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Football oasis NFL season underway in Palm Desert, wherever that is
PALM DESERT, Calif. -- I spent almost a week of not quite knowing where I was. Palm Desert, Desert Springs, Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Rancho Las Palmas ... towns blend into communities with strange boundary lines and names that seem as if they were all pulled out of the same hopper and then combined at random. I like Palm Springs, or Desert, or Rancho or wherever the hell we are. It makes me feel young. At every intersection there are at least three people I feel like helping across the street. From the window of our hotel room we see, in a pinkish haze, a barely discernable range of mountains. They're not all that far away. "Trapped car exhaust," the Flaming Redhead says, all of a sudden an expert on climatic inversion. "Nothing moves the air. New York has cleaner air than they have here." At night you see no stars. The hotel looks like it could house the entire Peruvian army. I counted 606 steps from our room to the press room. It's a strange place. The other day the Redhead and I were walking through the lobby and we heard a car siren go off. Awwwk! Awwwk! Awwwk! I mean loud. Who the hell has a car in the lobby? "Look," Linda said, and there was a bellhop carrying a horizontal pole with two big white birds on it, cockatoos or cockatiels or whatever you call those things. A sparrow had flown by and spooked one of them and it was doing its siren number. Few people noticed. They were used to it. Of course there was furious maneuvering behind the scenes at these NFL league meetings. There always is. "What actually was done here?" I asked Al Lo Casale, first lieutenant to the Raiders' boss, Al Davis. "Discussions setting the ground for realignment," he said. "A real in-depth look at the whole area of taunting." Fine, except that the guys who need to be addressed on the subject weren't here. "We'll get the word to Gene Upshaw and the Players Association," Lo Casale said. Of course what Lokie, as he has been known for years, didn't mention was what we both know was the major point of business, setting up the war party to counter the thrusts of the Raiders' billion dollar lawsuit against the league. But as the enemy, he is not privy to those discussions. It's an old role for Oakland's twin Als. Final headlines: Replay is in for another three years, as everyone knew it would be. And then the big one, the enactment of anti-shmatta legislation. No more do-rags under the helmets, nor will players be allowed to wear freshman beanies, whirly-caps or yarmulkes ("don't forget berets," the Redhead advises), any of the trappings of gang-related regalia. "Players will be permitted to wear scullcaps in team colors," the story says. Honey, find me my Bengals scullcap, OK? Having flunked economics, not once but twice, in college, I find myself severely handicapped by all the in-depth analyses of cap numbers and readjusted contracts, which, of course, is what the game is all about these days. "Remember when we'd come here and talk football ?" Bill Walsh said. "Trades and the draft and hot players, fun stuff like that. Now it's all numbers." "This is off the record, OK?" the Redskins' new coach Marty Schottenheimer said, "but it's a very simple concept. It's like when I was six or seven and I'd go into the candy store with five pennies in my hand and I'd stand next to the counter and pick one of these and one of those, and after my five cents was gone, that was it. No more." "Why is this off the record?" someone asked him. "Because I don't want people to think the league is running a nickel and dime operation," he said. "Thank God I was a finance major at Penn State," Detroit's new GM, Matt Millen, said. "There's still a lot of work for me to do here, but yeah, I can keep up OK." Millen, to me, is the most fascinating character here. From the pit to the broadcast booth to the GM's chair, running a franchise. What a trip! I've known him since he was a roughhouse sophomore defensive tackle at Penn State. Matt Millen, whose arm locked up on him once, so he went down to the basement and stuck it in a vise and had two guys try to pull it straight, and when people asked him where he ever learned that he said, "From doctors Fine and Howard," as in Larry Fine and Moe Howard from the Three Stooges movies. Matt Millen, who once showed me his high school team picture and said, "Here's my hero," pointing to a linebacker named Victor Fragnito, happily flipping a bird at the camera. We talked about the Lions and how he has stepped in and already launched a massive program of changes in the entire structure of the organization. "That's the fun part," Millen said, "but here, I sit in these meetings with all these club officials, and sometimes I have to pinch myself and say, 'What am I doing here?'" I congratulated him on getting a terrific young center, Eric Beverly, re-signed. "Quick, great feet, but not as much strength as I'd like," Millen said. "The other day I was down in the weight room with those guys and I told him I thought he had to be stronger and he said, 'I'll wrestle ya.' So I flipped him. 