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Author says football is one `Wild Ride' Anthropologist studies sport from inside By Bill Varble of the Mail Tribune Anthropologists study kinship patterns in Fiji or somewhere, right? But Rob Sands, an anthropology professor at Moorpark College in California, is fascinated by the American rite of football. Like many a middle-aged couch potato, he dreamed of playing the game. Unlike others, he actually did it. Sands went out for the Santa Barbara City College football team in Santa Barbara, Calif., in the fall of 1994 at age 37. He wound up playing two seasons as a 5-foot-10-inch, 165-pound wide receiver. The result is "GutCheck! An Anthropologist's Wild Ride into the Heart of College Football," a new book that's a unique study of the game from the inside. After two years of stitches in his chin, a severely pulled groin muscle, a dislocated shoulder, crutches and assorted aches and pains, he put together a report that reads like a cross between anthropologist Margaret Mead and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. By turns passionate and ironic, Sands tracks his story from locker rooms smelling of rotten sweatsocks to male bonding, coming-of-age rituals, love of the game and an almost religious fervor. "My parents wouldn't let me play football because I was too small," Sands says in a telephone interview. "It's the one sport I had not tried." He quickly discovered that although you can do what you want when you're almost 40, it hurts more and takes longer to heal. "In football you never really recover," he says. "You're 100 percent the first day of the season. It's downhill from there." Sands says football meets social science definitions of a rite of passage: It involves pain, it's a test of manhood, and you emerge from it an adult. But the football world he depicts is not that of South Bend, Ind., or Ann Arbor, Mich. There are no Saturdays with 100,000 frenzied fans in the stands, no Heisman trophies at stake, no sports agents, no rich NFL contracts (although maybe a couple of tryouts). No full scholarships, even. Most of these players are going nowhere. But there's always a chance, isn't there? Randall Cunningham of the NFL's Minnesota Vikings came from just up the road. Sands played with teens and guys pushing 30, men of all races and sizes. Some were marginal players. One was so good he's legendary. Some were hopeless as students. Some were criminals. Some had families. Most were going nowhere. They loved the game. Former NFL quarterback Tony Eason wandered onto the practice field one day and threw passes to Sands and other receivers until he wore their legs out. Eason calls the book "a frank and graphic description of the happening in the football culture." Far from remaining objective, Sands developed an obsession with football that was almost spiritual, and the game took on transcendent overtones. "I experienced the ordinary while I bumped along on a daily road of the mundane, taught classes, took classes, graded, planned lectures and relaxed, but once I stepped out onto the field, I stepped into a sacred and altered state of reality," he writes. Sands says football culture is male-dominated, concerned with pain, dominated by autocratic coaches and marked by an ethos of supermasculinity. "To a lot of these guys if you're not (a good player), you're gay or a fag or female ... Of all the things I had difficulty with, that was probably the most difficult. As an anthropologist I have a liberal perspective on gender relations." How did he work it out? "You can lose yourself in the game and not think about it," he says. He doesn't dispute the perception that football players are prone to violence to women. "Most people think it's a problem," he says. "There is a tendency for this kind of behavior." He saw some racism but says most of it was ironed out during the season. The color that ultimately matters in a team endeavor is the jersey, and racism is simply counterproductive. Balancing the game with teaching chores, he sometimes sounds like man trying to figure out where study ended and real life began. Woven through the book is the narrative of a season-ending game between the Santa Barbara Vaqeuros and heavily favored Bakersfield. It's the game that decides whether there will be a bowl bid. For most it's the last game before they hang up their cleats -- for the season and forever. However the rites and the male bonding and all the social significance turns out, you want these guys to win. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA