Rough Draft: Obsessing Over 40 Times

In "Rough Draft," lawyer-turned-writer-turned-football-player Clay Travis recounts his experience training for the 2008 NFL draft alongside some future pros. The following is Part 7 of 10 installments (read Part 6 here) that FanHouse will roll out every weekday leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft on April 25.

Our forty times are not improving. And Kurt Hester is coming undone over our continued failure. With less than a month to go until the combine, Hester sets up six taped lines on the field at a distance of ten yards. "I want y'all to try and run ten yards in six steps," he says. The idea behind the tape strips is to make us take longer strides so that we can get out of our starts faster. I do my best to make my strides match the six pieces of tape, but they're too far apart for me to cover in only six steps.

Hester leaves us to go to the other end of the gym and time some of us on full forty's. Geoff Schwartz, offensive tackle from Oregon, and Steve Justice, center from Wake Forest stand awaiting the cue from Hester. After Geoff Schwartz's first sprint, Hester double clicks on the stopwatch and it doesn't correctly record a time. We can hear Hester cursing from the other end of the field. As Schwartz stops to talk to me, he says, "I didn't get my f**king time because the stopwatch didn't work. I'd expect him (Hester) to have a great stopwatch and he doesn't."

Steve Justice overhears us. "What, like a $10,000 stopwatch?" he asks.

During this conversation Hester makes an error timing Peyton Hillis, and this time his rant is so loud that every single player turns to look at him. In the distance Hester is jumping up and down squeezing the stopwatch in his hand, arm muscles bulging. Then with a final scream, "Motherf**ker!" Hester yells, he sends the stopwatch flying into the wall of the gym. Pieces go everywhere, eventually raining down onto the turf.

"I need a new stopwatch," Hester says, calm now, hands lightly resting on his hips.


A few moments later Mark Sutton, survivor of a crocodile attack, returns and passes the stopwatch to Kurt Hester, alligator hunter. "What'd you do with the remnants of the last one?" Sutton asks.

"It's out here somewhere," says Hester, gesturing to the debris around his feet.

Geoff Schwartz approaches me again, "Maybe now he's got a $10,000 stopwatch," Schwartz says.

After attempting ten yards in only six steps, we move over to a new ten-yard starting area only this time Hester has reduced us to five strips of tape. "I want y'all dumbasses to cut a step out," he says, "if you can't do it without the tape then focus on hitting the steps with the tape. You won't have the tape at the combine, but your steps have to be right."

We try to make our first five steps coincide with the five strips of tape on the turf. No one can nail it perfectly although several guys are getting closer. In particular Tennessee tight end Brad Cottam is almost perfectly in sync with the taped steps. Cottam is 6'7.5" and 270 pounds, but once he gets moving he can cover the final 30 yards as fast as anyone in camp. It's only the forty start that he's had trouble with during training. Now, suddenly, Cottam is exploding off the line as well as anyone, the best starter in combine training.

Hester pulls me aside after one of Cottam's starts, "Big Brad is going to blow them away at the combine," he says.

On this day, Big Brad is floating through his first ten yards, staying low, taking advantage of his long legs, and striding through the ten yards in five steps. Personally, there is no way that I can come anywhere near striding ten yards in only five steps. I try and mimic Cottam's stride but I lose whatever minimal speed I already have. Cottam's stock is already rising rapidly thanks to his Senior Bowl performance. With most scouts projecting Cottam's forty time at 4.75-4.8, and Cottam running a low 4.6 with ease, it's altogether possible we've got a workout warrior, a player who is going to leave the experts shaking their heads at the Indianapolis combine, the next Matt Jones.

Cottam, a native of suburban Memphis, didn't play football until his sophomore year of high school. "I wanted to play basketball most when I started high school," he says. "I always thought I'd play basketball; I mean, I could dunk when I was in 8th grade." Michael Oher, who played basketball at Briarcrest while Cottam was at Evangelical Christian, recalls playing against a dominant Cottam. "Man, he blocked my shot so hard one time, that's when I decided to quit playing basketball. Right then and there." Asked whether he remembers the play, Cottam grins, "First time he got the basketball, he tried to shoot on me, and I swatted it away. It had no chance."

