Corey Grant
CFL.ca
The football season can be a long and tedious one for players with meetings and practices day after day and games week after week… making the days and weeks feel like ground hog day/week.
Following the same routine for six months can drive a player crazy. Imagine thinking about football 24/7 for six straight months without a break (oh wait, that’s what coaches do, however, they’re a different breed). It will make you old before your time, and this is why guys find other things to do to take their minds off football during their down time.
“As athletes, we’re used to reacting quickly. Here, it comes, stop, come, go, and stop. But there’s a lot of downtime and that’s the toughest part of the day.” – Michael Jordan
Some guys take classes to try and finish up their degrees, others work (getting life for after football together), many play video games (Madden or Halo), foosball, pool, basketball, and in our locker room it’s the intense game of ping-pong which is better known as table tennis.
Now, what happens in the locker room stays in the locker room, but the battle between the ping-pong players in our locker room must be known to the outside world.
Professional athletes are competitive by nature and no matter what they’re doing, whether it’s pitching quarters, or tossing paper balls into the garbage can, there will always be a winner declared. If we can rank it, put a score to it, or keep track of the person with the most wins and losses, there will always be individuals trying to prove that their game is better than the next person.
Well, in our locker room this competitive character is exhibited when the ping-pong table is pulled out. There are a few guys whose ping-pong skills are worthy enough to be mentioned while others… let’s just say they should learn some of the basic rules; the ball goes over the net and you need to use your paddle to hit the ball.
Right now the receiving core is battling it out on a weekly basis to decide who the best ping-pong player in the group is. The legitimate players are: myself, Fantuz, Palmer, Dressler, Getzlaf and Bagg (his game is still under review) with nobody really dominating the group. Each player has won a game against another guy in the group and then turned around and lost to the next guy. Eventually someone in the group has to step their game up to get an opportunity at the locker room title.
In our locker room there are a few guys who love to play the game and their hearts and competitive juices get into it, but their skills just don’t match. These are the guys everyone wants to play against for practice before they partake in the real competition. The feeling is, if you lose to these guys you might as well stop playing ping-pong for the rest of the season (these guys shouldn’t quit their day jobs).
As much as this troubles me to say, right now the guy who has all the bragging rights in the locker room about ping-pong is Scott Gordon who has not lost a game possibly in two years. This year he hasn’t been playing as much, maybe because the competition isn’t at his level or he’s found other things to occupy his time (taking a night class).
If you want to be the champ you have to knock him off the mountaintop and the receiving core plans to take him down before the season is over.
Competition for a professional athlete is not just regulated to the field of play, but finds itself in everything we do. So we have to make sure we bring our ego and competitive nature into the locker room because when the challenge is brought to you from arguing that Steve Nash is better than Kobe Bryant to playing ping-pong, you better be ready to compete and win.
Corey Grant is a 10 year CFL veteran who has played with the Ti-Cats, Alouettes and, for the last 7 seasons, the Roughriders. A Stoney Creek, Ont. native, Corey has won Grey Cups in 1999 and 2007. He was named the East Division Outstanding Rookie in 1999.
