Culture
Why Mike Tomlin leads NFL's most physical training camp: 'You can't box without sparring'
LATROBE, Pa. — No air conditioning in the dorm rooms. Horsehair-stuffed mattresses. Two padded practices per day, seven days a week, full of live hitting.
For 66-year-old former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Craig Wolfley, training camp at Saint Vincent College was a “totally different environment” when he suited up in the 1980s under legendary coach Chuck Noll. Every day, twice a day, the Steelers practiced in pads — first with a morning session to work on the running game and later in the afternoon to focus on the passing game.
“They didn’t even dry off your pants and jerseys (between practices),” Wolfley recalled. “It was just sweated up until finally you put (five bucks) in the ball boys’ hands and they would throw it in the dryer for a few minutes before practice.”
Wolfley, now a Steelers radio analyst, joked that he could have a degree from Saint Vincent after all the grueling, six-week camps he attended as a player. But even he heard the old-timers like Andy Russell talk about the marathon, nine-week camps that bruised their bodies and tested their will in the 1960s and ’70s.
“You came together as a team because it was blood, sweat and tears the whole training camp,” Wolfley said. “Chuck Noll training camp was never about making the team. It was about always surviving the moment.”
#FBF to Franco & Lynn at #SteelersCamp, 1983. pic.twitter.com/Qir6iBLMl9
— Steelers History (@SteelersHistory) August 2, 2024
For generations of football players — from Pee Wee to high school to college and into the pros — long, physical days full of hitting were the norm. The more you hit, the tougher you became. At least that was the thinking.
But times change, and so too has the way teams prepare for the season.
Because athletes are now working out year-round, there’s less need to work them into shape in the preseason. At the same time, rules under the 2011 CBA eliminated two-a-day practices. The physicality has also been dialed back dramatically. Today, in many NFL training camps, if you see a ball carrier or a receiver tackled to the ground, it’s usually an accident.
“I don’t know how many NFL teams are full-on tackling,” Steelers quarterback Justin Fields said. “It’s got to be under three, if they are.”
Fields’ observation got us thinking. How many teams engage in live tackling during camp? In an informal poll conducted by The Athletic, 24 of 32 beat writers (75 percent of the league) said the team they cover very rarely or never tackles players to the ground. Four teams tackle in practice sometimes, but typically for short periods with second- or third-team players on the roster’s fringe. Three teams tackle often, including Andy Reid’s Chiefs, Mike McDaniel’s Dolphins and Dan Campbell’s Lions.
Mike Tomlin’s Steelers are in many ways an outlier. When veteran linebacker Elandon Roberts arrived in Latrobe last season for a three-week destination camp, he was, like Fields, initially taken aback.
“I was kind of like, dang, we’re really tackling in camp,” said Roberts, who spent four years with the Patriots and three with the Dolphins before joining the Steelers. “I was cool with it, but I wasn’t expecting it.”
On a typical day in pads, it’s common to see the Steelers engage in periods of full, live tackling. Each practice begins with a drill called “Seven Shots” — seven chances from the 2-yard line — that are often full-tilt with starters like Najee Harris or key rotation players like Jaylen Warren being tackled to the ground. In many other 11-on-11 settings, the Steelers still see the value in live tackling, including short-yardage and goal-line drills. Additionally, twice this training camp, the Steelers staged spirited backs on ’backers drills, where high-speed collisions simulate live pass protection situations.
#Steelers backs vs. backers drill gets chippy at Friday night lights practice! 👀🍿
Elandon Roberts vs Jaylen Warren 😱
Patrick Queen vs Najee Harris 💪🎥: @sltphoto/Instagram pic.twitter.com/CskOe8px1Q
— Steelers Update (@SteelersUpdate1) August 3, 2024
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Now, as the Steelers pack up and move out of their dorm rooms at Saint Vincent on Wednesday, they’ve completed what is likely the most physical training camp in the league.
“You can’t box without sparring,” Tomlin said. “We play an intense game, competitive game, and I’m not doing these guys justice if I don’t create an environment that is reflective of what’s waiting on us.”
In 2007, when Tomlin became the NFL’s youngest head coach at 34 years old, he inherited a veteran-laden team full of many players who hoisted the Lombardi Trophy alongside Bill Cowher in 2005.
During his first training camp in Latrobe, Tomlin set the tone and — in a sense — made a statement that there was a new sheriff in town. This wasn’t Cowher’s team anymore.