Cottam played tight end and defensive end at Evangel Christian High School and was recruited to the University of Tennessee as a 230 pound tight end. He redshirted his freshman year and then his injuries began. "The really huge setback was my right shoulder. I got to UT and it got worse and worse and worse. I tried to tough it out my freshman year, but my first spring practice I couldn't move it, and then I ended up tearing up a tendon between my thumb and finger too. So I got my hand fixed, then had shoulder surgery. The shoulder never felt any better. I played another season. Then after my sophomore season, I had a total reconstructive shoulder surgery."

After three seasons at Tennessee (including a redshirt year), the highly touted Cottam had just two catches for 34 yards.

"So then, I played the next (junior) season," says Cottam, "but I felt like I was still recovering. Everything was going fine health-wise until the end of the season when my groin started bothering me. I did a bunch of rehab, and got to spring practice, and it was to the point where I didn't even want to walk. I ended up having sports hernia surgery."

In 2006, Cottam started six games with 14 catches for 182 yards. Everything was looking up as he prepared for his senior season. "The day before we started work for California, I dislocated my wrist getting tackled. I went in the next play and tried to block somebody because I didn't think it was hurt that bad, just a sprain. That was awful, it hurt so bad we went to the hospital. I was looking at the x-ray, thinking, 'Okay, nothing's broken.' But then the doctor said, 'Well, this bone's not supposed to be up here,' it's dislocated.' And I said, 'Well, go head and pop it back into the place.' The doctor said, 'you don't understand, this is serious, if the bone doesn't go back where it's supposed to be, it's located right beside a nerve, you could lose the use of your hand.'"

Within 3.5 hours of the injury, Cottam was put to sleep and undergoing surgery for the dislocated wrist, lost for the first seven games of the season. "They'd basically taken out the fullback position so we could play two tight ends," he says. "We were going to catch a ton of balls, me and Chris (Brown, the other Tennessee tight end). I got back in time for the final five games of the season."

In those final five games, Cottam caught 5 passes for 125 yards. After five years at Tennessee, Cottam's final stats were 21 catches for 341 yards and six surgeries. Now Cottam is attempting to prove himself on the NFL stage. And he's got a lot of scouts to convince. Pro Football Weekly rates him the 16th best tight end in the draft.

If Brad Cottam's stock is likely to surge based on his forty time, Peyton Hillis, fullback from Arkansas, is likely to see his stock tumble if he can't do better with his starts. Hillis is having trouble getting over the fact that his strides don't match the strips of tape laid out by Hester. "I can't run like this," Hillis growls. "Normally I just run. I'm thinking too much now. Worrying."

Hillis isn't alone. Nothing sobers up a joking conversation faster than staring down the barrel of a timed forty. The guys mill around, skittish colts in the pen before a race, full of nervous energy, high-stepping and rubbing their hands together. "I don't even think anymore, Bookman," Marcus Monk tells me, "I just get down and then I go." Monk pulls up his shirt and wipes off his mouth. Hillis looks at Monks abs and shakes his head ruefully. "White people can't get abs, Bookman, they just can't."


Certainly, this white guy can't. I'd hoped that after all the training my abs would come in nicely for the first time in my life. Thus far they haven't. "If I turn in just the right direction you can see my abs really well," I told my wife recently.

"No, you can't," my wife says.

I'm nervous about being timed as well. I want to improve but I'm also terrified that I haven't. I line up, tuck my chin, and explode off the line, intent on taking as long of strides as possible. I glide past Hester and turn around. I feel like I was moving pretty well.

"How'd I do," I ask, barely having any breath left.

"You went before I was ready, asshole," Hester says.

I run 5.7's on my next two sprints. An improvement of .4 from my initial times. This impresses Frank Okam, defensive tackle from Texas. "You almost cut a half-second off already, that's pretty good." Geoff Schwartz, who runs a 5.4 today, is less impressed. "You should have to run in a fat suit like me," he says.

From forty yards away Kurt Hester calls out, "The best performances in the forty come when y'all run in a relaxed position. When your muscles tense up your speed slows."

Marcus Monk's, wide receiver from Arkansas, first time is a 4.7 and he wants to run a 4.5. "I'll get that 4.5 before I'm through," he says, as he stretches beside me. "How'd you do Bookman?" he asks. "5.7," I say. "That's better Bookman," he says offering a fist pound. When I ask Monk whether he's going to be nervous at the actual combine he says he isn't. "Especially not if you're gonna be there Bookman. I'll find you, give you a fist pound and say, 'Put this mug in the book.'"

