Goodbye Grid Grime

I suppose it's because I come from a long line of clorox wielding women (my grandmother always said a good wife hangs her best wash closest to the road) that I watch football with a slightly different eye. I mean there they are, Sunday after Sunday, 45 players, squeaky clean, lined up for the national anthem. By halftime they look as if they've wintered over at Valley Forge.

The blood. The mud. Atlanta's red clay, Cleveland's mildew, the red paint from the map of New Jersey on the Meadowlands' 50-yard line. One game when John Madden was doing an organic-fluids trip down a nosetackle's body—"You got your blood, your grass stain, a bunch of mud...."—it occurred to me that they probably just pitch these uniforms after the game and start each week anew. Or do they? I mean, could someone be performing a weekly washday miracle even detergent companies haven't thought of? Just who does the laundry for the NFL?

I called the NFL. A woman pondered the question and told me, "I think the players take it home and do it themselves."

"The players?" said Los Angeles Rams equipment manager and laundry chief Don Hewitt when I told him what the NFL lady had said. "The players couldn't even, they couldn't even...." He stopped and threw his arms in the air.

At the Rams' busy laundry near Anaheim Stadium, Hewitt was inspecting a drip-drying coach's uniform, which, next to the players' stuff, looked as if it belonged on a Ken doll. Behind him Joe Slaughter, the Rams' part-time laundry folder, was working through a stack of 800 towels. Next to him was a 30-gallon drum filled with nice fluffy jockstraps, which had been thoughtfully dried with several sheets of fabric softener. Across town, another SWAT team was dealing with the Rams' game-day uniforms.

The players don't do their own laundry. It's done, rather, by a fraternity of football-laundry specialists that include a Coral Gables, Fla., bon vivant, an old yellow dog who was on death row and a nice young couple in Berea, Ohio. The laundry falls into two categories. Sweats, socks and jocks are usually done by the team's equipment staff, which greets the challenge with a wide variety of attitudes. Hewitt sees to it that the Rams get extra springtime freshness in their jocks. Down in Miami, Dolphins equipment manager Bob Monica is somewhat less enthusiastic. "I throw the stuff in, put in some detergent and pull it out," says Monica. "I could give a———what it looks like. It smells clean."

The laundry that really counts, however, the high-profile stuff, the game-day laundry, is where the contract specialists come in. Not that the players are all that fussy about their clothes. "I can think of maybe a couple of guys over the years who cared about how they looked," says Hewitt.

So who really does care whether a football team lines up perfectly scrubbed? "Television cares," says laundry magnate Dick Lancaster, who makes sure the Dolphins look as if they're headed for a Miami Vice casting call when they take the field. "With big-screen, color TV," says Lancaster, "a guy like myself puts himself on the line taking in this laundry. As a business decision, it's a risk."

What could be risky about the Dolphins' laundry? "Well, I'll explain it if you'll hang on," continues Lancaster. "I've got to pour myself a scotch and soda. I've just got a minute. I have to pick up my date for some fundraiser for somebody named Dulahhh, er, Duklakis, I think."

I tell him my laundry questions can wait until tomorrow. "Tomorrow's no good," he says. "I've got 4,000 pounds of sheets coming into the plant in the morning, and I've got to shoot over to the islands for a tuna tournament in the afternoon—me and my Formula boat. God, I love it. A Formula boat can get you to Bimini for lunch."