Metro Pulse/Gamut/ThunderCats

Our feckless correspondent tries out for the Tennessee ThunderCats pro football team. He doesn't make it. Not by a long shot.

by Matthew T. Everett

This isn't going like I planned at all. Little fuzzy yellow spots are dancing in front of me. My head hurts, too—all over, really, but particularly on that little outcrop of bone on the back, a dull throbbing ache that reaches all the way around the sides of my head, squeezing my temples so my eyes feel as if they'll pop out. At the same time, millions of sharp, excruciating little neurological blips right behind my pupils are signaling that no, everything's not all right. Even my teeth hurt. On top of it all, I feel like I'm about to throw up. I hang my pounding head between my knees, panting and staring at my running shoes until the wave of nausea finally passes.

I'm pretty sure I have a concussion.

It's a Saturday morning in early March. Above a grim exurban landscape of empty parking lots and square aluminum buildings along Lovell Road in West Knoxville, just north of Interstate 40, the sky is a heavy, flat gray—the kind of sky that brings winter storms and biblical plagues. A brisk, chilling wind is blowing across the parking lot of Parker Sports Arena, an unlikely roller hockey rink for suburban teenagers. It's an ominous way to start the day—any day, really, but especially one in which limbs, bones, and vital organs will be risked for the fleeting glory of semi-pro indoor football.

There are 160 of us standing in the parking lot, crowded into a disorganized mass that was, at one time, a line. We're all here to try out for one of the few remaining spots on the Tennessee ThunderCats, Knoxville's new franchise in the Indoor Professional Football League, a far-flung coalition of five teams with names like the Trenton, N.J., Lightning and the Omaha Beef. The team has already signed some big-time local players—former University of Tennessee quarterback Sterling Henton and former Vol lineman Jarvis Reado, plus another couple of dozen with major college experience—so only a handful of spots are left, mostly for the practice squad. The tryouts are simple enough, based on the combines that pro scouts use to gauge outcoming college players: a vertical jump test, a bench press test, and the 40-yard dash. Those who make the first cut go on to passing and blocking drills, and a select few will maybe get offered a contract.

I thought a first-person account of a skinny writer-type competing against real football players would be good for a few cheap laughs. Fragile little me versus, on one hand, towering specimens of enormous girth and humorless faces and big meaty hands the size of my head, and, on the other, guys with 30-inch waists and minuscule body fat and bulging pecs who look like they can run the 40-yard dash in, like, three-and-a-half seconds and still bench press 400 pounds.

But self-mockery is best practiced in small groups. It's safer to make a deliberate fool of yourself when everybody else is in on the joke, and it's hard to let 159 other grown men know that you're just kidding around, particularly when they're seriously involved in a male ritual as hallowed as football.

I expected about 30 or 40 aging jocks with widening middles and bushy mustaches would show up for a chance at a $200-a-week paycheck and a long-shot opportunity at pro football stardom. But there are four or five times that many guys here, and most of them are younger than me, in their early 20s, it looks like, and a lot more prepared for this than I expected. Most of them are locals who want to retrieve the crisp autumn Friday nights of the state playoffs. But a good number of them are making a serious effort to get on a pro football team, any team, at any level, and see where it takes them. One small group drove in from Dallas the night before and are heading out on a circuit of semi-pro tryouts all over the Southeast after this one's done. That makes me a little nervous.

The only thing we all have in common is that we're wearing the same matching slate-gray athletic T-shirts (XL or XXL only) that the team handed out in exchange for the $40 tryout fee. (Interesting side note: Steve Hamer, center for the University of Tennessee men's basketball team in the dry-gulch years of the mid-'90s, hands out the T-shirts at the registration table. His seven-foot-plus frame looks awkward sitting behind a folding card table, but he handles my goofy "Hey, you're Steve Hamer" blurt with grace and dignity—by giving me a chilly up-and-down glance and saying, "Yeah." I don't blame him at all. I was a dork about it.