Ryan Karl, Tennessee's undersized linebacker who is trying to make the move to safety, runs a 4.8 the first time. He needs to run at least a 4.6 to have a football future. Chris Brown, Tennessee's starting tight end last year, also runs a 4.8. "Probably need to get it down to a 4.6 Bookman," he says. After three sprints Monk has his 4.5 (a 4.59) and I've gotten as low as a 5.81 to shave .36 seconds off my original forty time.

Peyton Hillis is furious with his times. He's run in the 4.7-4.8 range and is convinced that he's not going to run a good forty time. "I'm just not going to be able to do it," he says, "I'm a football player and this running style just doesn't work for me." He talks aloud to himself for a while, waving his arms and cursing. The toothpick that a jaunty Hillis began training camp chewing on is long gone. Eventually Hillis settles on the fact that his triceps are too big to allow him to pump his arms properly. "See," he says, "moving his arms across his body, my triceps just don't let me do it like everyone else. They're too dang-gone big." Hester pulls a fuming Hillis aside to individually work with him.

"Hey," says Hester, from drill sergeant to consoler in an instant, "you're going to be fine. We can do this."

Later, in the shower, I take a moment to reflect as the hot water pours down on top of me. After a month, I'm at least four yards faster in my forty time. My speed has gone from atrocious to merely godawful. Outside the shower I can hear the guys talking about their times and where they've improved or not improved. I can hear Geoff Schwartz talking about his 5.4. In a pause in the conversation, I take the opportunity to utter my first ever forty trash talk.

"Hey Schwartz," I say, "my forty time is going to be better than yours."


The couch in front of the television is more crowded than usual. The Discovery Channel show, The Haunting is on, and everyone is completely enmeshed in the story. The story involves a former funeral home that a boy claims is haunted. The lights are all out in the locker room and whenever anything scary happens everyone jumps. Several times guys stand up and say they can't watch anymore but then they return, glued to the story.

The parent's refusal to believe their son sees ghosts is much debated, particularly the removal of light bulbs so the boy can't sleep with his lights on. "That's so f**ked up," says Oregon offensive tackle Geoff Schwartz. "I would have run away."

Everyone is so engrossed in the story that the start of the lift time comes and goes without anyone noticing. Finally Kurt Hester rips open the door and finds us all sitting in front of the television. "What the f**k are y'all doing?" he yells. "Get the f**k out here."

Schwartz, Marcus Monk, and Chris Brown all persuade me to stay inside and find out what happens to the eldest son at the end of the haunting. I stay for twenty minutes, and then the story becomes too eerie for me. I think I hear sounds from the locker room and I open the door and walk inside. It's completely empty. When I come back out into the television room, the little boy is rocking silently on the bed chanting to himself while spectral figures hover in the distance. That's it for me.

I head outside into the bright lights of the workout. As soon as I get to the weights Schwartz and Monk accost me, "Bookman what happened to that boy?" they ask.

"I gotta work out."

"You don't have to work out," says Schwartz.

"It's dark in there."

"You scared?" Monk asks.

"Yeah," I say.

"Hey," says the 6'7" 340 pound Schwartz, "me too."

The locker room television remains center stage after the lift, a place to fall down and relax after a draining day. Today we're watching a combine favorite, the Maury Povich Who's Your Daddy episodes, a fat white woman who is married to another fat white guy is unsure whether the husband is the father or another extremely skinny white guy is.

"Hey, Bookman," says Chris Brown, "you better not laugh, this could be you soon."

Before the child's father can be determined the room votes during commercial break. We're evenly split 4-4 until Weston Dacus, linebacker from Arkansas, switches his vote. "I'm wavering now," he says, "the skinny guy seems like the dad to me. Look at those eyes." The room's vote switches to 5-3 in favor of the skinny white man.

Dacus is prescient; the skinny white guy is the winner. "I told y'all," drawls Dacus/McConaughey.

