Three and Out (25 page)

“We've got a lot of motherfuckers we've got to pay back this year.

“It all starts right here, right now. Everything we want—revenge, respect, the Big Ten title—it all starts THIS VERY MINUTE!

“So get in. ‘Big Ten champs' on three! One, two, three—”

“BIG TEN CHAMPS!”

They didn't walk but
ran
to every station and got to work immediately, a stark contrast to the confusion and reluctance the players showed exactly twelve months earlier.

As the legendary football coach Lou Holtz said: “Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated.”

Among the most motivated were projected stars like Brandon Graham, Mike Martin, and David Molk, but also two-star offensive lineman Patrick Omameh, who developed stretch marks on his chest from growing from 255 pounds to 305, all muscle, and walk-on Erik Gunderson, who lost 15 pounds in the first three days—and kept losing more. (Despite the amazing gains, steroid use was one of the few rumors Michigan football did not have to deal with under Rodriguez, and from everything I saw, rightly so.)

*   *   *

I'd heard so much about these modern gladiators and their weight room heroics—and seen enough of it, too—that I wanted to find out for myself just how much harder it really is than what we weekend warriors put ourselves through just to avoid buying “relaxed-fit” jeans.

I signed a waiver to work out with Barwis and his staff. Barwis's grandfather broke horses well into his sixties, but Mike was a troubled teenager on Philadelphia's mean streets until he finally leveraged his 151 IQ to find his calling.

And find it he has. Rich Rodriguez accepted Michigan's offer on one condition: Barwis could bring his entire staff and get an unlimited budget to overhaul the weight room. A million dollars later, the Wolverines' gym is world-class.

After eating an uncharacteristically healthy breakfast, I walked through the doors of the Michigan Wolverine weight room Monday, March 16, at 10:00 a.m. for my first ninety-minute workout. I joined a group of pro players from Michigan and West Virginia, who worked out between the two groups of current players. I was to show up three times a week for six weeks—“if you last that long,” said Barwis, whose alums call his gym the Barwis School of Pukitude for a reason.

Barwis conducted a baseline test on me. I weighed some twenty pounds over my “playing weight” and carried 26 percent body fat. Not good. But when you're forty-four, eating like a lineman, but exercising like, well, a sportswriter, something was bound to give.

The formalities behind us, the fun began. “Time to get after it!” Barwis yelled in his ridiculously raspy voice. (At the kids' summer football camp, one brave ten-year-old raised his hand to ask Barwis, “Is that your real voice, or is that your ‘tough guy' voice?” I can answer: It's both.)

“Bacon! You're working with Foote!”

That would be Larry Foote, the former Michigan All-American linebacker turned two-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steeler.

Foote was one of more than a dozen professional players who come back every year to work with Barwis, who refuses payment. “Barwis is crazy, but I love him,” Foote told me. “He will get you doing things you never dreamed of.”

Foote was right. Barwis constantly yelled at me to “move that bar!” Back and forth, all day, through twenty-some different lifts, pull-downs, curls, and all manner of squats. We did everything at least three sets each, consisting of ten reps each time. That's about six hundred reps per workout, for you folks scoring at home, not one of which I would have done without these maniacs pushing me.

Whatever your limits are, they double them—so being in better shape would have spared me nothing—then they make you do twice as many reps as any sane person would do. They're also fascists about form, so each set feels twice as hard as it would doing it your way—that is, the wrong way—which is why your personal records get cut in half when you're working out with these guys.

And you can forget about getting a breather. Between each set, while Foote was lifting, just for fun they made me do plyometrics, like lunge jumps, abdominal crunches, or inclined push-ups, so I could never decide which was going to kill me first: the lifting or the stuff between the lifting.

Just fifteen minutes into my first workout, I was sweating like a pig and panting like a dog. You could have taken my pulse by touching my hair.

