Bengals camp used to have frat house feel
NFL's big business now, but '70s were full of pranks, characters
By Chick Ludwig
Dayton Daily News
CINCINNATI | Alone in his third-floor dormitory room at Wilmington College in 1971, Bengals quarterback Virgil Carter was awakened at midnight by smoke and fire.
Teammates had sprinkled gunpowder onto aluminum foil, lit it and slid it under Carter's door. Worse, they had wedged pennies in the doorjamb so Carter couldn't get out.
"When that gunpowder flashes and you're in a deep sleep and then you see this smoke, the first thing you think is the place has blown up," Carter said. "And then you start realizing, no, that's not the problem. The problem is I can't get out and I have to go to the bathroom.
"There I am, three floors up, it's the middle of the night, you don't have your clothes on and you're hanging out the window gasping for air and needing to go to the latrine. More so than the smoke, it was the need to use the restroom that was prevented."
Eventually, after what Carter called "a good 30 to 40 minutes," assistant coach Bill Walsh came to his rescue.
"Bill came running up," center Bob Johnson said. "He didn't realize Virgil was pennied in, and he starts pounding on the door because there was all this smoke. He was saying, 'Virgil, Virgil, are you in there? Speak to me Virgil!'
"Finally, they got him un-pennied and Virgil crawled back in the window. I'm sure it was semi-dangerous. Of course, we all thought it was hysterical watching Bill pound on that door thinking that his starting quarterback was passed out from smoke inhalation."
Carter, who had joined the team in 1970 via trade from Buffalo, wasn't upset.
"Oh, no," he said. "It was just part of training camp distractions. The fact that they would pick me, and I wasn't a rookie, boded well that they accepted me."
The prank against Carter is a perfect example of the extreme measures players would take to kill time during the long, hot, boring days of training camp at Wilmington College, the Bengals' summer home for 29 years (1968-96) before they moved to Georgetown (Ky.) College. The event also underscores how training camp has evolved.
From the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 through 1977, the Bengals played six preseason games — seven in 1975 with the Hall of Fame game at Canton — and 14 regular-season games. Players remember arriving at Wilmington three to four weeks before the preseason opener, then playing six exhibition games. They felt like hostages until the league finally adopted a 16-game schedule in '78, slicing the preseason to four games.
"We played nearly half a season that didn't count," said Dave Lapham, an offensive lineman from 1974-83. "Those were the years where guys would literally play themselves into shape at training camp. That's how it's so different in this era. It's totally different now with all the offseason workouts.
"It was like a big college atmosphere in those dorms. Once you're there for a month, guys are just trying to come up with as many ways as they can to entertain themselves and everybody else. That's when a lot of the bonding takes place with the crazy stuff and funny stories. Guys really become friends."
In the modern, big-business NFL — Forbes magazine pegs the value of an average franchise at $630 million — teams spending $85.5 million on player salaries in 2005 won't stand for the silly pranks of yesteryear. Time is of the essence, too. The Bengals will spend only three weeks in Georgetown — Thursday through Aug. 17 — compared to up to 10 weeks in the 1970s.
Back then, many players held part-time jobs because there were no sophisticated offseason training programs. Nowadays, with minicamps and on-field coaching days as part of an organized 13- or 14-week offseason regimen, the NFL has become a year-round sport.
Gone are the days when the veterans scared the rookies near cutdown day by saying, "Coach wants to see you;" when linebacker Tim Kearney ambushed teammates in pitch-black dorm hallways while wearing one of his scary Halloween masks; and when tight end Bruce Coslet, walking across the parking lot for morning practice, felt the hood of halfback Jess Phillips' car and discovered it was warm, a sign ol' Jess had been out all night.
Gone, too, are the days when defensive end Bob Maddox rocked Lapham's world.
"We had just finished watching a psycho-type movie that was real scary," Lapham said. "I went to take a shower. Maddox hid under my bed and waited until I fell asleep. Then he reached up, slapped his arms around me and bear-hugged me. He scared the ever-livin' dog out of me."
And gone are the days of the barnyard battle between quarterback Ken Anderson and tight end Dan Ross.
Anderson had placed chickens in Ross' room. But Ross didn't cry "fowl!" He simply got even.
"Kenny was always a practical joker," Ross said. "So one day I asked one of the kids who lived in Wilmington, 'Can I get a pig?' He said his family owned a farm. So he brought a pig and put it in Kenny's room. Kenny came back from the second practice and there was a pig with poop all over the floor. The kid had a hard time getting the pig out because the pig was a little bit nervous being in that room."
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