After yoga I drive Marcus Monk home to a fancy and fully-furnished apartment complex, the Allura, near Nashville's Cool Springs Mall. It's dark, cold outside, and Monk is bundled up in several layers of clothes. As we drive through the apartment complex we don't see a single person. I ask Monk, the high school valedictorian at his hometown of LePanto, Arkansas, what he's planning on doing once he gets back to the apartment for the weekend.

"Just chillin', Bookman. I don't have to do anything to have a good time. Just put on the television and hang out."

It's already become a running joke with the guys about Monk's disinterest in going out to bars or clubs. At the beginning of each week he talks a big game. "Oh, this week I'm definitely coming out. Text me." As it gets closer to the weekend he maintains his enthusiasm when asked but the excitement level in his voice decreases. "I'm there. Text me." Until, eventually and without fail, Friday and Saturday night arrive and Monk drops off the radar screen. "I've sworn off sex so I run a good forty," Monk says. "I'm going to explode out there." Or as Kurt Hester puts it, "Monk's a monk." Tonight, as I drop him off at his apartment Monk climbs out of the car. Then he turns around and looks at me, "If I don't run a 4.5 I'm going to cut my legs off," he says.


Saturday's morning workout is incredibly difficult, but I'm learning that as the combine training intensifies, it's also becoming liberating: You can't think about anything else, you can't worry about anything else, there's just the drill and your body moving, football-training nirvana.

As soon as a particular repetition is over, you become aware of the time that's passed but while you're in the moment, physically doing the act, there's a degree of release that's not similar to anything I've ever felt before. Football is controlled fury, about training your body to act and react without thought; your body has to move before your brain can process everything it needs to do. Training for the combine isn't just about learning so many new body movements and controls, it's about learning them so well that they become second-nature.

But in between training sets humor is omnipresent, particularly when I'm involved. Today Wil Santi is training a 14 year old boy. While we take a break the boy runs a timed forty. From the sideline he seems to be moving so slow it's impossible that he'll ever reach the finish line. When the boy finishes, Santi looks down at his stopwatch.

"5.4," he calls, so everyone can hear it, "he beat Bookman."

Marcus Monk, who due to the cold of the early morning gym is training in long sleeve UnderArmour that he has yet to remove the tags from, howls with glee. Ryan "Firecracker" Karl is more forgiving. "That's tough, Bookman, real tough," he says, tapping me on the shoulder.

("Firecracker" Karl received this nickname as a freshman at Tennessee. It was bestowed by linebacker Kevin Simon. The "fire" part of the nickname went to the then-safety Ryan Karl because he made plays all over the field. The "cracker" portion because he was white and played in the secondary. Hence, "Firecracker," a name all Tennessee players call him.)

As my athleticism is attempting to recover, Santi pours it on. "That's nothing, he broad-jumped more than you too."

After the morning workout we return to the locker room where the All-American Football League is holding their draft on television. The All-American Football League is an eight team upstart organization that's planning on playing a football season during the spring in the Southeast. One of the goals of the league is to bring in local college stars to play in some of the same stadiums where their college glory arose.

As close as we are to the actual NFL Draft, the players sit and watch former college athletes, men who trained just like them for a shot in the NFL, have their names called for a smaller league. In a way that perhaps they never have noted before, the fine line between making it as a professional athlete and playing on the periphery of the game is tantalizingly near. Many of their own futures will be revealed in a few short weeks. Right now, Tennessee tight end Chris Brown stands in front of the big screen television and looks at me.

"Hell, Bookman, I'd play in that league too," he says.


That Saturday night, the guys and I go out drinking. The most popular guy at the bar is 6'5", 340 pound Frank Okam. Partly it's the fact that Frank is one of the nicest guys on the planet, so if anyone talks to him he fully engages in the conversation, partly it's that Frank is just so huge it's impossible for him to hide and so he attracts attention for that reason, but there's also just a kind of magnetism about him. People are drawn to Frank.

Within fifteen minutes after our arrival, Frank has been swarmed by a huge crowd of white girls who are chanting, "Frank the Tank, Frank the Tank," over and over again. Pretty soon they're buying him shots and asking him to pose for pictures with them. Over and over again this happens. At no point does Frank ever approach a stranger and begin the conversation himself, people of all shapes and sizes just find him. Later, after he's extricated himself from another crowd of girls, a bald man who is about fifty years old approaches Frank and takes him by the elbow.

"You are one big bloke," a random Australian man says.

