All over Napa Valley on this glorious summer morning, visitors to California's wine country are enjoying the fruits of someone else's labor. A pinot noir at Robert Mondavi. A zinfandel at Sutter Home. A gamay rouge at V. Sattui. They drive the scenic Silverado Trail, past neat vineyard rows and winemaking castles, pulling over intermittently for a taste of homegrown grape. Meanwhile, in the heart of Napa, behind a nondescript Marriott Hotel and a chain link fence, Chad Levitt is sweating buckets. It's hot enough sitting in the shade sipping a chardonnay, but it's downright scorching under a silver-and-black football helmet on this, the first day of training camp for the Oakland Raiders. Surrounded by a mass of massive humanity, Levitt stands, hands on his hips, his familiar Number 31 on his back and God-knows-what running through his head. The scene is a mixture of boot camp, an acting audition, and a psychological stress test. It is The Right Stuff meets The Longest Yard. And it is only the first practice of the day, in a schedule calling for two a day, six days a week for some six weeks--until the real season begins.

Amid the tumult of receivers running pass routes, linemen bulling into tackling dummies, and punters launching spirals into space, there is the shouting ("Huddle up! Huddle up! Left! Left! Left! Finish! Finish the run!"), capped off by the scream of an air horn every ten minutes to herald a new phase in the practice regimen. Throw into the mix the pressure of a brand new coach teaching an entirely new system, the fact that while there are some eighty men on the field there are only forty-five spots on the team, and the unwavering gaze of critical observers--eager assistant coaches, hero-worshipping kids peeking through fences, photographers with lenses as big as megaphones, and videographers standing atop platforms to record every missed assignment, turned ankle, or dropped ball--and the truth is as brutal as a bullet pass to the gut: life in the National Football League is no picnic.

It starts with aspirations, followed by accomplishment, then whispers and rumors. What Pop Warner prodigy doesn't want to make it to the pros? Never mind the odds. Or the fact that he weighs seventy-nine pounds soaking wet. What's a stuffed pigskin if not a prelude to the stuff of dreams?

The dream can die quickly--when you can't make the high school squad, when you're the third-string cornerback or, usually, when Cornell is the most obvious football powerhouse recruiting you. But once in a while a genuine talent slips through the cracks. Maybe he was a late bloomer, maturing physically only after reaching college. Maybe he played on a lousy high school team, earning a ticket to recruiting oblivion. Maybe he chose Cornell for the academics, and then blossomed.

Two seniors on the 1996 Cornell squad qualified as legitimate late bloomers. Levitt was ignored by big-time football universities, then proceeded to assault the Cornell record books, falling just fifty-eight yards short of the school rushing record, and only because he fractured his elbow. And Seth Payne, a defensive tackle, wasn't even an All-Ivy League selection until he was a senior. Of course, he'd also grown three inches and gained sixty pounds by then, thanks to the Cornell dining plan.

With their senior success came the whispers. The NFL was interested. The NFL. From the Hill to the mountaintop is a rarity, but not an impossibility. Before Levitt and Payne, twenty-three Cornellians had played pro football in its various forms over the previous eight decades. One of their Big Red teammates--Jay Bloedorn '96--had even caught on as a backup center for the Seattle Seahawks. But only once in the past quarter-century (Derrick Harmon in 1984) had a Cornell player been drafted by an NFL squad.

Levitt and Payne weren't going to take any chances. Payne skipped his final semester to prepare. Levitt rehabbed his arm and took a spring journey to Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine, where for three days he was shuttled through various workouts and examinations. Assistants measured his vertical leap, his forty-yard dash time, his bench press. Coaches watched as he performed position drills, caught passes, ran over bags. He sat for a fifteen-minute logic test. Which word doesn't belong? Which sentence makes sense? He went to the hospital for blood samples, X-rays, flex and extensions tests. He underwent physical examinations by all thirty NFL team doctors, who measured his body fat percentage with calipers as if choosing a sirloin. "They look at past injuries, ask questions, feel your joints, twist you, turn you, poke you," says Levitt. "It's the ultimate, in terms of making you feel like a piece of meat."