“He came in and he wanted to set an example and establish his own toughness,” said former Steelers lineman Max Starks, who played three seasons for Cowher and six years under Tomlin. “He didn’t want anybody to seek comfort. We hit every day we could possibly hit, all the way until Week 13 of the regular season, which was unheard of.”
But over a long season, more is not always better. On a team full of veterans, the pounding took its toll. After starting 9-3, the Steelers fizzled down the stretch, dropping three of their final four regular-season games before bowing out of the playoffs in the wild-card round against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
“He got the appropriate result,” Starks said. “We’re out in the first round of the playoffs, because he had to learn the veteran-ness of this team and understand that we can we can go light in the week and go kill it on the weekends at games.”
Mike Tomlin, right, with Ben Roethlisberger at the coach’s first training camp with the Steelers in 2007. (Joseph Sargent / Icon SMI / Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)
Throughout his time with Tomlin, Starks saw the coach learn from the experience and tweak his approach. While the Steelers still hit often in camp, Tomlin tempered it and learned to take care of veterans with days off. Sure enough, in Tomlin’s second season, the Steelers surged down the stretch, winning six of their final seven to finish 12-4. They rode that momentum to the team’s sixth Lombardi Trophy.
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“He’s not too prideful with taking a step back or (saying), ‘Hey, you know, I can get better at this,’” Starks said. “And that’s why you see the sustained success model that he’s created. It was too hard in the beginning. OK, now pull it back.”
Now in his 17th season and at 52 years old, Tomlin has gone from the youngest head coach in the league to the NFL’s longest-tenured. His first training camp in Latrobe feels like a lifetime ago.
“Man, that was a different time,” Tomlin said. “That was medieval times.”
Even the oldest players on the Steelers’ current roster — Russell Wilson and Cameron Heyward, both 35 — never participated in two-a-days at the NFL level. The approach was banned under the new CBA in 2011, Heyward’s first year in the league and one year before Wilson was drafted. (The NCAA eventually followed suit and ended two-a-day practices with contact in 2017.)
There’s no question Tomlin’s philosophy has evolved, to a degree. In adherence with the CBA, padded practices have been scaled back considerably during the season. Often, if Tomlin makes the Steelers wear pads during the season, it’s to make a point that physicality is lacking on Sundays. Even early in camp, Tomlin will hold out veterans like T.J. Watt, Minkah Fitzpatrick and Heyward to protect them from themselves.
Tomlin also used to intentionally schedule training camp practices during the hottest time of the day to manufacture adversity. He has since changed his approach with a new strength and conditioning staff to practice earlier in the morning when it’s cooler.
At the same time, the coach still very much sees the value in creating game-like situations in Latrobe — and so do the players.
“Just how we do Seven Shots, I don’t think anybody else in the country does that,” Fields said. “The parameters of how practice is ran and just the intensity out of everybody, it’s very competitive out here. And you wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Iron sharpens iron ⚔️
📸: https://t.co/tg8VtjVLDf | @Acrisure pic.twitter.com/EeHTbUWz7v
— Pittsburgh Steelers (@steelers) August 12, 2024
Beyond preparing starters for the season, the physicality of camp is an important evaluation tool. Two seasons ago, Warren arrived as an untouted and undrafted rookie running back with a junior college stop on his resume. In an early backs on ’backers drill, his pad-popping demeanor got the coaches’ attention and ultimately helped him earn a spot on the roster. Now, he’s one of the league’s best pass-protecting backs.
“I love it,” Warren said when asked about the environment Tomlin creates. “Although the days get hard, I love what it brings and what it creates.”
In this camp, especially, the word physicality has been on the tip of many players’ tongues. When the Steelers hired Arthur Smith — who is well-known for his run-heavy, tight-end friendly offenses — the new offensive coordinator made a point to say he wants to have the most physical offense in the league. That buzzword has carried over to the practice field.
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“Whether that’s being part of the run game or getting yards after the catch, he wants all 11 to be physical,” wide receiver Van Jefferson said. “He wants to be a physical offense. He’s instilled that in us from Day 1.”
What will it all mean when they finally start the season? Coaches often say that coaching a football team doesn’t come with an instruction manual. And while there’s no perfect answer when it comes to how much hitting is enough (and how much is too much), the Steelers believe that through their physical approach, they have begun to establish the identity that will carry them through the season.
“Other teams, they know what it is when they play the Steelers,” Warren said. “You can see what we built here.”
(Top photo: Joe Sargent / Getty Images)
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The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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