Late that night, sometime after 3, I climb outside of a cab in front of my house and stumble inside. The night has gotten crazier than I've anticipated. For the first time in a month, my legs don't ache as I climb the stairs to my bedroom, I'm drunk enough that the pain is gone. Upstairs I fall into bed alongside my wife, planning on sleeping for the next ten hours. That goes well for about three hours.

And then at 6:30 in the morning on January 27, 2008 my wife's water breaks.


I've always thought of water-breaking as being one of life's immediately recognizable events. For the past week, I've been waking her up in the middle of the night to make sure her water hasn't actually broken. She says she's been fast asleep and suddenly woken up to the sound of me patting the sheets around her searching for wetness. A few times I've actually shaken her awake and said, "Babe, your water has broken, we've got to go."

My inability to turn my brain off while sleeping has been a continual issue for most of my life. I have night terrors, sleep walking, sleep talking, basically you name it and I'm likely to attempt it while sleeping. From my wife waking up to see me grabbing the television in our cruise ship cabin convinced that it was only me keeping us from being crushed by the falling television -- bolted to the wall, to the time when, as a kid, my next door neighbor's parents found me in the shower turning the shower nozzle saying over and over again, "The door won't open, the door won't open."

During my first year of law school I fled from a would-be attacker into the street outside our condo in the middle of the winter wearing only my boxers. Shortly thereafter I woke up outside, barefoot and freezing, crouching down behind the rear bumper of my Toyota Camry. Worst of all, as I crouched, suddenly awake and aware of how ridiculous I appeared, a man with a long white beard walked by on the sidewalk, looked me up and down and said, "Good morning."

So after all my night terrors and imagined water floods in our bed, the actual water-breaking came without a great deal of fanfare. My wife, already out of the bed, calls from the bathroom. "Clay, I think my water's broken, but I'm not sure."

She thinks?

Turns out she's right. At 4:04 on the afternoon of January 27, 2008, I became a dad and Fox Clay Travis enters the world. Just in time for the NFL Combine.


The guys training for the combine are impressed when I rejoin them three days later. Army safety Caleb Campbell, back on leave for a full week of training from West Point, greets me in the locker room, "Congrats, man, congrats." Geoff Schwartz taps me on the back, "You know," he says, "that kid is never breaking 5.0 in the forty." Kurt Hester is particularly welcoming. "Your life is over now," Hester says. "She already likes the baby more than you. Wait a couple of months and she'll give up on sex too. Until she wants another baby."

"How's his d**k?" Hester asks.

"He just got circumcised, so he's hurting. Circumcise is a much nicer word for what it is, if they called it d**k amputation no one would do it."

Hester laughs, continues, "I've only got one son but he's got a huge d**k. He's eight years old, skinny as hell, you can see his ribs, looks like an Ethiopian, but he's walking around with this huge swinging d**k. Been like that since the day he was born. Some people want their babies' feet measured or whatever but when my son was born the first thing I said was, 'Holy s**t, look at his d**k, it's huge.'"

"The nurse turned to me and was like, 'Most people count fingers and toes, Kurt.'

"When the nurse stamped his feet on the paper, I had her measure his d**k--1.5 inches at birth. Then I had her write that on the paper too. My wife is coming up here tomorrow, you can ask her."

For the first time in two months Hester has the entire afternoon weight-lifting group speechless. Finally, Geoff Schwartz responds, "You want us to ask your wife if your son has a big d**k?"

Hester doesn't skip a beat. "Yeah, she knows me. She'll be fine with it."

Back on the field, Hester has crafted a new workout regimen designed to help our explosiveness. He's lined up a series of four platforms of varying height. The first one is relatively short, the next one taller, the third one taller still, and the last platform is very tall. We're to jump onto the platform and then step off into the middle distance before jumping again. Before we start, Hester says, "If the last platform is too tall, know your limits, don't try it."

Wake Forest center Steve Justice doesn't know his own limits. He falls, and scrapes up his entire body on the fourth platform. Bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, and always lacking in verticality, I know my limits. When I get to the last platform and don't jump, several of the guys start riding me. "Come on, Bookman, you can do that," says Firecracker Karl. "I've got a kid to think about now," I say. He's barely four days old and already Fox is being trotted out to explain my lack of athleticism.

