Meat And Money At Football Camp

The early-morning flight from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis is mostly business people, studying The Wall Street Journal. They settle in, order coffee from the flight attendants and attack the endless gray columns of type and the seas of tiny numbers. A few of them even take notes.

But there are perhaps half a dozen passengers who do not fit the mold. For one thing, they do not wear business suits. They're dressed in sweaters, jeans and cowboy boots.

But it isn't just their clothing that sets these guys off and tells you they are different. These men are big, and not merely large. They are big and powerful, radiating strength and a kind of appealing brutality. They are much too big for the airplane seats, and when two of them sit next to each other, the effect is almost comic. They could be grownups sitting in furniture designed for children.

None of the big men reads the Journal. None of them reads anything. Some sleep and some look out the windows and some just sit, not bored but utterly (continued on page 104)Meat And Money(continued from page 101) calm. People all over the plane turn to sneak a look at these big. tranquil men. the way they would have at Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep if they had been passengers out of Pittsburgh this morning.

"You must be, ah. a football player." the seatmate of one of the big men says.

"That's right." By now, a few passengers have recognized two of the big men--Shane Conlan and D. J. Dozier, stars of the Penn State team that beat Miami to win the college national championship less than a month ago.

"Where are you fellows going?"

"Indianapolis," the big man answers. It is the only stop on this flight, so he isn't giving away much with this answer.

"Ah, anything special going on in Indianapolis?"

"Scouting combine. That's what they call it," the big man says, "but what it actually is ... is a big fucking meat market."

•

Well, there are markets in everything (as any reader of The Wall Street Journal knows), so it shouldn't come as any surprise that there is a market in football players. This year, 123,000,000 people watched the Super Bowl. Advertisers paid more than $500,000 for each 30-sec-ond commercial during the game. The television networks' last contracts with the National Football League were for 2.1 billion dollars over five years. (The league took a slight--very slight--cut this time out.) When quarterback Jim Kelly signed with the Bills, his contract was estimated to be worth $8,000,000.

So, yes, there is a market in football players. Bet your sweet ass, as the players on the plane from Pittsburgh would probably have put it.

The Indianapolis meat market is the final chance for sellers to show their stuff and for buyers to look over the merchandise. The affair lasts for the best part of a week, with 330 players coming in from all over the country. The players have been invited by National Football Scouting Combine, Inc., an organization that supplies scouting reports to client teams. Every team in the league participates in this event. It is a chance for coaches and scouts--as well as doctors, owners and general managers--to take a good look at this year's rookies. There is no contact, only running, jumping, weight lifting and such. But coaches claim that it is a great opportunity for them to evaluate talent, especially when it is all virtually side by side, in the same room.

Three months after Indianapolis, the teams will be drafting players for the 1987 season. A good draft can mean a good year. A great draft can lead to a dynasty. A bad draft can cost a coach or a general manager his job and leave a team flailing around, trying to make up ground with trades and luck and finishing, inevitably, out of the money.

For a player, being drafted early can mean a lot of money. A man drafted in the first round can expect to sign a four-year contract for an average salary of about $400,000 a year. A man drafted in the second round will also sign for four years, but at $250,000 a year. After you have factored in bonuses and incentives, the first-rounder will sign for around $600,000 more than the second-rounder.

A fifth-rounder will sign for three years. at an average of $106,000 a year. A man taken on the 12th and final round will average $75,000 with a two-year contract.

So the five-day affair in Indianapolis is a serious market for some serious meat.

On the day the men from Pittsburgh arrive, the big news is a player from the University of Florida. His name is Jeff Zimmerman and he weighs 341 pounds. There is no way of knowing how he manages to sit in any airplane seat.

While the men on the flight from Pittsburgh are getting checked in at the Union Station Holiday Inn, Jeff Zimmerman is showing perhaps 200 scouts, coaches, G.M.s and even a couple of owners what 341 pounds on a good man can do.

The workouts at Indianapolis are closed--no spectators, no reporters. The results of Zimmerman's workout are confidential, available to the staffs of National Football Scouting and the 28 N.F.L. teams that each ponied up enough to cover the $1,000,000 it cost to put on this show.

But even though it is a private affair, when someone has a devastating workout, word gets around.

"Did you see that sumbitch move?"

"Like a cat. A real big cat."

"That's a lot of man to be moving around like that."