As April draft day approached, both seemed destined for the NFL. But where? The whispers became rumors. The Miami Dolphins are looking at you. The Buffalo Bills are interested. You might be drafted in the second round. No, third round. Maybe fifth. "The most frustrating thing, I think, is not having any idea what they're saying about you," says Payne. "You know they're evaluating you, but you really don't know exactly what they're thinking." To make matters worse, some team scouts have been known to give false information to NFL prospects, hoping they'll pass it on to rival scouts.

With ESPN broadcasting the draft live--seven rounds to determine which 240 college players would be invited to the pros--Payne and Levitt huddled around the television with friends and family. With one phone call, two young men were going to find out where they might be spending the next few years. It could be anywhere. They had no control over their immediate futures, and that was fine with them. "If you want to play football," Levitt says, "you accept that."

The Jacksonville Jaguars chose Payne early in the fourth round, with the 114th pick. The team, whose senior vice president for football operations is Michael Huyghue '84, had flown Payne down for a visit before the draft, so he'd had an inkling of their interest. Minutes later, when the Oakland Raiders made a trade with the Miami Dolphins, obtaining their fourth-round pick (the 123rd overall) and choosing Levitt, the Philadelphia-area native knew little about the team that had tapped him. "All I knew," says Levitt, "is that they once beat my favorite team, the Eagles, in the Super Bowl."

It's midday in Napa now. Levitt and his mates are heading to the weight room for their usual post-practice regimen, but before he can get there one Raider is surrounded by reporters and cameramen. Gennaro DiNapoli is an offensive lineman, Number 64, and he removes his helmet to reveal a haircut--one side of his head is completely shaved--that seems decidedly involuntary. You don't need a roster to know that this guy's a rookie.

In the NFL, it's not easy being green. Levitt and Payne would start their careers on opposite coasts, but the experience would be much the same. First, there was the rookie orientation program, three days of lectures about how to deal with the media, getting through training camp, drugs, alcohol, sex, domestic violence. "I guarantee if I got a job with Smith Barney on Wall Street," says Levitt, "I wouldn't have to sit through three days of 'Don't beat up your girlfriend' and 'Don't do drugs.'"

When the rookies arrived for mini-camp--their first drills in big league uniforms with big league teammates in a big league environment--they felt . . . small. Payne remembers walking into the locker room and catching sight of Jacksonville's offensive line, one of the largest in the NFL: "Five guys," he says, "bigger than anybody I'd seen in my life." He had never faced big-time competition, hadn't competed in any college all-star games, had no proof that he could go up against the cream of the crop. And Payne was going to butt heads with guys like this? "The first couple of days, before we got out on the field, all I was thinking was, 'I don't belong here,'" he says. "'What have I gotten myself into?'"

It got tougher. The rookies were immediately handed three-inch-thick playbooks, herded into meetings, then sent out onto the practice field. "At the mini-camp, they try to saturate you with information to see how you're going to react to it," says Payne. "They want to see how much composure you have in that situation and how you recover from making mental mistakes."

There were many. Learning the plays is the easy part. Most teams have only about a dozen different running plays and two-dozen passing plays, but each one is run from different sets with different motions and different personnel groupings. Take a typical Oakland call, Red Right F Short 22 Z In. "Red Right" tells you the backfield set (split running backs with the fullback on the strong side). "F Short" tells the flanker to go into a short motion, and "22" is the protection, telling the linemen and blocking backs whom to block and how to read the defense. "Z In" denotes the routes to be run by the receivers.

