Tales of training camp

[Smizzy]

Tales of training camp

By ERNIE PALLADINO

epalladi@thejournalnews.com

AND KIT STIER

(Original publication: August 2, 2005)

Training camp is a time when coaches stuff 80 bodies into a small facility in the dog days of summer and try to come out of it with a football team.

Along the way, between the practices and meetings, meals and sleep time, the tranquil tedium of these mini-societies is occasionally broken by the torturing of a rookie or an eruption of emotion between sweating veterans.

Gone are the days of rookies being taped to trees and coaches encouraging veterans to pick on the newcomers. But a wily veteran will still find creative ways to make a young guy's life miserable. Fewer rookies incur the midnight madness of old, but most of them have been made to pay some kind of dues.

All this means is that virtually every player has his favorite training-camp memories. Few of them will ever show up in a G-rated newspaper. But some of the Giants and Jets now engaged in this team-building exercise found some of their fonder reminiscences in their mental databases. Not surprisingly, none of them involved a crisply run drill in the 90-degree heat

Jeremy Shockey: False start

Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey had a legendary first day of training camp. Not only did his driver get lost that morning going to the University at Albany, but he wound up brawling with Brandon Short when the linebacker demanded the first-round rookie sing for his supper.

Tables and chairs went flying. Shockey wound up with a fat lip, and the linebacker got a bruised cheek.

"I remember Rich Seubert, clearly, and Luke Petitgout, who were supposed to be my friends, just sitting there. I think they actually kicked me while I was down on the ground," Shockey said, laughing. "They didn't help me out at all. They were right at the same table, and they didn't try to break it up at all. Rich says he was too tired at the time. And Luke, I think he punched me.

"I guess I understood what Brandon was trying to do, but I was tired. You know, my driver got lost, and I had to sleep in the car. It was a hard day and that was the last thing I needed, to get into a fight on the first day."

Shockey said the fight served to soften his views toward other rookies. He leaves them alone.

"The way I look at it, we're all going to help each other," he said. "You can either bully people around and take advantage of them because they're a rookie, or you can take them in and say they're going to help us win. I don't (haze). Never have. They're already in a hard situation, not knowing what to expect and trying to make the team. The last thing they need is to have more pressure on them and feel like they're scared."

Kevin Mawae: Busboy

Jets center Kevin Mawae never forgot how he had to tend to veteran center Ray Donaldson as a Seattle Seahawks rookie in 1994.

"My job for him was I had to bus his table every day, take his tray," Mawae said. "And every night in our meeting room, he had to have his cup of coffee."

He never did get Donaldson's coffee order wrong, either. Such was his reverence for an aging, wise veteran.

"I learned quick," Mawae said. "I called him Pops