"How'd he do in the forty?"

"Five-three."

"That's hauling for a man that size."

The word is that Zimmerman will go high, maybe to New Orleans, which has the 11th pick and always needs help pro tecting the quarterback. Ask Archie Manning.

Zimmerman, still wet from his shower, is checking out when Dozier and the other arrivals are checking in. The most remarkable thing about Zimmerman, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, is that he doesn't look all that big. The fellow standing next to him, wearing a T -shirt that could cover a queen-size mattress, is only a little smaller than he. He is from Texas and he's going home, too.

Serious meat.

•

The Pittsburgh arrivals sign in at a desk that is set up for that purpose. A young lady from the scouting combine cheerfully takes their names, finds them on her chart and checks them off. Then she gives each man an envelope full of printed material and shows him to a small room where he can pick up a duffel bag containing the shorts and sweats he will be wearing during his workouts.

"Next man." she says gaily, as though she has been ordering 300-pounders all her life.

Before any player can get through the lobby of the Holiday Inn. before he can make it from the check-in desk to the little room where he picks up his duffel bag. he will run a raggedy-assed gantlet of middle-aged men who have his best interests at heart. Men who want to guide him through the thickets of the market. Men who want to make sure he is not taken advantage of,

They are on him like chickens on scratch corn.

The younger, grimmer, less prosperous-looking men are from the union--The National Football League Players Association. They have literature and a soothing line for the new arrivals. The word is that there will likely be another players' strike in 1987. this one over the issue of free agency, and the union is out building solidarity early. You wonder if they could carry a chorus of Joe Hill.

The union reps, however, are a minor distraction in a room full of chaos. An arriving player can throw them a handshake and a nod and be in the clear. The agents are another matter.

The lobby is thick with them. They study the crowd with scavenger eyes, and when they spot a potential client, they flash wide, insincere smiles and start reaching for a back to slap, shoulder to grip or hand to shake.

"Hey, babe, good to see you again. I thought you'd make it. How they treating you?"

"Uh, good, real good."

"Fine. That's fine. You got a minute?"

"Well, uh, I was going up to the room."

"That's OK. I'll go up with you. We can visit while you unpack. You mind?" (continued on page 172)Meat and Money(continued from page 104)

"Uh, no."

"Good. Here's the elevator, right here."

The agents are here either to find clients or to protect investments; that is, to make sure that some other agent isn't finding his clients in their stables. Every agent in Indianapolis says that he is here merely to protect his investment.

A sports agent may be a lawyer or an accountant or someone who has experience in show business. Or he may be a former player. He may be anything. One of the most successful ever was a dentist before he found his new calling. In theory, an agent helps a player negotiate his contract, invest and manage his money and find outside sources of income, such as endorsements. In return, he takes a percentage. Good agents get rich and do not have to come to Indianapolis for the meat market. The rest of them are here, and if they are good at anything, it is waiting around hotel lobbies as if there is nothing in the world they'd rather do than flatter the stuffing out of some 21-year-old kid who runs a quick 40.

One of the general managers in town, staying at another hotel, calls the agents who cluster around the elevators at the Holiday Inn vultures.

"Would you want to be represented by a guy who'd do that?" he asks.

But, in a way, he goes on, that scene actually works to his advantage. "Every year, you'll get guys who sign contracts with three or four agents. When one of those agents comes to you to talk contract, he is usually in a hurry. He'll take the first thing you throw at him."

Some agents, of course, aren't above offering, well, call them inducements to the players, hoping to influence them to sign. At least, if other agents are to be believed.

"Guys come around here with everything, man," says one agent, who makes it clear that he is here simply to protect his investment. "Money, obviously. Some of these kids have never seen any real money before. They still think a $100 bill is money. Dude says, 'How about $10,000, just to take care of things until we get you signed?' and that guy's eyes just pop.

"Guys will buy clothes for somebody to get him to sign. Lease him a car. Throw a couple of hookers at him. Lay a sackful of coke on him.

"Goes on all the time. Sure does."

Drugs. It is the topic of many conversations in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. No doubt the coaches and scouts and G.M.s scattered around town in other hotels are talking about the problem, too. Last year, when the camp was held in New Orleans, more than 50 of the players invited tested positive for either cocaine or marijuana.

