Northwestern University Athletics
Fed to the Wolves
9/1/2009 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 1, 2009
By SKIP MYSLENSKI, NUsports.com Special Contributor
EVANSTON, Ill. -- The mind is the athlete's constant companion, a multi-layered courtesan that controls every motion, that monitors every emotion. It can be resilient or malleable, as rigid as annealed steel or as limp as dripping candle wax, as tough as stale bread or as delicate as a meringue pie. That is why, inevitably, it separates the superior from the merely mediocre, guaranteeing the first extraordinary performances and miring the latter in nothing but middling efforts.
"Our brain is a distillery, pumpin' strange whiskeys into the bloodstream to produce permanent intoxication. Ye'eve got to feed the right things to the distillery, or ye get some bad green whiskey," the character Shivas Irons warns in the Michael Murphy novel called "Golf In The Kingdom." But when the athlete first appears on a college campus, his brain often fails to do that. It is instead busy adjusting to new circumstances and adapting to odd situations and worrying while trying to grasp a game that is so different from the one he encountered in high school.
This is why Woody Hayes, the late-and-legendary coach at Ohio State, once muttered disdainfully, "The best thing about freshmen is they become sophomores." But, as a freshman, 'Cat senior corner Sherrick McManis was thrown to the wolves, and that was true too of fellow corner Jordan Mabin and safeties Brad Phillips and Brendan Smith.
"I was prepared a little bit," remembers McManis. "But everything went so fast."
"I came in fast and ready to play," adds Smith, himself now a senior. "But the tempo of making the play call, getting the call to your corners, having the confidence that you have the right play and that you understand their offense and you understand the concepts of your defense is definitely a big difference between freshman year and senior year."
"We actually just talked to the DBs about this," concludes Phillips, also a senior. "We talked about how the speed of the game has really slowed down since we first started. Our freshman year, the game was really fast. We thought we were ready to play. But the speed of the game is just so much faster than you can prepare for in practice. Over the years, it slows down as you take more reps and get used to it."
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Back in early August, as his 'Cats were taking their first steps toward their Saturday season opener with Towson, coach Pat Fitzgerald considered his defense and declared, "It reminds me a lot of the (one) I played with from the standpoint of (defensive backs Chris) Martin, (Rodney) Ray, (Eric) Collier and (William) Bennett, who played maybe a little bit too early. They had baptism by fire out there. They had the same experiences that McManis and Phillips and Mabin and Smith have had. There's a lot of similarities there and, fortunately, this group is a lot more athletic than our group was back in '95. So I think we have a chance to be even better."
"The benefit of that (baptism by fire) is you find out a lot about a young person in a hurry because, at some point in time, he's going to get beat," picks up Jerry Brown, who coached that group in '95 and is coaching the group now. "What you look for is, how does he handle that. Does he go back out there the next time and play soft? Or does he go back out there and say, 'OK, he got me that last time. Let's go. I'm ready for the challenge again.'"
"My attitude then, at first, I got a little down at the end of the game. 'You got beat. You suck.' All that stuff," McManis goes on. "As a freshman, I'm like, 'Wow, what am I doing?' But I just thought about it for awhile and then I was, 'Man, I can do this. I've done it before.' And Coach Brown, he was there to talk me through it. When something bad did happen, he'd talk to me on the phone (from the press box to the field). It was, "Sherrick, you're staying in the game.' That built me up knowing he had confidence in me. That gave me confidence in myself as well."
"As a freshman," concludes Smith, "you're kind of scared to make a mistake. You feel like, 'Aw, I have one shot and if I mess this up, I'm going to be taken out. I can't make a mistake.' Now it's just go and play."
That helps define the bad ingredients a freshman oft feeds that distillery that is his brain, which is one reason he is yet far from being all he can be. The other reason for that is best grasped when considering the utterance of a guy named Walter Beach, who in the misty past was a defensive back for the Cleveland Browns. "If you've got to think about what to do," he said, "it's too late to do it."
"That's a fair analogy," says Phillips, thinking back. "As freshmen, we kind of reacted. But it was think before you react."
"That's perfect. It's exactly what you said," says McManis when informed of that line. "Freshman year, you have to think about everything. You worry about not messing up. You worry about all the wrong things in some case. Now, I don't have to think. It's already part of me. I just react now rather than think it. I'm used to things now, that's the main thing. I'm able to execute my technique a lot better. Now, as a senior, things have slowed down."
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Through the '60s and into the early '70s, John Brodie quarterbacked the San Francisco 49ers. "At times, and with increasing frequency now," he would say near the end of his career, "I experienced a kind of clarity that I've never seen adequately described in a football story. Sometimes, for example, time seems to slow way down, in an uncanny way, as if everyone were moving in slow motion. It seems as if I have all the time in the world to watch the receivers run their patterns and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever."
Now, on the cusp of their senior seasons, Brad Phillips and Brendan Smith consider that notion and, along the way, reveal both just how far they have come and just why their coach feels they (and their unit) can be so special. "It's not really slow motion," Phillips begins. "But you can just see it, you can just feel it. As a freshman you'd make a play and it was, 'Holy crap, I just did that.' Now you can see it coming. You can see yourself making the play as it happens."
"You can anticipate," says Smith. "When you're watching film and see the motion, you know what play's coming percentage wise. Then you set it up. You can visualize these things coming. That's why it's slow motion. You've gone over it so many times in your head and you've prepared for it so much, it seems like it's slow motion as it's happening in front of you."
"It's an inexplicable thing. It's an intangible," says Phillips. "It's something you get from playing. It's something that slows down the game for you. You learn to expect certain plays. Everyone runs a screen. You learn to look for what's coming in a screen. You learn to not let the emotions of the game get to you. You've been in different situations, so you know what to do in the different situations. It's just something you have to earn and it really helps."
"You've had your ups and downs," says Smith. "You got beat on a play four years ago that you can still remember and now you know this time you have to stay outside. Some of the biggest things that I remember as a freshman is I wanted to do too much. You wanted to try to make every play. You think you have to. What experience gives us is you know it's a team game, you've got to do your job and if your job is to fill that gap, you've got to fill that gap rather than running outside trying to make the play. The knowledge of those previous mistakes, or successes, you learn how to play from them."
And now, when you do make a play, they are asked, how does it feel?
"A little joy. Smitty gets a vision when he scores touchdowns," says Phillips with a laugh.
"No. Please," demurs Smith. "It's, 'The hard work has paid off.' It's getting an A on a test, getting 100 on a test after you've studied. Putting in that effort to see the game on the field, when it comes, it's rewarding."
"It makes it worthwhile," concludes Phillips. "To do the work and then you play fast on the field because you've prepared, it makes it worthwhile."
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