The heat and the dust and the suffering, they still echo down the years. A man wrote a book about it, turning cruelty and madness into something just this side of noble. Hollywood made a movie from the book. It was a bizarre, massive nostalgia wallow for a time even those who lived it say was insane, and whose architect, a Rushmore coaching legend, admitted later was plain damn stupidity on his part.
The year was 1954. The place was Junction, Texas. And the Rushmore legend was Bear Bryant, who dragged his Texas A&M football players into a nowhere spot in the middle of a heat-seared countryside dying of thirst, and put them through 10 days of hell so brutal 80 of his 115 players quit and one almost died.
The survivors have been memorialized ever after as the Junction Boys, and celebrated as ultimate old-school avatars. It's just how things were done then, the litany goes. And, boy, ain't it a shame you can't treat your players like that anymore.
Yeah, well. Maybe those people ought to ask Jordan McNair's parents what a shame it is.
Jordan McNair was a 19-year-old offensive lineman at the University of Maryland, which hired a man named DJ Durkin as its football coach last December. DJ Durkin in turn hired an apparent sadist named Rick Court as his strength and conditioning coach, and together they allegedly did their damnedest to bring back 1954 whole and breathing.
Unfortunately, they weren't as lucky as Bear Bryant, who only had a young man named Bill Schroeder almost die on him. McNair actually did die.
He died of heatstroke two weeks after a May 29 workout in which he collapsed after running 110-yard sprints. The accounts of his last moments before collapsing are an eerie doppelganger of Bill Schroeder's last moments before collapsing in Junction 64 years ago: Signs of extreme exhaustion, difficulty standing, soaring body temperature. McNair, for instance, arrived at the hospital with a body temp of 106 degrees.
A subsequent ESPN report alleges that running players until they collapsed -- which, understand, is not conditioning but actually counterproductive to it -- was only the tip of a particularly cruel iceberg. Maryland players were regularly subjected to bullying both physical and psychological; Court reportedly had a habit of throwing small weights and other objects at players who displeased him, and in one incident a player having trouble losing weight reportedly was forced to gorge himself on candy bars while watching his teammates work out. Others were forced to eat until they vomited.
And apparently that wasn't the half of it.
The upshot is, Durkin and his staff are on the griddle now at Maryland. If there's any justice in the world, they'll be checking into a Graybar Marriott sometime soon. And meanwhile, the old-school types who romanticized the Junction Boys and continue to confuse sadism with toughness in a tough game -- one of them South Carolina coach Will Muschamp, who lashed out at ESPN for using anonymous sources -- will no doubt say it's a rotten deal coaches can't abuse their players anymore the way ol' Bear did, and bemoan the "sissification" of America.
In the meantime, Jordan McNair lies in the ground somewhere.
Well, now. There's a big W over "sissification," right, boys?
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