The names were not released to the public; but it was widely reported that some of those who tested positive were such good ballplayers that teams were willing to draft them in the early rounds anyway. That's the rumor, at any rate; and among the agents at Indianapolis, rumor is king.

"We had a guy last year," one of them says in a confidential tone, "and he was a sure high second round. Maybe a first, depending on need, you know. He goes in to pee and, man, he burns a hole in the cup. Guy had probably been packing his nose on the airplane out.

"So on draft day, he goes in the 12th round. Only costs himself $1,000,000 or so."

"He make the team?" one of the agents listening to the story asks.

"Yeah. But he got a knee in camp. Spent the season on injured reserve and got fat. Guy is history.

"And the thing is, they all knew. People told them they were going to be tested. They knew a long time before they ever got to camp. They sure did."

Some people, especially those who work for National Football Scouting, think that things will be different this year, after all the press about the results of last year's tests, the deaths of basketball player Len Bias and Cleveland Browns player Don Rogers and the general antidrug climate that prevails in the country.

"There may not be as many," says one of the agents, "but I promise you, there will be some. With some of these dudes, you can't tell 'em any damned thing."

It turns out that of the 330 players attending the camp, with perhaps their entire careers in jeopardy, only one player tests positive for cocaine, six for marijuana. Several also test positive for steroids, but this comes as no surprise to anyone. The one player who tests positive for cocaine, well, either he is so good that he can get away with it and knows it, or maybe he is just tired of football.

The drug test is part of a complete physical that is given to every player who comes to Indianapolis. As soon as the men from Pittsburgh have run the gantlet of agents and organizers, they are hustled onto a bus that takes them across town to a hospital, where--in addition to the urine test for drugs--each man is given a full-body X ray, an E.K.G. and a battery of other tests and examinations. Each team in the N.F.L. has brought its consulting physicians to Indianapolis to inspect the meat. A rough census indicates that the average medical detachment consists of three doctors. Indianapolis is the place to be this week if you have an orthopedic complaint.

After the physical, the players return to the Holiday Inn and the agents stand sentry at the elevators while the players sit down to take a written test.

"You believe this?" says one West Coast quarterback who thought the E.K.G. was a little much. You get the feeling, listening to the bitching, that these men don't like to take tests. They go to college, after all.

The test is no great brain bender. To answer the first question correctly, you must know the difference between a parasol and a parasite. If you don't know but have a good time in the 40, then you will probably be all right. Whoever drafts you can hire a tutor to teach you the difference between an umbrella and an agent.

Once the players have completed all the written and physical examinations, it is time for supper. The hotel staff has prepared 120 chicken dinners, which is the number the scouting combine ordered. These dinners are served to 100 players who crowd into the dining room--exactly the number the combine expected.

"Only way I could make sure everyone got enough to eat," says the man in charge of logistics.

•

While the players are making chicken bones out of chicken dinners in the bright, sterile dining room of the Holiday Inn, another gathering is getting under way at the Hoosier Dome, a couple of blocks away. No players are invited to this party. Coaches, G.M.s, scouts, owners and team physicians are.

Indianapolis is a town sufficiently enthusiastic about football to take even a team owned by Robert Irsay in order to have its very own franchise. The Colts--Irsay's woebegone team--lose their home games in the stadium that Indianapolis built to entice them out of Baltimore. The Hoosier Dome looks like an old, infected blister from the outside. Inside, it is more like a military bunker--all lifeless gray concrete. A party in the Hoosier Dome is like a party in a crypt.

But the VIPs of Indianapolis are here, even on a cold, rainy night in late January. They eat the usual liver-and-bacon balls that are held together with toothpicks and the mushroom caps that are stuffed with cream cheese. They drink from plastic glasses that make whiskey taste like turpentine, and they look nervously around the room to see if anyone famous--maybe Mike Ditka--has arrived.

The party room is dominated by a six-foot ice sculpture of a football helmet. The help wear football jerseys.

For some reason, the coaches and G.M.s seem to be ducking this party. In the first hour, the only recognizable N.F.L. figure in attendance is Don Shula. He looks beefy and slightly bored, like a candidate who is behind in the polls and is going through the motions merely to pay off his campaign debt.

But the boosters who put on this party are not about to let Shula's mood deter them. His hand is shaken and his back is slapped at least once a minute, and he is addressed as Don by people who have never met him before or been under the same roof with him until this evening. The smile carved into Shula's jaw is colder than the six-foot helmet.

