Why you’re in Detroit: traveling.
Business travel might be the most annoying part of being a professional athlete. Maybe you’re with a New York team and have the good fortune of playing most of your road games against nearby teams from the many cities that are tightly bunched into the Northeast Corridor. But if you play for Seattle, you are fucked. No matter what, you’ll be traveling on weekends and holidays. You’ll be taking chartered red-eye flights and be expected to take the field six hours later. And when you arrive, the airport limo may occasionally be three minutes late. This is the quiet suffering that fans don’t see. Maybe if they knew what it was like to travel forty-five days every year in exchange for millions of dollars and five months off, they’d appreciate you a little more.
PACKING. Road trips can last upward of ten days, and even longer if you play baseball and are in the middle of a divorce proceeding. So it’s important to know what to pack. Be sure to bring two bags with you on every road trip: a folding bag for your suit (turn the jacket inside out to prevent wrinkles!) and a rolling suitcase. I suggest buying Tumi luggage. It’s expensive, but nothing moistens a hotel lobby groupie’s panties quite like the sight of Tumi luggage. Having expensive luggage lets people know you have expensive shit inside your luggage. That’s well worth paying $1,000 per piece. And if you buy Vuitton luggage, you are legally allowed to walk into the hotel naked from the waist down.
AIR TRAVEL. If you play for big-revenue teams like the Mavericks or Redskins, you’ll be boarding a private, team-owned jet to fly to road cities. The jet will include first-class seating, satellite television, a fully stocked bar, a four-star restaurant, a crepe station, a fully operational health club, two hospitals, and a petting zoo. If you play for small-revenue teams like the Clippers or Royals, you’ll be flying AirTran. Sorry. Be sure to bring your own food, or else you’ll get the standard team “dinner” consisting of a day-old turkey sandwich, Humpty Dumpty potato chips, and a can of Veryfine Cran-Raspberry Cocktail. AirTran will also provide Shasta and unsalted pretzel nubs.
MEALS. You’ll be given a union-mandated food stipend for road trips, usually around $200 a day. It’s not much, but it should be enough to just barely get by.
BUS TRAVEL. Regardless of the length of your trip, you will find yourself on a team bus at some point. The team bus is used for road trips of two hours or less, and for shuttling you from the airport to the hotel and back. When you board the bus, go immediately to the back. Only kiss-asses sit at the front. Your coach will sit at the very front of the bus. The only person he will make chitchat with is the driver. Trust me, he has more in common with the driver than he does with you. So don’t talk to him unless you like your casual conversations awkward and stilted. Your team bus and team plane have specific departure times that your coach has noted on his detailed trip itinerary. Your coach spent hours overthinking this itinerary, so do not test him by arriving late. If you arrive late, your team bus will leave without you and you will be fined and suspended for a quarter. Unless you’re really good, in which case you can show up whenever the fuck you want.
HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS. When you arrive at your hotel, you’ll be assigned a room. Certain superstars have suite clauses in their contracts that guarantee them a deluxe suite to themselves on the road (complete with champagne-glass Jacuzzi). But if you do not have such a clause, you’ll be sharing a standard room with a teammate. Veterans usually get to choose their roommates. But if you are a rookie, you will be matched with someone via a pairing system that is as poorly designed as the one that determines female freshman roommates at Middlebury. If you are clean, your roommate will be a slob. If you like to go to sleep early, he’ll be a night owl. If you’re in favor of fair trade, he will be against it. But you can probably survive this unpleasant circumstance so long as you adhere to a few simple rules.
ROOM ETIQUETTE. First, always tie a sock on the doorknob when masturbating. And make sure it’s a sock you haven’t “used,” if you catch my drift. Second, always bring a travel edition of Connect Four. You aren’t just connecting checkers when you play that game. You’re building relationships that will stand the test of eight to twelve hours. And always bring your own alcohol. You and your roommate may have nothing in common, but years of watching romantic comedies has taught me that people can overcome their differences and really bond if they get stone-cold shitfaced off margaritas and dance around to James Brown together. No matter where you’re from, alcohol is the social glue that brings us together in a sloppy, forgettable, and disingenuous fashion.