and soaking wet. “BEAU. Can I get a towel? These kids keep takin’ mine.” I gave him two.

Behind where I usually stand is the laundry room. It has two giant industrial washers that have crude calculator keypads on them. My bosses have programmed the keypads to inject various detergents at various concentrations to keep our gear as clean as possible. We have a regular Maytag for washing more delicate clothes, like polos. One wall is a pair of the biggest clothes dryers I have ever seen. They make short work of even the wettest clothes and are good companions on the coldest days in November.

Laundry becomes a lifestyle for me. Every day, we must wash and distribute 120 or so practice loops. When those are in use, we’re washing towels for game day (at least 200, double that if it’s a home game because we provide towels to the visiting team). Later in the season, we’ll have to battle grass stains and facemask goop1 with specialized cleaners and scraping tools. It’s a rare day for me if I’m not loading or unloading one of the washers or driers.

I fold so many towels, that I cannot fold a towel any other way. When I started living with my partner years ago, she wanted the bath towels folded a different way and I had to stop and think about the motions necessary to achieve the layout she wanted. She managed to break me away from the usual way I folded t-shirts, but not towels. It’s too ingrained.

One afternoon, we’re working on an interesting sewing project. We use these things called Wrist Coaches—they’re armbands with a clear plastic pocket sewn into it that holds a short-hand playbook on the quarterback’s wrist. The coach can flash a number to the QB and he can consult his Wrist Coach for the correct play. Our offensive coordinator, however, has developed an enormous playbook and the screen simply isn’t big enough. Our QBs2 hate the velcro version of wrist coaches because they’re too bulky. So, we rip the screen off one wrist coach and sew it on another to make a double-screen.

I’m using a seam ripper to accomplish this…about two screens in, I slip and slice the knuckle of my pointer finger. It’s painless, being such a clean cut, but I’m starting to bleed everywhere. Mike hands me an old towel and takes me down the hall to the training room. He knows where everything is in there, of course, because he knows everything about this facility. He tapes my knuckle and smiles at me wryly. “You don’t deal with blood well, do you? You’re awfully pale. It’s just a cut.”

I chuckle. The truth is I’m mortified. I’m embarrassed that I’ve screwed up one of the first jobs I’ve been tasked with beyond laundry. Mike isn’t really that bothered though. He gives me a couple bandages and sends me on home because I have class in 45 minutes anyway. He and Tim will take care of the rest. “See ya tomorrow.”

I still have the scar. I’m looking at it as my finger rests on the J key on my keyboard. My career as an equipment manager was off to a great start, and it was just going to get better.

For more backstory about my time as an equipment guy, check out previous entries in the Gridiron Boys series