After ten or 15 minutes of it, Shula breaks away and heads for an open bar. Two men watch him closely, as though he may be about to give something away.

"White wine, please," Shula says to the bartender, a large black woman wearing a Rams jersey.

"You see that?" one man whispers to the other. "Don Shula drinks white wine."

"Well, I'll be damned," his partner says.

•

Meanwhile, back at the Holiday Inn, Shula's son Mike is having his own trouble. While he is arguably the most photogenic and intelligent prospect attending this camp, he is also the least likely to be drafted.

Even Ray Perkins, who recruited him to Alabama and coached him there for four years, thinks that Shula is a long shot. Perkins is here in his new capacity as head coach and V.P. in charge of football operations for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise that may be more inept than even Irsay's Colts. Perkins' contract is the subject of considerable discussion at this camp. Rumor (our old friend) has him making $750,000 a year, with some of it going toward part ownership of the team. This contract has raised the stakes for prospective head coaches everywhere. A man who buys right in the meat market can make himself a millionaire.

Perkins has the first pick in the first round of this year's draft. The assumption is that he will take Vinny Testaverde. [He did.] Of Mike Shula's chances, he says, "He probably won't be drafted. If he makes any team, it will be as a free agent."

One of the men who organized the Indianapolis camp says that Shula wouldn't have been invited to work out if his last name were different. "It's like politics. You do favors even before you're asked. If the guy has to ask, then you're not doing him any favors."

In any case, Mike Shula is here to work out for the scouts; and while his father is sipping white wine with the kind of people who lease sky boxes in the Hoosier Dome, Mike is talking with the coat-check girl at the Holiday Inn.

"I don't get off for another hour," she says.

"OK," Shula says, "what about then?"

Well, she says, it's like, she has this friend.

"Oh," Shula says.

"But I could probably go out tomorrow night."

"Oh," Shula says.

"What about it?" the girl says.

Well, maybe.

Mike Shula isn't having such a good camp. He is recovering from chicken pox. Not a gifted, natural athlete to begin with, he is even weaker and slower than usual. But he thinks he is "throwing the ball pretty well."

He says, "I'm just hoping to be drafted by someone so I can get to camp and show them what I can do." He is not approached by agents. He won't be a high draft choice, and when it comes to advice about how to negotiate an N.F.L. contract, he can get all that he needs at home.

"Those guys--the agents--have a lot better things to do than waste time talking to me," he says.

Shula and another player hang around until the girl's shift ends. She leaves when her ride pulls up in front. The two players go back to their rooms through the forlorn lobby, where a solitary agent stands watch at the elevators and another sleeps in one of the hotel chairs.

"Struck out," the other player says to Shula. It sounds wrong at a football camp.

•

While Shula is losing yardage with the coat-check girl, some of the other players are heading off into the night with the agents, most of whom drive big cars. Big rented cars. A head full of blinding blonde hair appears in the rear seat of one of those cars. The head rises from shoulders that are draped in some kind of equally dazzling fur. Lynx, maybe.

A visitor wonders aloud how the agent was able to come up with something like that in Indianapolis.

"Probably imported her," an agent says, "just for this trip. Flew her out from Jersey--People Express."

Some agents--according to the rumors--throw hookers at prospects the way PACs throw honoraria at Senators. That doesn't exactly qualify as a bribe, you see. It is more a demonstration of good will. Senators need campaign funds; ballplayers need to get their ashes hauled.

A couple of years ago, when the scouting camp was held in Seattle, an agent employed a hooker to demonstrate his good faith to several ballplayers. Then he tried to economize by stiffing the hooker. She exited the hotel, found herself a policeman and started crying rape.

In the confusion, one team's front-office Samaritan who was trying, as they say, to assist the police with their inquiries got his name in the papers. Something about obstructing justice. In the end, nobody was charged with anything. The players, as usual, got off without a scratch.

"You don't buy much with a hooker," one of the agents sitting bored in the lobby says. "By the time a guy comes this far, he's past that. Maybe when he was in high school and some honey gave him something to get him to go to college someplace.

"That still happens. But you'd have to talk more than just some hooker when a kid is looking at the draft. Money, that's the thing. Or if you're talking women, then you'd better be talking stars."

Which brings us to Norby Walters, who talks both.

