TODAY WE WILL talk about derrieres. Well, not exactly derrieres. They're just part of a trend.
Which is to say they're getting bigger.This startling revelation was made by Dr. Don Cooper, a longtime team physician at Oklahoma State who was once quoted in a magazine as saying, "If you talk to the people who make cars or airplane seats in 1949, versus the people who make them today, you'll find that butts are bigger and nobody's given a good explanation for this."
Actually, there is a good explanation for this: people are just getting bigger - in every direction. Nowhere is this more evident than in football, where people take great interest in heights and weights, and have for years, thus providing great archaelogical information for future (huge) generations.
For instance: in 1949, the average lineman was 6 feet and weighed 195 pounds. By 1989, the average lineman was 6-foot-3, 253 pounds. During that same time, the average size of a running back climbed from 5-foot-11, 176 pounds to 6-1, 201. (No statistics are given for the growing girth of coaches, but good money says they're leading by example.) What's more, the players appear to be growing at an increasingly rapid rate. Linemen added six pounds from 1949 to '59, then 14 pounds during the next decade, then 18 pounds the next, and finally 20 pounds between 1979 and '89.
At the current rate of growth, experts say the average lineman in the year 2029 will be more than 6-foot-6 and weigh 314 pounds.
Already 300-pound football players are no longer even a curiosity. Utah State, Utah, Weber State and Southern Utah all have at least one 300-pound player, and BYU has four of them, plus several players who are just one or two Big Macs shy of joining the club. Ten years ago, there wasn't a 300-pound player in the entire state.
None of which is news to Floyd Johnson. For 34 years he has been the equipment manager at Brigham Young University. It is his job to fit football players in uniforms.
"When I first started, the biggest lineman we had was 260 pounds," says Johnson. "We had six to eight pairs of Size-38 pants, and 32-34 was the most popular size. Now we have eight to 10 pairs of 40s and 42s, and 36-38 is the most popular. If the pants nowadays weren't made of Spandex, we'd be into 46s and 48s."
The upper half of the anatomy has grown, as well. When Johnson began his career, nobody made a jersey bigger than an extra-large. Now almost all of BYU's linebackers and linemen wear at least a XX-large jersey - despite the fact that they wear them skin tight to discourage holding by their opponents.
You can take your pick of the theories about why football players have grown during the past four decades. Players used to shun weight lifting for fear it would reduce speed; now everyone lifts weights. Steroids no doubt figure in here somewhere. Then, too, nutrition is better. All teams have a training table, where vast quantities of food are consumed daily; where teams like BYU have Friday night rituals called "cheeseburger snacks" (is this an oxymoron?).
But these explanations don't quite cut it when you listen to Johnson. During his first 20 years on the job, he had only one player who required a Size-15 shoe. Now he has eight. The same thing has happened at the other end of the anatomy. "Players' heads are getting bigger," says Johnson. "I don't think their brains are any bigger, but their heads are." When Johnson first started the business of dressing football players, the biggest helmet he had in stock was 77/8, and the most common size was 71/4 to 73/8. Now the most commonly used size is 71/4 to 75/8, and "six to eight players" use 81/4 or bigger.
What's the point? "I know you can get bigger by lifting weights, but I don't think it affects the size of your head," says Johnson. "People are just getting bigger."
Indeed, during the Revolutionary War the average male was merely 5-foot-41/2, which means our founding fathers were about the size of Danny DeVito. Says Cooper, "The size of the average male grew to approximately 5-7 during World War I and was close to 5-9 during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The overall society has gotten bigger."
And bigger and bigger . . . Someday Mike Jenkins might be just another body. An offensive lineman at BYU, Jenkins has weighed as much as 400 pounds - a size so big that the only place he could weigh himself was at the city dump. These days he's down to 370 pounds and stands 6-foot-7. Stare at him and meet the future.