Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge: Naked World
Safety in a glass?
Study shows some Canadian drunks have safer sex.
By Jack Boulware
[04/11/00]

Urge
Facts of life
One wonderful, confusing, sweaty summer in Miami, I got my first lessons about sex from my pal, my dad and a Jersey girl.
By Stephen G. Bloom
[04/11/00]

Little house of medical horrors
The Mütter Museum reveals medicine as the gruesome and inexact art that it is.
By Robert Strauss
[04/10/00]

Urge: Naked World
Chunky Chinese
A growing number of spoiled only children are obese, and may face diminished future sex lives because of it.
By Jack Boulware
[04/10/00]

Urge
The man who made gays macho
A new book about Tom of Finland says the artist was the first to show homosexual masculinity.
By Michael Alvear
[04/08/00]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"It's a medical meat market," said Rob Huizenga, a former team doctor for the Oakland Raiders and author of "You're Okay, It's Just a Bruise: A Doctor's Sideline Secrets About Pro Football's Most Outrageous Team." The test results can make or break an NFL hopeful. Coaches say the medical information is the most valuable intelligence they get at the scouting combine -- even more important than the bellwether 40-yard dash.

The combine is something like a mass job interview for college football players who hope to be selected in the NFL draft, which will be held Saturday and Sunday. The young men who make it to the NFL will last, on average, three to four years. With minimum salaries of more than $190,000 for rookies, and signing bonuses that totaled $142 million for the 31 top picks last year, teams are understandably careful about whom they hire. At the combine, months before the draft, players are put through physical tests to assess their aptitude and durability for one of the most violent of sports.

"It's not a livestock show," says George Young, an NFL executive and former general manager of the New York Giants. "We just have to see the product before we spend that kind of money."

Since 1993, 62 percent of the players invited to the combine have been selected in the NFL draft.

The combine kicks off with the body assessment. "That's where they take your height and weight," said Casey Crawford, a tight end who played for University of Virginia. "But more than that it's walking up on a platform, taking your shirt off, getting into your skivvies or whatever, and having representatives of all 31 teams go through a sheet looking at every body part: shoulders, biceps, trunk, legs." The spectacle is videotaped, and the player is asked to pirouette for the camera so other coaches can look later.

Crawford, 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds, is blond, bright-eyed, curious and friendly. After finishing his sociology degree early, he took graduate courses in economics during his final football season. He lives with his parents in Northern Virginia and has interviewed with investment banks and Internet start-ups as well as 31 NFL teams. I met him at the combine in late February, in the bar of the players' hotel adjacent to the stadium -- workouts are closed to journalists.

Coaches checked out Crawford, while about 20 players watched and waited their turns. "Everyone sits around you and looks you up and down and takes their notes," he said. "Then they take your height and call it out. And then they take your weight and yell again: '250 pounds.' And then they measure your hand from the thumb to the pinkie, they measure the length of your arm and they take your body fat and they yell that out."

The inspection continues with a medical examination. Each player goes to a room. League and team physicians scurry in and out. "They just said, 'Lay down,' and then three doctors kind of surrounded me," said Joe Dean Davenport, a tight end from the University of Arkansas who never missed a game or practice due to injury. "They were pushing and pulling and yelling out big words -- 'The medial collateral tendon is bilateral,' these big scientific terms. You're kind of like, What does that mean? I didn't ask them. I didn't want to make 'em think I'm not very bright."

Thorough examinations occur in other professional sports, of course, but the sheer number of new bodies required in the NFL has an effect on the league's methods. Counting undrafted rookie free agents, about 300 new players will make NFL squads this year. That's nearly 10 players per team -- or nearly as many players as suit up in the entire National Basketball Association. In baseball and hockey, both sports with high turnover, players come up through club-affiliated minor-league systems, where team doctors can follow them for years.

The NFL, in contrast, relies primarily on college football to train its young players -- and the rules of amateur sports prohibit pro teams from approaching players until their college eligibility runs out. Teams must examine and interview hundreds of players between the end of the football season in December and the draft in mid-April.

The league centralized the interviews partly because top recruits got exhausted talking with all the teams that wanted to meet them. Gil Brandt, a draft consultant who then headed the Dallas Cowboys personnel staff, remembers interviewing Nolan Cromwell, a Kansas star drafted by Los Angeles in 1977. "He got off a red-eye flight in the morning and could barely keep his eyes open at the morning workout."

Another story, perhaps apocryphal: One top receiver managed to conceal the fact that he was nearly blind in one eye by memorizing the eye chart.

Next page | Well-balanced individuals don't usually look for jobs where they have to hit other people hard