Walters is the most persistent of the agents in Indianapolis this year. He is a small, thin man with vulpine features, white hair and dead eyes. Looking at him, you think of saloons, casinos, after-hours bars and the like. He is a nighttime guy who gets his exercise by walking up a flight of steps when the elevator is broken or by taking some steam and getting a rubdown.

Walters is the agent who--to hear them tell it--brought all the other agents to town to protect their investments.

"The guy has no ethics at all," one of them says. "None."

Walters comes to football from show business. He books music acts. He is a promoter and doesn't care who knows it. "He talks a lot of showbiz crap to these kids," another agent says. "Tells 'em he's going to introduce them to Janet Jackson and like that. Really gets to them."

Walters, who is too busy working the pancake shop and the lobby to discuss ethics or tactics with some outsider, says merely, "These guys are just jealous. They're lazy. They've never seen a real agent before."

A few weeks after the Indianapolis camp, it becomes clear just how a real agent works when Walters starts suing some players for, essentially, not staying bought. He'd paid them money when they weren't supposed to take it, in return for which they had agreed to become his clients, usually on the first day they were no longer eligible to play in college. Some of them had been receiving money from Walters for more than a year before their eligibility expired. Walters said he considered those payments just a normal cost of doing business.

One of the players he sued was Rod Woodson, who had the kind of workout that Jeff Zimmerman had had the day before him--the kind, that is, that has everyone talking. He ran a 4.2 40 and, although he is a defensive back, he was running patterns and catching balls like a wide receiver. Walters, in court affidavits, claimed he had paid Woodson more than $21,000 while he was still in school. Woodson signed as Walters' client on January 2, 1987, the first day he could do so legally and some four weeks before the Indianapolis workouts. He later broke the agreement, and that was when Walters sued.

The Walters story went off in other directions as well. One of the athletes who stayed with him, Paul Palmer, a dark-horse Heisman candidate behind Testaverde, was accused of accepting some money from Walters while he was still eligible. He, however, was goodhearted enough to remain a client and was subsequently cleared of N.C.A.A. violations.

Walters held such strong convictions in these matters that, according to some complaints, he threatened other agents with the kind of harm that had once come to Frank Sinatra's enemies at the hands of Ole Blue Eyes' bodyguards. And in Skokie, Illinois, Kathe Clements, a sports agent whose firm signed two of the athletes Walters was cultivating, was assaulted by a man who walked into her office wearing a ski mask and stabbed and beat her. He did not rob her and he did not rape her. Law-enforcement agencies have been unable to link the assault with Walters.

After that episode, as well as many others, the FBI began an investigation. Other threats and violent incidents were uncovered. An SMU wide receiver produced a tape from a phone-answering machine. On it, Walters' business partner threatened to have the player's hands broken (and would have threatened his legs, no doubt, if he'd been a running back) if he signed with another agent. Jeff Atkins, another SMU player, was also threatened and, later, a friend driving Atkins' car was shot and killed. That murder is still an open case and is officially unrelated to Atkins' affiliation with Walters.

Walters, then, doesn't play around. If he signs you, he expects you to stay signed, and if you are a rival agent, he expects you to honor the sanctity of his athletes' sacred vows. The man has standards.

Of course, Walters has learned in almost three years as a sports agent that you can never be too careful. Another SMU player signed first with him, then with an agent in Seattle and then with a third firm. A kid in Dallas--where they have plenty of people with experience in paying dirty money to football players--had agents on both coasts and in Chicago, too.

So you could understand why Walters would be nervous about guarding the meat that he had cut from the herd. Once, in Indianapolis, a kid in the lobby of the Holiday Inn recognized Rod Woodson, who had played at Purdue, and asked him for his autograph. When Walters saw Woodson signing something, he rushed across the room and jerked the paper from his hand.

You can't be too careful. It could have been another contract.

And, as it turned out, Woodson did go with another agent, after taking Walters' seed money. According to Walters, Woodson himself actually never saw much of the cash. Most of it went to family trips and car leases.

Just the same, Walters sued him for $500,000. Breach of contract. Woodson was one of approximately 55 players who signed contracts with him dated January 2, 1987.

Now Walters is out there in the night. So are many of the players. God knows what they have found to keep them out there in Indianapolis. The players who have chosen to pass on the pleasures of the city are sitting around in their rooms on furniture that doesn't fit them, watching television and talking. Some are trying to sleep. In the morning, the last workouts of the week will be conducted. It is a final chance to make your case.

