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Wednesday, September 27, 2000

Piling it on
It's a harsh world inside the fumble pile
By Lee Goddard
Caller-Times

David Adame/Caller-Times

Being a football on the bottom of a fumble pile can be a dangerous thing. Banquete players Chris Bates (82), Charlie Otahal (12) and Kevin Dueitt (66) all show what scrambling to recover a loose fumble can look like.

The first time Anthony Harris emerged from a fumble pile, his reaction was typical for someone who had just been pinched, scratched and had an opponent digging into his facemask, trying to gouge his eyes.
   "I was hoping I'd never see a fumble again," said Harris, now a junior linebacker at Miller High School.
   But Harris would see more fumbles. And things actually would get even rougher for him in future fumble piles.
   From the stands, it may just seem like a cluster of bodies fighting for control of the ball, but on the field, the fumble pile - also known to players as the "dogpile" - takes on a brutal form all its own. In the middle of these scrums, players use almost any means possible to get the ball, with a little tactical maneuvering thrown in.
   "Everybody is jumping on you," said Rickey Jones, Harris' teammate. "It's pretty hectic. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in the pile. Spitting, biting, punching. It's a pretty gruesome thing to be in."

   'It's crazy'
   Piles even have stories that seem straight out of "The Longest Yard," the 1974 movie starring Burt Reynolds. In that movie, former NFL player Ray Nitschke plays a prison guard/linebacker who is on the field against Reynolds' team of convicts. To get back at Bogdanski - Nitschke's character - several plays are called where Bogdanski is allowed through the line and the ball rifled below the waist of the cup-less Bogdanski. Then the whole prison team piles on Bogdanski, obviously in pain.
   Sometimes, players said, life imitates art."Nothing bad has really happened to me, but my dad used to tell me about a fumble play they had when he played," Banquete quarterback Charlie Otahal said. "Everybody would be in on the play, and they would all come flying in and take shots at the guys on the bottom of the pile."
   Many times, players never even see the play that causes the whole pile to form.
   "Most of the time, we don't see the fumble," Jones said. "You're playing and all of the sudden, somebody yells, 'Fumble!' You don't even see it, but you go to the pile. Some people are stupid and try to run with it, but most people just try to fall on it, and that's when the piling on begins."
   Just how the players come piling on can affect your time in the dogpile. Some slide in at an angle and try to work their way in from the side. Others like to dive in straight from the top and fight their way down to the ball.
   And it isn't always a cohesive pile that forms. Occasionally, there are piles where the players are scattered in small groups fighting toward the ball, so players don't feel the weight of teammates and opponents heaped up on them.
   Other times, there is weight concentrated right on top of one player.
   "It's crazy," Harris said. "It feels like you've got a car stuck up on you."

   'Punched and kicked'
   But that's just the beginning. Once the pile takes shape and the referees gain control of the action outside the mass, the battle begins for control of the ball.
   In future fumble piles, the eye-gouging seemed minor to Harris, who was once bitten on the leg by an opponent in a pile.
   Jones has been punched, kicked, spit on, poked in the eye and had someone wrap their arms around his helmet and try to choke him into letting the ball go.
   And, unlike boxing, there is hitting below the waist.
   "You get punched in the face and other parts of the body," said Banquete tight end Chris Bates, who admitted he has been hit in a real sensitive area. "Punched and kicked. When you have the ball, they do want you to let go of it."
   To his credit, Bates held on. But you do wonder about some of the opponents on the Bulldogs' schedule when you hear Kevin Dueitt's story.
   "Yeah, the dogpile. I've had experiences in there," said Dueitt, a Banquette linebacker. "Choking, gouging, nails to the face.
   "But worst of all," Dueitt added with a tight grasping gesture, "I have been squeezed below the waist. It's only happened once . . . luckily for me."

   'Anything to get the ball'
   Players learn from what has been done to them in the dogpiles. Bates admits that what has happened to him, he has done in return - short of punching someone below the waist.
   And Harris has taken his fumble experiences and made himself into an effective dogpile fighter, he said.
   "I scratch back. I pinch back," he said. "Punch to the ribs. Anything to get the ball. Anything and everything you can do without getting caught."
   That doesn't mean a pile can't have a little strategy involved. Dueitt once came up on a pile and, when he saw the ball was still free, jumped in. But there was no way for him to get the ball and keep it himself without an opponent having the opportunity to swipe it.
   So he gave the ball to a teammate.
   "I just took the ball and shoved it into my teammate's chest," Dueitt said. "I pushed it in there and held it in there so the opponent couldn't get it."

   'Here we go again'
   All of this may go on while the referees are trying to sort through the pile and find who has the ball. It can be an agonizing process.
   While Harris felt the weight of people on top of him during the play, it's when the un-piling starts that Jones begins to feel the pain.
   "You don't think about it until you hear the whistle," Jones said. "You try to get up, but can't. That's when it hurts. You've got 20 people on top of you and they're not just lying there. They're all moving around, trying to get to the ball."
   As for Harris, he's learned to deal with the dogpile. But every now and then, when he sees the ball hit the ground, the experiences of that first pile creep back in for just a split-second.
   "Sometimes it's like, 'Oh, no. Here we go again.'"


Staff writer Lee Goddard can be reached at 886-3613 or by e-mail at goddardl@caller.com

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