'One more trip,' he said and I flipped him again. He started yelling, 'Corey, Corey, I need you!' so here comes our fullback, Cory Schlesinger, two time Nebraska state heavyweight wrestling champ, and I said, 'Sorry guys, I've got to go work on my legs.' I mean I'm not crazy." Marty Mornhinweg, Millen's personal choice as head coach, was asked how he felt having a GM who wrestled his linemen in the weight room. This was at one of the midweek coaches' breakfasts, in which they're available to the writers. It's my favorite event of the week, a kind of giant smorgasbord for quotes and relaxed chit chat. There's been some talk of eventually doing away with the spring meetings, and I'll be sad if they do, precisely for this reason. "Matt knows what people think he doesn't know," Mornhinweg said, "and that's where people make a mistake about him because he knows an awful lot. I remember when I was an assistant and Matt would come in with the Fox crew, and he'd be asking me things and I'd wonder, 'Why is he asking me that? It was lengthy technical stuff, inside information, the kind of stuff I knew he'd never have time for in his broadcast. I figured that either he loved the game or he wanted to get really involved some day." The Lions had been run as a benevolent kingdom, with the Ford family dispensing favors, often of a financial nature, merely for the asking. The job of Millen, and Mornhinweg as well, has been to instill a grain of toughness. "It's been a big, giant PlayStation," the coach said, "You'd see something and you'd ask, 'How did that happen?' and people would say, 'Because they asked for it.' I looked at our training camp in Saginaw and I thought, 'Oh my God, this is too nice.' I felt we had to go back to Rocky I, or at least Rocky II. Start running on the beach or something." I talked to Schottenheimer for a while, wondering how a guy with a reputation for running a hardnosed show would be able to live with an owner who throws his coach out of the trainer's room after a game so that he could deal directly with the players. "It won't happen to me," Schottenheimer said. Why not? "I just don't see him doing it again." How about the QB, Jeff George, who let it be known at the end of last season that he was the owner's hand picked boy and the coaches were mere pawns? Of course he's still Dan Snyder's guy, but is Schottenheimer really comfortable with a QB like that? "Right now my job is to get him to be what I want him to be," he said. "We've had discussions about the role of the quarterback in our offense. We're very fortunate to have a guy as gifted as Jeff. The job of me and our coaching staff is to get him to get it done the way we want it done." Yeah, but how about if he tanks, as he has done in three previous outposts? And you want him out. And the owner doesn't. What then? I was waiting for Schottenheimer to crack, to get snappy, to stick his finger in someone's chest and say, "Now, look!" But he remained serene. "Dan and I have had discussions relative to the football side of it," the coach said, "and ultimately those decisions will be made by me." I have that page of notes highlighted. I want to see if they all hold up in December, when things get tough, which they will because this is a team sorely strapped by the cap. The Skins have lost not only guys, but blue collar guys, Schottenheimer types, such as Ndukwe Kalu, a fine pass rusher, and Derek Smith, a functional, run-stopping middle linebacker, and James Thrash, who held up well last year when the whole receiving corps was having problems, and fullback Mike Sellers, a devastating blocker and special teamer. Any help in sight? "Only back-ups," Schottenheimer said. "Anyone who could challenge to become a No.1, well, we couldn't afford him." Sometimes the price could be low. New Orleans coach Jim Haslett displayed a printout of available free agents including some functional starters who had been simply cut and couldn't catch on anywhere. "Lots of them," Haslett said. "It's heart-breaking. We'd love to have some of these guys, but we simply can't afford them. No room under the cap. Every day I get calls from players practically begging me to sign them -- at the minimum. I just got a call from Lorenzo Neal who said he'd play for the minimum. Had to turn him down." "I told Gene Upshaw," Millen said, "that the Players Association ought to figure out a way to get an amendment to the contract that would let players play at under the minimum, if they wanted to. Then the club could attach incentives to the contract, or something like that. There are a lot of guys out there who would play for $250,000." Right now there are five professional leagues in existence, the NFL, CFL, World League, Arena Football and, of course, the XFL. People here have been advised about talking about it, which hasn't really stopped them, in off-the-cuff conversation, but in a strange kind of way, I can understand it. Writers who absolutely hate the concept of this WWF freakshow thing as a selling point, have done whole columns about it. They're practicing they're cleverness, their one-liners, on a dead horse; they're either too vain or too dopy to realize that all the XFL people want is mention, any kind of mention, and if you really dislike them, then make a noise like an oyster. Have I watched it? Sure, in bits and pieces in week one. All it was was minor league football, dull as any competition is when the stakes are low. It tried to sell itself on the viciousness of its names, Xtreme, Hitmen, Rage, etc., but when the whistle blew it was just football, and not very interesting. I mean nobody was bringing any weapons out there. The cheerleaders? A lot of fake, silicone breastworks, basically covered. You can see all you want of that, minus garments, on those midnight channels. Jesse Ventura doing the announcing was a glorification of illiteracy. "He could of did his team some real good," was his pronouncment after a dropped interception. How about that guy with He Hate Me on the back of his jersey? "Wonder who hates him," one of the announcers said. "His English teacher," said my Redhead. I'm signing off now, with a notebook that is still full. I'll save it for the season. Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and CNNSI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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