“You’re putting that where?” Rookie hazing rituals.
If it’s your first year in the league, your fellow pros are going to want to indoctrinate you. No doubt attending college has given you a taste for massive group hazing. Now, being brutally sodomized with an unvarnished broomstick while rushing your frat probably wasn’t fun. But it was a small price to pay for the handsome reward of fitting in (in this case, literally) with the other guys in your house. Besides, at least the broomstick was cylindrical! Imagine if it had been a hockey stick! Talk about a square peg in a round hole!
Hazing is a test. Sure, it’s also a cruel and needless display of power born of the massive insecurities and unresolved inner anger of your new “brothers.” But it is also a test. If you accept your hazing with a minimum of fuss, your teammates will see you as a reliable colleague, one who won’t fold in the face of adversity. And that’s a valuable bond to establish, until half your teammates depart via trades or free agency the following year. Conversely, if you resist hazing, or act like a whiny baby about having all your clothes (wallet included) doused in lighter fluid and burned to a very fine ash, then you will be seen by everyone as a big pussy. Hope you enjoy eating lunch by yourself.
So get ready for a hazing redux your first year in the pros. The first one you need to know about is Bitch Duty. Bitch Duty means that you are the designated gofer to all of the veterans in the clubhouse. You must carry their luggage. You must handle their deliveries. You must carry their hashish through airport security. While annoying, this is all fairly benign stuff. If Bitch Duty is the only hazing you experience your first year, consider yourself lucky. And on a losing team.
The other classic rookie hazing ritual is the Rookie Dinner. This is when your veteran teammates “take you out” to dinner, only to order the most expensive food and wine on the menu and then stick you with the tab. This is especially fun to do with a seventh-round draft pick, who only gets a meager signing bonus and then must fight tooth and nail just to cling to your team’s final roster spot. You should see him start to freak out when he considers the possibility of having to split the tab equally, even though all he had was a panini and a mineral water, while everyone else at the table ordered five-pound lobsters and solid bricks of foie gras. Then, when he finds out he has to pay for the whole thing, he completely loses his shit. Man, does he get pissed! It’s priceless stuff.
Lugging bags and paying for dinners are not exactly extreme forms of hazing. There are, as you might suspect, more severe initiation rituals. The first of which is the Jump-In. This is when you stand in the middle of a circle of teammates and then each one “jumps in” to the circle to beat you senseless, often with some sort of foreign object. This mimics the hazing techniques of many inner-city street gangs, those great trailblazers of modern American fashion and social trends. Tight end Cam Cleeland was beaten with a sack full of coins by his fellow Saints in 1998. But instead of taking his subdural hematoma like a man, he went screaming to the media about it. What a little snitch.
The Jump-In is usually followed by the group Insertion. The number of times you will be penetrated and the objects that will penetrate you are strictly TBD. I suggest you close your eyes really hard and sing nursery rhymes to yourself. Everything usually turns out all right after that.
You also may be called on to do the obligatory Rookie Cross-dressing. Being forced to dress like a woman totally makes you gay, and your teammates will be more than happy to point that out to you. You may briefly become confused about your own sexual identity as a result of this, but I assure you this is a common occurrence, and nothing to worry about. Unless you’re gay. (See the end of this chapter.)
Other types of hazing exist and will vary by both team and region. You may have your hotel room bed short-sheeted. You may have lye poured down your throat. Some light bukkake may take place. It really depends on where you are, and just how bad your karma is. If you already have a wife and / or children, I suggest sequestering them until your rookie year is over.
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DID YOU KNOW?
The most accomplished hazer in pro sports history was Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, who plugged an astounding 132 assholes as both a player and a manager.
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Once that rookie year is finished, you will have the chance to become the hazer, rather than the hazee. It’s your opportunity to continue the horrendous cycle of peer-to-peer abuse, and it’s a great feeling to scar someone else’s psyche for a change.