Once we get our T-shirts, we're herded out onto the "field," a concrete floor with a thin and ratty layer of artificial turf surrounded by a clangy 10-foot-tall plexiglass wall. One of the coaches comes over and promises that he'll make sure I don't get hurt. Well, we'll see about that.

The team's Dragon Lady fitness coach, a lean and leathery and, honestly, kind of mean-looking woman with a bullhorn voice and knotty little calf muscles, gets us out on the floor and directs us through a series of complicated contortions, apparently influenced by the Spanish Inquisition, that she calls "stretching exercises." Besides making me sore and giving the world a good look up my shorts, I don't see much point in this part.

Then it's some light jogging. This is where the trouble starts. The coaches and trainers group us like cattle into lines and rows, 10 or 12 wide and about 12 deep. We jog, in rows, from one end of the field and back. Then we run down and back again, lifting our knees up as high as we can. We do it a third time, kicking our feet up high behind us.

I've started to sweat a bit by now—the front of my gray T-shirt's damp—and I'm breathing hard. The blood's flowing, but apparently not to my brain, because when we get to the backpedal run—that's highly-technical football language for running backward—I completely lose it. Right in the middle of the field, just after the Dragon Lady yells out, "Stay in control. Don't go too fast. You're just loosening up," I lose my balance and fall back, hard, right on my butt, bounce a few inches, and bang the back of my head on the floor.

When I get up, I'm so embarrassed that I just trot to the back of the line with a stupid grin. I'm dizzy and disoriented and nauseated for a few minutes; the thought crosses my mind that this is a good excuse to head home.

I stick around. We're split into position groups, and all the receivers and running backs are put together for the vertical jump test. Each of us stands, flat-footed, underneath a plastic pole with 15 or 20 little plastic flags sticking out of it. The idea is to jump and touch the highest flag you can reach. Most of the guys in this group get up to 25 or 28 or even 30 inches; my jump is 17 inches. They even lowered the bar about six inches so I'd be able to reach the bottom flags.

Then it's on to the bench press, the object being to lift a 225-pound barbell from a prone position as many times as you can. Umm...I can already answer this one. But I'm not the only one intimidated by the size of that barbell. There's one thin and wiry guy wandering around in circles, babbling to no one in particular that there's no way he can lift that, seeming to hope that someone, anyone, will hear him and offer some consolation, maybe even a chance to use a lighter weight. Me, I don't need any consolation—I knew this was coming, and I know I can't lift it, not even off of the rack. But there's still something mildly frightening about the prospect of having that much weight hanging right above my chest with only my puny little arms there to stop it. There are spotters—but what if they slip?

By the time I get up, the record is something like 23 reps. The average is probably around 10 repeats. When I lay down on the bench, I hear the spotters whisper to each other that I'm a special case, then sort of snicker. I take a deep breath...and then suddenly the bar's up, and even with the help of the spotters, my arms tremble and quiver under the weight. I mutter a quick four-letter word (that's all I have time or breath for) and shake my head, then hear the clank of the bar landing, unpressed, back on the rack. At least I matched my expectations.

Two trials down. Now it's just the 40-yard dash.

I'm hopeful about this one. I ran track in high school. I'm skinny. No extra weight to carry. I figure I can run a respectable time here, maybe even under five seconds.

I run a 5.7.

The guy in front of me runs, like, 4.4 or something. And he's disappointed.

A 5.7. It's without a doubt the slowest time, outside of maybe some of the 300-pound offensive linemen. And I ran hard. I mean, my legs hurt, burned with the build-up of lactic acid in them. I'll be sore for three days, and all it got me was a 5.7.

One prospect tells me, "That's not bad for a reporter."

But it is. It's bad. I knew I couldn't jump high, that I'm not very strong. I knew I didn't have blistering speed, either. But I didn't know I was that slow. It hurts.

After that, I quietly slink over to get my backpack and head for the parking lot. The first round of cuts is about to be made, and the PR people have told me I can stay as long as I want to, but it's taken five hours to get this far, and I've succeeded—beyond my wildest imaginings—in embarrassing myself. My head hurts, and I'm tired and sweaty and I need a shower. If I stay any longer, there's no telling what kind of damage I could do.