The terminology is easy compared with the need to retrieve it automatically and understand the essence of the play. "The hard thing is when you're in the huddle, and the quarterback calls the play once, and you have about three seconds to break the huddle, know where to line up, read the defense, pick up the motion, go on the right snap count, run the right play, and block the right man," says Levitt, who had the additional challenge of learning a new position, having been drafted not as a running halfback but as a blocking fullback. "In the first few mini-camps, I had no idea. I was screwing up left and right." Miss an assignment--block the wrong linebacker, for instance--and the quarterback may be sacked for a fifteen-yard loss. Not that mistakes are limited to rookies. Even for NFL veterans, failure is a foregone conclusion. "There's nobody in this league who doesn't get knocked on their butt or throw an interception or let up the game-winning touchdown," says Payne. "Everybody gets humiliated at one point or another."

Rookies just get humiliated more often, on and off the field. For instance, there's the traditional fight song routine. "They tell all the rookies they're going to have to sing their school fight song at dinner during training camp," says Payne, "so I had 'Cornell Victorious' all memorized." Then the veterans changed the rules. After the first rookie bellowed out Nebraska's anthem, they mandated no more fight songs. Payne was left with a microphone and a room full of mischievous teammates. "I struggled through 'Come Monday' by Jimmy Buffett," he says. "I mumbled the words I didn't know."

Payne also found himself adapting to a new rookie position--team caterer. On the Jacksonville squad, rookies are required to get fried chicken for the whole team and pass it out on flights to road games. "So you go to Popeye's, you get 200 pieces of chicken, you put all of it in your bag and carry it through the airport," he explains. "You're drenched with sweat by the time you get on the plane, and then you have to hand out all this greasy chicken."

On top of it all, Levitt and Payne weren't just rookies--they were rookies from the Ivy League. If any first-year player makes a mistake, he hears about it. But if a rookie from the pinnacle of academia screws up, he hears about it endlessly. "Last year, we had an offensive coordinator who used to coach Alabama, and he was always calling me 'Cornell,' " says Levitt. "Every time I'd mess up, he'd say with that accent, 'C'mon Co-er-nayl. I thought you were supposed to be smart.'" Levitt even heard it during games. Jacksonville played at Oakland in the final contest of the 1997 regular season, and though Payne was injured at the time and didn't make the trip, he told his fellow defensive linemen to look out for his old teammate. That was a game in which Levitt actually ran the ball, an opportunity he received only twice all season. But when the Jaguars piled on him, they piled on the trash talk, too: "C'mon, Cornell. Get up."

Having completed his weight regimen, Levitt heads toward lunch, but there is one more hurdle: an obstacle course of cameras, notebooks, and mini-cassette recorders. The professional athlete's opinion of the media ranges from tolerance to contempt, usually tilting toward the latter the more famous he becomes. But to young players yearning for superstar status, success can be gauged by the number of microphones thrust in your face.

They learn the clichés immediately ("We have to step it up"; "We're just taking it day by day"; "You have to give the other team credit"), but the second-best way to earn media attention is to avoid the mundane and be christened a Good Interview. The best way, of course, is to be a superb football player. Levitt is working on both, but on most days he can generally make it to lunch without being devoured by the media. Not today. A man hurries up to him, eager and breathless, and Levitt stops in his tracks. "Excuse me," says the reporter, tape recorder in hand, "are you Ed Hervey?" Uh, no. Levitt walks a few steps further, until another credentialed chronicler comes forward.

"Excuse me, Chad. I'm from the San Jose Mercury News. Can I talk to you for a second . . ."

"Sure."

". . . about Jon Ritchie."

Ouch. Ritchie is another fullback in camp, a rookie drafted in the third round out of Stanford. The scouting gurus called him perhaps the best fullback in the draft. He's both Levitt's teammate and his rival. Indeed, just a few weeks later, he will prove to be the reason Levitt fades from the Raiders' plans. With a new coaching staff came new perspectives. Ritchie was their guy; Levitt wasn't. Such is the nature of a profession where instability reigns and the team depth chart can change with the weather. A man can be an all-pro one day and a has-been the next, or he can be in the throes of a confidence crisis at season's beginning and in the starting lineup by its end. That's what happened to Levitt and Payne in 1997.