"Hell," Hester says, not allowing such an excuse to hang in the air for more than ten seconds, "you're worth more dead than alive anyway. I know I am. S**t, when I'm wrestling alligators I know I'm okay. I'm worth $2.5 million if I die. I tell my wife that all the time. She says, 'Do you want our kids to not have a father?' I say, s**t, if I die, they'll be rich. They'll be fine."

As we move through our sets Kurt Hester continues his soliloquy. "The thing about me is that I don't act different around anybody. I'm me. My wife will read this book and she'll say, 'Yep, that's Kurt.'"

At the end of Saturday's workout, everyone is beaten down and tired. With Fox's arrival, the training, and the lack of sleep, I feel like I could lie down on the field and sleep for 24 hours in a row. But before we can leave, Hester calls out to us, "Sit down, we've got a story to tell y'all," he says.

We all sit down on the field. I feel like a little league kid about to get a lecture from his coach. "This is going to be the first once upon a time story with fifty f-bombs," I whisper to Schwartz. But before Hester can speak, trainer Mark Sutton gets up to talk. He stands above us and takes his time looking each of us in the eyes before he begins. Last Saturday's exploits have reached our trainers, "You've got too much on the line to be going out and drinking as often as you guys are. Plus, you don't even know who is going to be out and see you."

He pauses to let his words sink in. Then he points to me and says, "Last Saturday when you were all out, guess who was there at the bar? Jim Washburn's daughter. He's the defensive line coach for the Titans. His daughter told him about seeing all of you at the bar as soon as she got home. You guys don't even know which girl it was, but her dad is looking to draft defensive linemen. And his daughter was right there with you."

There is no sound on the field. I feel like I'm to blame for introducing the guys to all the good bars and nightspots in Nashville. Sutton continues to talk, "I talked to Titans offensive line coach Munchak the other day. I asked him whether he was going to take care of Benji Olson (long-time Titans offensive guard) when his new contract came up. Olson played hurt all last year, took nine different cortisone shots so he could get out there. And you know what he told me? He said, 'No way. I don't care about all that. My job is on the line every year. And if those guys don't produce, I'm not going to keep it.' So, no, he's gone.' Point is, you're all expendable, especially you guys, you haven't done a thing for these teams."

Sutton finishes up with a flourish, "I saw the Titans big draft board on the wall while I was there. All of your names were on it. Some were higher than others but all of you were on there. And you know what? They're looking for any reason to pull your name off that board. Don't give them one. This business is hard, don't make it harder."

Kurt Hester takes Mark's position at the center of the circle and begins speaking in a soft tone, "If I ever seem pissed off at you guys it's because I wish I was in your position. You're this f**king close to being drafted. (He holds his fingers an inch apart.) Do you know how many people wish they were you right now? Hell, I wish I was you. We're 19 days away from the first day of the combine and some of you are still f**king around."

"If you want to go out drinking do it on Saturday. I know you guys are stressed. I know you need to cut loose occasionally and get away from here. But do it on Saturday. Because then you can recover on Sunday. Not any other day because then it messes with our training too much. I need you at 100% the other six days. Get you a gallon jug of water and go sit in the sauna and drink water all day to cleanse yourself. I know we can't expect everyone to be 100% focused on everything each day because it just doesn't work like that. Y'all need to be able to get away from this. But we've got a limited number of days left and we have to do each of these reps at full speed. There's only so much time to get better and if you're drinking you're not going to get better. Unless you're Frank and then you'll come out and bench more than you've ever benched before."

Everyone silently stands and begins to file away, a pall hanging over the combine training class. Steve Justice, Mel Kiper's top ranked center who is incapable of sitting Indian style, puts his arm around me and points up the at the all-time D1 practice records hanging on the wall above us.

"Just think, when you got here Bookman, you weren't faster than the fastest 7-11 year old girl. You've come a long way."

I can't even tell if he's joking.

One of FanHouse's newest additions, Clay Travis is the author of Dixieland Delight and the forthcoming On Rocky Top: A Front-Row Seat to the End of an Era. For several years he wrote the ClayNation column for CBS Sportsline, worked as an editor for Deadspin.com, and practiced law, where his love for the billable hour rivaled only his love for the WNBA. He's convinced that his 40 time is much better than yours.