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+---- Thread: *Dick Littlewood's Ohana Diary. (/showthread.php?tid=27977)
*Dick Littlewood's Ohana Diary. - LatinViking - 11-28-2020
Day 1
I arrived to Honolulu after a 15 hour flight. My body aches and my limbs are stiff after the long flight. The breeze of the ocean hits my face as I leave the airport looking for a cab. I'll be staying at the clubhouse for a while until I find a place to call home.
But that matters not. I gotta report myself with the General Manager and get introduced to both the coaches and the facilities so I can get to train tomorrow morning.
Once I reach the facilities a local woman dressed in a suit introduce herself as the housing manager and asks me for my bag.
I gave it to her and she calls the General Manager. After a couple minutes a man, dressed up from head-to-toe on a Gucci suit approaches and extends his hand to me. "You've finally arrived, it's a great pleasure to meet you, people around here calls me Gucci and I'm your very own general manager".
I thank him and ask him if we can get this started,it's been a long flight and I would like to rest a bit.
So that's what we do, he shows me the weights room, where five guys are working. As they see us, they put the weights down, stand up (all of them are at least 6' 5") and come to us, then Gucci says "Let me introduce you to our offensive Line. Here you've got Blake and Dinkley, our Guards,Doo and Rogers will compete with you for the Tackle spots, and that big guy doing sit-ups its our center Jones." with everyone introduced we walk through a long hallway with different rooms where people are getting massages, doing cone drills and other stuff of the likes.
Gucci then turns to me and says. "here everyone gives their best for the team, and I don't expect anything different from you. A play starts in the Offensive line and only if you give your all, then the play will continue. If the plays continue then the chains moves.
If the chains move then we keep possession.
If we keep possession, the other team can't attack.
If the other team can't attack, we win games.
If we win games, we get into playoffs.
And if we get into the playoffs you all will get paid more."
I stand there looking at him with my mind in blank... I have no idea where all that came from, I think. After a couple more seconds I manage to make my jaw come back to it's place and whisper "sure thing coach".
"good" he answers... "Then let me show you your room, as you've said,you must be terribly tired and you better sleep. Tomorrow... Tomorrow will be a new day"
After a couple more minutes walking we arrive to a Hawaiian styled shack where he looks as me like wanting to tell me that's where I'll be living in.
"the other lineman and their position coach will come here tomorrow around 7,be ready by then you'll be doing a different training for a while before your debut".
End of the First day
Day Two
As Gucci said yesterday at 7 am I was ready for my first day of work.
I see my teamates running down the mountain and getting behind the shack onto the beach. I follow them and there's when the lineman coach whistles at me
"Rookie! You won't be training with them, now go and run a lap around the diamond head! I'll be waiting for you here"
So off I go,I put on my headset, it's a mile until I reach the volcano, so I'll reach it easy, once I'm half done with the lap, my phone rangs, it's my coach telling me that he got bored of waiting so I better go find him on top of the mountain, to finish my lap and use the hiking trail to reach him. I keep running, my body gets heavier with each step, I slowly get to the hiking trail and find a note. "Rook, go up two steps, backpedal em down, do that twice then go up. Repeat this with each set of steps, you'll find hula hops on the way, you guessed it! 5 hops drill every time you see em, 5 series before you advance!"
This guy wants to kill me! I say, but start none the less with the steps while I keep advancing trough the path... It's getting close to midday when I finally reach the top. There's the coach, with my teammates laughing at me, completely soaked while they enjoy some Gatorade.
The coach looks at me smiling. "Welcome to the hahalua, you're one of us, you're slow and not really agile, so you will be doing this exact thing daily until opening day. You can do weights only once every three days. I expect to see you on the training facilities in 4 hours, go take a shower and get something to eat." the rest of the team leaves jogging across the hiking trail and I'm about to do the same when the coach grabs me by my shirt and tells me "Repeat the steps and hops drills on your way down, then jog back to your house"
Off again I go, thankfully the late training for me was just a nice tape study and some massages. I wouldn't be able to keep the pace if we were doing contact training. After the afternoon training sessions finish we meet on the field, there's Gucci, the different position coaches and a tall guy with the looks of someone who would knock you out cold if he didn't like the way you were looking at him. The tall guy introduces himself as James Boxman (fitting surname if you ask me. Welcomes us the newcomers and tell us we have a luau waiting for us outside to meet each of our teamates, we are family now and we should treat each other like that. The luau was great, tons of faces I used to see when I was in college, meeting with venus powers was an honor but never expected someone to be so.... Intense about kicking footballs, I guess I'll end it here for today on a high note, alcohol food and football players ain't a really good match to keep telling you what happened.
End of day two.