Down in the lobby, a young, tired and slightly disillusioned agent talks with a civilian guest at the hotel. Even though he is an agent, the man says he finds this whole thing a little hard to take. He got into it because he'd always been a sports fan back in Atlanta. He's big on the Hawks, he says. He expected the money thing, hardball negotiations and all that. But this other thing, the under-the-table stuff, is hard to take.

This conversation takes place before the SMU scandal breaks fully and before Walters is written about extensively by Chris Mortensen of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Still, anyone who follows football, even casually, knows how deep the rot is.

"You know what is missing for me?" the discouraged agent says. "A little blame on the players' heads. The coaches and the agents and the college alums are all getting blasted, but nobody ever mentions the players. It's like they are these innocent children and the rest of us are out to corrupt them. And I can tell you that's a lot of bullshit."

"That so?" the visitor says, not especially interested.

"Think about it. Even when they are being recruited to go to college, these guys are mostly old enough to go to jail if they break the law. In most states, they are old enough for the electric chair. The Marines will take 'em and expect 'em to do what they're told to do.

"But when they get involved with taking money--or something else--under the table, it's everyone else's fault, because they're football players and not responsible.

"But just think about something for a minute. Do you think the people paying the bribes, giving away the cars, want to do it? How many college coaches start out a recruiting trip thinking, Man, I hope I can give away a few automobiles this time out. I just love giving cars away?"

"I get your point," the visitor says.

"Players are part of it. That's all I'm saying. And they get away clean--for a while, anyway."

"What happens later?"

"Well, you can look around you, in this lobby, tomorrow morning. Bob Hayes is here, calling himself an agent. World's Fastest Human, remember? Caught passes from Don Meredith when they were on the Cowboys together. He did time for drugs. Just last week, the 1978 first pick for Dallas, a guy named Larry Bethea, got convicted of stealing his mother's life savings. [He committed suicide last April.]

"Vinny Testaverde came in today, right? And he was all anybody could talk about. Everybody in the lobby was looking at him like he was a movie star, winner of the Heisman Trophy. Well, an old Heisman winner got sent to jail yesterday. Johnny Rogers pointed a gun at the guy who came to disconnect his cable TV.

"Warren McVea is going back to prison for sure 'cause he can't handle cocaine. Mercury Morris is out now, going around telling kids how it was he got put away for dealing coke.

"A lot of the problem is that these guys got away with what they knew was wrong for so long that they just figured they'd never get nailed. You know, they're football players and the rules are different."

"I see what you mean," the visitor says bleakly.

"Right now, everyone wants a piece of these guys. They can't do wrong. But it won't be that way forever. Somebody has to tell them that."

Hard to know whom they would listen to, the civilian says, or what he could say to get their attention.

"That's what I mean," the agent says. "I believe it will get worse before it gets better. If it ever does get better."

One has to keep in mind the fact that most American forms of corruption are gleefully voluntary. If players are being corrupted, they have a willing and eager hand in the process. There is no coercion (aside from the excesses of Norby Walters). Football is probably as corrupt as Wall Street and is still more fun to watch.

•

Armed with this cheerful perspective and a good night's sleep, the visitor decides to break the rules and sneak into the Hoosier Dome to watch the workouts.

So he disguises himself. This involves wearing a name tag that belongs to Bo Shembechler, which came into the visitor's hands through a third party. The visitor's mouth is dry and his palms are wet as he steps up to the entrance, which is guarded by a sweet gray-haired woman in a Wackenhut uniform.

Maybe I should have been Earl Bruce, he thinks.

But this is Indiana, and almost certainly the only coach this woman recognizes on sight is Bobby Knight. Once inside, the visitor slips his name tag into his pocket and tries to look like a young front-office guy for a team in transition--the Chiefs, maybe. At the coffee table, nobody gives him a second look.

All around him, legends of the game are taking their coffee from Styrofoam cups and nibbling on gooey pastries. Chuck Noll, wearing a black sweater and looking grim, is here. So are Marion Campbell and Forrest Gregg. You can see the faces of some former head coaches who have now been reduced to obscurity as assistants. Abe Gibron, who must weigh more than Jeff Zimmerman and was a head coach of the Bears before the days of Walter Payton and Jim McMahon. Dick Nolan is here, too. As thin and impeccable as Gibron is fat and disheveled, Nolan was coach of the 49ers when they almost went to a Super Bowl before Joe Montana and Bill Walsh.