Both began as third-stringers, worried first about learning the system, then about making the team, then about not messing up in their first appearance of the regular season. Payne remembers his vividly. It was against the Washington Redskins in the fourth game of the season. Stepping out onto the field, he was reminded of that scene from Hoosiers in which Gene Hackman shows his squad that the baskets are the same height in a cavernous arena as in a small-town gymnasium. "I wasn't as nervous as I expected," says Payne. "Standing on a football field in front of 75,000 people doesn't feel any different than when I was playing JV football in ninth grade. It's a lot faster, a lot tougher, and there are a lot more people watching. But it's still essentially the same game."

The irony is that, after being so intimidated by the size of NFL offensive linemen, Payne found himself double-teamed on the first play of his career--600 pounds of muscle heading straight for him. "I got knocked down, but I didn't lose any ground," he remembers. "It wasn't anything spectacular, but I did my job." Levitt, too, started humbly, playing mostly on special teams: kickoffs, punts, grunt work.

But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. A handful of Raider fullbacks and Jaguar defensive tackles went down with injuries. Meanwhile, Levitt and Payne continued to impress. By the end of the season, both were starters. Payne appeared in twelve games for Jacksonville, starting five of them, while Levitt started the last two for Oakland. He ran the ball twice and caught two passes, one of them a twenty-two-yarder. He blocked like he'd been a fullback all his life.

They entered this year's training camp as incumbent first-stringers, but as Payne puts it, "You never have job security in the NFL." After the Jaguars drafted a defensive tackle in the fourth round, and after his injured fellow linemen returned, Payne found himself in an eleven-man fight for two starting positions. And the last thing Levitt wanted as he battled the rookie Ritchie for the starting fullback slot was to be asked questions about Ritchie himself. "You can't let it get to you. There are always going to be people coming up and trying to beat you out, earn your spot. It's part of the job," he says, and adds his usual refrain. "You just accept it." The competition is unspoken. On the field, in meetings, watching films, the rivals are teammates again, quick to provide assistance or guidance. But they don't discuss the fact that they're both scratching and clawing for the same spot.

Unspoken, too, are the dangers of playing professional football. Ask Levitt how hard NFL players hit, and he answers without hesitation: "As hard as you're gonna get." But if you have the right stuff, that indefinable something that separates the good players from the great, you recognize the difference between pain and debilitating injury. "Just about everybody will get some sort of an injury during the season. Most of the time they're not listed on the injury reports," says Payne. "There are actually a lot of broken bones out there that you don't know about. Just about everybody sprains or pulls something during the season at least once. It's a question of balancing how much damage you're going to do to your body, what it's going to do to your career, and the importance of the game."

Payne found himself balancing such considerations last season. After dislocating his shoulder in the second-to-last regular season game and sitting out the final game, he decided to tough it out and compete in Jacksonville's playoff game because, well, it was the playoffs. Adrenaline kept him going during the game, but afterward he realized he'd damaged the arm further. That meant surgery two weeks later, followed by three months of recovery. Odds are it won't be his last trip to the operating table. There are NFL players who have collected more surgeries than years toward their pensions. Look at a player who's been in the league ten years or more, says Payne, and "you regard him the same way you look at a fifty-year-old man in real life."

In fact, a freak injury will cost Levitt his job in Oakland. A few days before training camp began, he turned his right ankle while running, spraining it badly. He came back within a week, returned to practice on that first day of camp, but it was too early. The ankle got worse. It would be another three weeks before Levitt could practice again. By then, he wasn't getting any repetitions during drills and was barely receiving any playing time in preseason games. Worse, the coaching staff seemed to be reluctant to make eye contact with him. Clearly, they had already made their decision. It was only a matter of time.