By 10:30, I already had the look of a man in deep trouble—mouth breathing, head back, eyes half-closed—when I realized I had to find a trash can, and fast. Barwis just pointed his thumb over his shoulder to the Rubbermaid barrel in the corner, then calmly returned to loading more plates on Foote's weight bar. I made it just in time and let loose, repeatedly and loudly.

A great cheer went up. “Yeahhhh!”

“Go, Bacon, Go!”

“Get rid of the poison!”

“We have a winner!”

There is a snobbism in the Michigan weight room, but it's not based on your stats or your weights, just how hard you're working. I was the oldest, weakest, and fattest guy there by a long shot, and I was fully prepared to take a lot of crap the minute I walked through the door. But I never took a single shot for any of that. So long as I was sweating, the players would yell and urge me on and high-five me after each lift.

In their eyes, I now had the same status as every other guy who'd puked in that trash can—which is to say, everyone.

When I left Schembechler Hall that day, I had just started going through something called hypertrophy, which occurs when you push your body so far past its limits that “it's basically a catastrophic event to your body,” Barwis said. “Like a car accident.” And that explains the incredible pain.

When I tried to wipe some sweat off my brow, I discovered I could no longer raise my right arm, so I grabbed the sleeve with my other hand and whacked my face with the powerless limb. Eureka. Walking to my car, my legs felt like prosthetics, as if I needed some kind of remote control to operate them.

When I got home and collapsed on the couch, I filled over two pages with simple tasks that suddenly seemed almost impossible, from tying my shoes to flossing my teeth. Even taking a shower proved problematic, because I could not raise my hands high enough to shampoo my hair.

I then made a second list of all the things that didn't hurt, which consisted of a single entry: blinking. That was it.

Of course, you think I'm kidding, and doing all this for laughs. But any Barwis graduate reading this is nodding: “Yep, sounds about right.”

As I lay curled up in the fetal position on my couch, it occurred to me Michigan's players go through hypertrophy twice a year and have to go to classes after each session.

How they do this is a mystery to me.

By the middle of my second week, the hypertrophy started to fade, and it became just a matter of grinding it out. I started getting the hang of it, the ripped blisters on my hands stopped bleeding, and my form improved. Once I figured out that Barwis's goal for us was not making beach muscles but increasing our core strength, I understood why we did so many squats and dozens of balancing tricks.

I was coming so close to competence, I could almost taste it.

After three weeks I was beginning to think I might just make it, until one day Barwis announced I'd be joining the rest of the guys for an additional half hour of laps, hundred-yard dashes, sprints, and suicides after each workout.

“If you're going to go around claiming you did this,” Barwis said, poking me in the chest, “you have to do
all
of it.”

We ran in two groups, the fat boys and the speedsters. I was lumped with the fat boys, of course, but I couldn't catch even the long snap center recovering from a broken toe.

Near the end of our next workout, Barwis told us we had to run the width of the field and back, three times. “Y'all got to finish in fifty seconds,” he said. “Bacon in sixty. But Bacon, if you don't make it, everyone else has to run again.”

The glares from the NFLers were all the motivation I needed.

I took off like I was being chased by Larry Foote. But after five of the six widths, I had only kept pace and was running out of gas. This was not good. With one width left, I knew I had to find something extra. Most of the guys had finished and were looking back at me, huffing and puffing. “Move that white ass, Bacon!” I dug deep and pulled and lurched and thrashed every limb of my body toward that finish line.

“Fifty-eight!” Barwis bellowed. I had made it.

The guys cheered and walked up to high-five me, but I ran right past them straight for the trash can, puked again, wiped my mouth, and got back on the line for our final sprints. My threshold for … well, just about everything had doubled.

“That's the first time I saw you run,” Barwis said, “when I didn't want to punch you in the jaw.”

It doesn't get any better than that.

On my last day, with all the guys cheering me on, I doubled my bench press to 145 pounds—doing it their way, which entails keeping your arms wide, your back flat on the bench, and holding the bar an inch above your chest for three counts before pushing back up. I also squatted 180, with much better form, tripling my starting mark. I had lost only ten pounds, but they had reduced my body fat from 26 percent to 16 percent.

