It's mostly a lot of hard work. Has anyone forgotten the hard work bit? The five hours a day of practice (transportation, changing, showering, pre-work out, practice, post-work out, etc) plus then going home to do hw in order to get a decent GPA... dude I dunno about anyone else but it's just a lot of work in order to play sports and do well at school.
I remember three-hour practices every day of the week during the soccer season. Coach had us run up and down the bleachers in a full-sized stadium, and when we were tired, had us run up and down a series of 45-degree inclines. We were always running--practicing drills, playing side-against-side, or just running, including repeated wind sprints--except three times: (1) after our first mile run, at the beginning of practice; (2) our mid-practice water break, which lasted about five minutes; and (3) after our second mile run, at the end of practice (we had to match or better our earlier time or run it again).
Probably the worst weren't the practices in November when we had to wear gloves to keep our hands from chapping and knit caps to keep our ears warm (and keep running to counteract the biting cold wind). The worst ones were the practices in August when it was still over 95 degrees at 9:00 p.m. We'd stand there steaming, little clouds of vapor around our heads, at the end of a long, difficult practice while Coach tore the slackers a new one.
I think straight male jocks are taught and conditioned to submerge themselves into one unified masculine consciousness, what is referred to as "the team." I think it's probably a very deep experience for them where at some level -- at least while working with the team on the field -- they get to a point where they feel as though they ARE each other.
I think this state of a fused male identity is so deep that they aren't even aware of it -- because they aren't supposed to be aware of it.
At those times--the end of practice, on those hot August nights, standing there, weary in every muscle, drunk with fatigue--the homoeroticism was largely lost on me. I saw Chris's curly black chest hair, damp with sweat--or Dave's sculpted, muscular ass, or Emmanuel's rich dark-chocolate skin stretched over razor-sharp abs--but I was too tired to get hard. Or even think about getting hard. They were just members of my team.
My visual memories provided
lots of later jackoff material, but I was too far gone, energy-wise, to even think of sex in the moment. I'd bet most of us were in that fugue state.
I did indeed feel a sense of "fused male identity," but not quite to the point that I felt I was someone else. I just barely retained my individuality through having my own separate perspective. Yet we were aware of "the team," as an entity somehow transcending our individualities.
I'm stumbling along here, trying to describe what in previous posts resonates with my experience of being on soccer teams from the age of seven until I graduated from high school. Perhaps the sense of "team spirit" was just a delusion caused by the togetherness of our collective exhaustion--but I'd like to think the "fused male identity" was not fake, was not manufactured in any arbitrary sense merely by our circumstances. In those moments, at the end of soccer practice those hot August nights, as I looked around at other weary faces, a powerful feeling of shared community washed over me, cleansing me of any other characteristic than "member of the team."
NCbear (who realizes he just waxed awfully poetic just now :redface