Turn an ankle, lose a job. That's life in the NFL, where 65 percent of rookies are out of work within three years of being drafted. Good thing they're paid well. The minimum rookie salary last year was $131,000, and it was non-negotiable. What was negotiable--and both Levitt and Payne hired agents to handle it--was the length of the contract (each committed to three years) and the signing bonus (each received about $200,000, typical for a fourth-round pick). "Most people think I probably make more than I do," Levitt insists. "I can't complain, but for the NFL, I'm not making that much." The average NFL player earned $643,941 in 1997, and nearly one-fifth of the 1,765 players in the league earned more than $1 million. The 1998 Number 1 draft pick, Peyton Manning from Tennessee, signed a six-year, $48 million deal.

All of which reveals another aspect of life in the NFL--people know exactly how much you're making, or at least they think they do. "I'd rather more people knew what I make because most people assume that you have $10 million in the bank and money's no issue to you," says Payne. "It can get sort of annoying. There are a lot of people out there who expect you to hand them over a lot of money just because you have some. People you haven't talked to in a while expect you to buy them tickets to games. But you don't play this game for too long, and if you're not somewhat frugal with your money, it's tough to walk away with anything substantial."

Payne has discovered, too, that it's not only third cousins and fringe friends who want a piece of his newfound wealth; there are also a parade of cons who stalk the pros. More than a few football players have lost more than a little savings after being approached with bad business deals packaged as offers they can't refuse. "The thing you have to always remember," says Payne, "is that for most legitimate investments, there are a lot of people out there that they can be going after who have a lot more money than professional football players. If they're targeting us, they're probably not all that reputable to begin with."

Having escaped the herd of reporters, Levitt leaves the practice field and wades into a gaggle of autograph seekers. He signs programs, pennants, footballs, T-shirts. He signs for six-year-olds and sixty-year-olds. And he doesn't seem to take it for granted. Not yet, at least. Autographs imply fame, and fame can be fun. Celebrity means flashing your NFL ID card at a nightclub and being escorted past the line. It means free passes to Disney World, gift certificates from restaurant owners, outlandish appearance fees. It means occasional endorsement opportunities like the full-page Converse/Foot Locker ad in Sports Illustrated that shows Levitt in jeans and bright red Chuck Taylors, holding a football and staring into the distance like T. E. Lawrence surveying Arabia. "No matter how far you go," reads the ad, "they'll help you find your way back."

NFL membership also means an 11 p.m. curfew on the road. It means you can't watch your buddy's minor league hockey game because twenty fans are lining up for your signature, and that you're suddenly the world's biggest jerk when you decline to give an autograph while in a hurry.

Yes, you have to travel quite a bit, but it's hassle-free travel--a quick bus ride to the airport, immediate boarding on a chartered flight, room to spread out in the back of the plane while the media squeeze together up front. When you reach your destination, there's usually a police escort waiting for you and sometimes even barriers set up at the hotel to separate you, the professional athlete, from the riffraff who want a piece of you.

Even more important than the trappings of fame is the chance for glory. What do you think most of them do on Sunday night after a game? They flip on ESPN's SportsCenter to see which plays the announcers tout and who gets good TV time. After Levitt's first game as a fullback, ESPN showed a replay of his block that sprung Napoleon Kaufman for an eighty-three-yard touchdown. Watching at home, Levitt saw them slow the play down, highlight the key block, and then announce, "Watch Chad Levitt as he leads the way." If an athlete tells you that doesn't mean anything to him, take his pulse.

They remember their biggest plays of the season, even if nobody else does. Levitt's came on a Sunday night against the San Diego Chargers, in front of a national TV audience. Twice he was called to block San Diego's all-pro linebacker at the goal line. Twice he won the battle. Payne's most memorable moment was much the inverse. As the Jaguars took on the Houston Oilers, the Jacksonville media wondered whether Payne could handle his first starting assignment. On the first play of the game, Houston sent its star running back straight at Payne. He stopped him. No gain. On the second play, same story. Star vs. rookie. Again, no gain.