If they could get a forty-four-year-old man to do all that in six weeks, you can imagine what they can do with the real athletes in that weight room. In the winter of 2009, I was not surprised to see them setting record after record—and enjoying it.

Over dinner one night, Mike Martin and friends told me a story about the “40 complex,” a diabolical regimen that requires you to do eight upright rows, then go right into eight clean and jerks, eight simple jerks (over your head), eight more clean and jerks, then finish with eight bent-over rows. You have to do all of it without ever letting go of the bar or putting it on the floor. You drop the bar, you have to start the entire set over until you finish it the right way.

I knew that drill too well. Larry Foote, no stranger to hard work, asked me while we were warming up one day, “Hey, Bacon, can you count to forty?”

A week earlier, I would not have paused. But three workouts with the Barwis crowd had me doubting just about everything.

“I think so,” I finally muttered.

“Well, you're going to find out.”

Having finished the first four sets, I forgot about the last set, the bent-over row, and dropped the bar. I will never forget Jim Plocki screaming in my face, alarmed, “NOOOOOO!”

I have never dreaded anything more than picking up that bar and doing it all over again. There is a reason why these football players could not sleep the night before a big workout. They're
scary.

When Mike Williams, one of Michigan's defensive backs, was in the throes of his 40 complex that March, he was standing with the bar on his chest, doing his reps, when his legs buckled and he fell back to the floor, on his back. Amazingly, he had the presence of mind not to let the bar touch the ground, which would require him to start the whole thing over.

That's when ten teammates ran to help him, but they did not touch him or the bar. When they saw he was all right, they started yelling at him to get up and finish it.

“It was, like, ‘C'mon, Mike, you can do it!'” Martin said. “And he was, like, ‘I can't, I can't!' Almost crying.”

But Williams didn't let it hit the floor, and bit by bit, he found a way to get up. It took him about five minutes to get back on his feet, but he did, and then he finished it.

“And when he did,” Martin recalled, “the whole weight room went
nuts.
”

“I'll never forget that,” Ryan Van Bergen said. “We just know there's no one with a hidden agenda on this team. It's what we do.”

On Friday night, March 13, they held the Night of the Wolverine, the culmination of their winter workouts, with stands set up for family, friends, and select fans. It was an Olympic-style competition—whose points counted for the Wolverine Olympics—consisting of events like the medicine ball toss, the Plyo-Box jump, and the sled drive. It wasn't a punishment but a celebration of what they'd accomplished—capped by an egg-eating contest à la
Cool Hand Luke
.

Whenever you asked any of the players about the coming season, the most common remark that spring was “I can't wait.”

Rodriguez's vision for what his Wolverines could be was slowly coming into focus.

*   *   *

On Sunday, August 23, the 2009 Wolverines gathered on the practice field for Michigan's Media Day. When the
Free Press
asked freshman Brandin Hawthorne, who had enrolled in January from Pahokee, Florida, what winter conditioning was like, he said, “It's crazy. We'll work out from, like, 8 to 10:30. We come back later, have one-on-ones, seven-on-sevens, a little passing. Then I'll go watch a little film.”

The
Free Press
also asked freshman receiver Je'Ron Stokes, who arrived from Philadelphia in June, about Michigan's off-season program. “Hooooo!” Stokes said. “A typical week is working from 8 a.m. in the morning to 6 or 7 at night, Monday through Saturday.”

And that was starting in June?

“Yes, sir,” Stokes said. “We do the weight room at least three times a week, and seven-on-sevens and one-on-ones. Speed and agility on the other days. Every day we have something new to get ready for the season. The coaches have done a great job of stressing the importance of getting us ready for the big season that we're about to have.”

Their answers fed into the aura of Mike Barwis, who had become something of a cult figure—so much so that Michigan State felt compelled to counter, on its website, with the fourteen hours its players endured every Sunday.

The 2009 squad looked better in every way: experience, leadership, and team spirit.