Walsh is here, looking professorial. And Al Davis, looking like a guy who owns a trucking business: black windbreaker, conspicuous jewelry. Ron Meyer is here. He was head coach at SMU back when the trouble started. Then he went to the pros and coached the Patriots before they went to the Super Bowl. Now it is his wretched duty to suffer as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts.

Meyer is talking about how hard it is to sell a house in Dallas after what oil prices have done to the economy down there.

Gradually, things get under way. In one room under the stadium, the players coming through this morning are stripped to their shorts and first measured, then weighed. A couple of dozen scouts and assistant coaches (no head coaches) sit in the room and write down the figures as they are called off.

"Six-zero, three-zero."

"Two-three-four."

The players look blankly out at the crowd. Once a man has been weighed and measured, he is directed to another room, where his picture is taken, then across the hall to where his hand span is measured.

Next there is the bar. Everyone does as many bench presses as he can, with 185 pounds for backs and ends. Two-twenty-five for linemen. Before the players lift, a trainer uses calipers to measure their fat.

When a player is on the bench, struggling to squeeze out that last rep, the men waiting in line will shout encouragement.

"Come on, babe. Go. Get it, get it."

Otherwise, it is entirely quiet in the Hoosier Dome.

After the weights, it is out to the field, where players' vertical leap is measured and they are timed in the 40. There are throwing drills for quarterbacks. Receivers run patterns and catch balls. Linebackers run agility drills.

Everyone is watched and timed. Cross pens are constantly scratching figures into little black loose-leaf notebooks. Stopwatch buttons click like crickets on a summer night. Everyone below the rank of head coach has a stop watch slung around his neck.

To an impostor passing himself off as Bo Shembechler, it is all a major bore. But the coaches and scouts--the people who are supposed to be here--seem to be having a fine time. They alternately watch the proceedings and make small talk along the side lines. Even on this, the last day of the camp, they are simultaneously relaxed and attentive, the way a man can be when he is doing work he enjoys.

When Bill Parcells comes into the Hoosier Dome, he is late and he walks past half a dozen other head coaches, each of whom congratulates him on his Super Bowl season.

That's the reward for having a good eye, for being able to spot talent on the hoof. Parcells takes his time. When he does watch a player work out, it is with unemotional poker-player eyes.

Parcells, Bill Walsh, Al Davis and Ray Perkins spend their time on the Astroturf carpet, walking the side lines, talking with one another, occasionally watching the players do their drills.

The impostor leaves. No one has embraced him and asked why the hell he can't win a bowl game. He flies back to Pittsburgh with some of the same players who flew out to the camp and, also, with Parcells, who is stopped on both sides of the metal detector and asked for an autograph. That comes with having done well at earlier auctions. You get asked for your autograph, you get a new contract (the Atlanta Falcons tried to get Parcells away from New York, according to our good-buddy rumor) and you don't have to walk around with a stop watch hanging from your neck. Other guys, who think they know as much as you but have never proved it, wear the stop watch.

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The results of this meat market will be a while coming in. There will be some big winners and some big losers. Some coaches will get fired. Football will end for some of the players. (When one receiver ran a five-flat 40, three scouts sitting in front of the visitor drew a line through his name with their Cross pens.) Mike Shula will be drafted in the 12th round by Ray Perkins, who said in Indianapolis that he didn't think Shula would be drafted at all. Jeff Zimmerman didn't go until the third round. The word was that he could be so much better if he got down to 320 or so. Rod Woodson went to Pittsburgh and Chuck Noll was so pleased he could hardly stand it--until Woodson started making noises about running track instead of playing football unless he got the money he wanted. Woodson has a way of using money to drive grown men to despair.

The Norby Walters scandal grew and cost one Ohio State player his last year of eligibility. Evidence went to a grand jury. Newspaper stories followed one after another. The buying and the selling would go on for a long time.

It is an ugly scene in many ways. But there is this to say for it: In this meat market, even the meat makes money.

"A good draft can mean a good year. A great draft can mean a dynasty. A bad draft can cost a coach his job."

"'[Agents] will buy clothes for somebody to get him to sign. Lease him a car. Throw hookers at him.'"