To a pair of young athletes trying to make their mark, the plays may not have meant lasting glory, but gave them something more significant--the confidence that they belong at the top of their profession. It's in moments like those that everything--the pressures and perks and playbooks and pain--fades away, leaving only the realization of where you are and how you got there. "You always have to remind yourself that you're doing what a lot of people in the world wish they could be doing," says Payne, "and you're doing what you dreamed of doing as a little kid."

Several weeks later, with the season under way, Payne will find himself on the bench with a separated shoulder, suffered in the second game of the season. He had started that game; now he'll be fighting to get back in the lineup. But at least he made the team. Levitt, having been waived by the Raiders at the end of training camp, will be shuttling around the country from tryout to tryout--St. Louis, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Atlanta. His contract wasn't guaranteed. If he doesn't find a place to play, he doesn't make a dime. "I'm not ready to give up football at this point in my life," says Levitt. "I have the confidence to play at this level, and I know I'm better than a lot of the fullbacks out there. I'm not ready to pack it in yet."

Brad Herzog '90 is a frequent contributor to Cornell Magazine. He wrote about Watkins Glen in the September 1998 issue.

Cornell may not be a "football factory" like Notre Dame, USC, and Michigan, which regularly churn out professional prospects, but its athletes have had an impact on the sport. Roll the highlights . . .

1920
The National Football League arrives, only it is temporarily known as the American Professional Football Association. Fred "Boo" Gillies '18, a 215-pound tackle, begins a seven-year stint with the Chicago Cardinals. In 1925, his team will win the league championship.

1936
A second league arises to rival the NFL. Harold "Bus" Nunn '36 competes as an end on the American Football League's Boston Shamrocks. The league will fold a year later.

1941
Five years after the NFL College Draft is initiated, Nick Drahos '41, MS '50, becomes the first Cornellian drafted (by the Cleveland Rams in the eleventh round). He opts instead to compete for the New York Americans of another upstart league, once again called the AFL. He becomes a first-team All-Pro.

1950
The first of four Cornellians to compete in the Canadian Football League, Allen Dekdebrun '47 stars for the Toronto Argonauts, leading the team to victory in the league title game.

1961
Irvin "Bo" Roberson '58, BS Hotel '59, a silver medalist in the 1960 Olympic high jump, joins a third attempt at an American Football League. Over the next six years, with four different teams, he will record 176 receptions and sixteen touchdowns. In the 1965 AFL championship game, he will grab three passes, and Pete Gogolak '64 will boot three field goals, as the duo and quarterback Jack Kemp lead the Buffalo Bills.

1966
After initially making waves as the nation's first soccer-style placekicker, Pete Gogolak becomes the first player to jump from the AFL to the NFL, sparking a bidding war between the two leagues.

1968
For the first and only time, four Cornellians are playing pro football: Gogolak, quarterback Gary Wood '64, halfback Harry "Pete" Larson '67, BA '70, and wide receiver Bill Murphy '68.

1972
After nearly winning the Heisman Trophy, Ed Marinaro '72, BS Hotel '73, is drafted in the second round (fiftieth pick overall) by the Minnesota Vikings. He will spend six uneventful years in the National Football League before moving from the big leagues to the small screen.

1974
The AFL and NFL have merged by now, but another pro league sprouts up--the World Football League. Linebacker Bob Lally '74 spends two season with the WFL's Memphis Southmen. The league doesn't last through the second year.

1983
For the sixth time, a league emerges to compete with the NFL. Fullback Ken Talton '79 earns a spot on the United States Football League's Birmingham Stallions. This league lasts three years.

1985
After being drafted by the San Francisco '49ers a year earlier, halfback Derrick Harmon '84 becomes the first football player from Cornell to win a Super Bowl.

1995
Offensive lineman Tom McHale '89, BS Hotel '96, records his ninth and final season in the NFL. Only Frank Wydo '50, BS '52, and Gogolak served more time in the professional ranks.

1997
For the first time, two Cornellians are chosen in the same NFL Draft. Seth Payne '97 and Chad Levitt '97 are chosen in the fourth round, nine picks apart.

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.