On Hazing - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
If you read this long-form meditation, please note the “Pat Trammell story.” For me this anecdote reveals “hazing” can end instantly … if the right leader has the courage to stop it.
As a COP (Change of Pace), today I’d like to present my thoughts on the ritual of hazing.
Upon reflection, this is a surprisingly fertile topic for meditation as it raise questions like: Why do so many people haze other people? Why do so many people submit to this abuse? Do these traditions produce any positive results?
In this anthology of hazing anecdotes, I discuss hazing in fraternities, in the military, elite military academies and on football teams.
This writing project also made me realize that just about every person in society submits to varying degrees of hazing (or abuse) … all because we want to be a part of a certain group(s).
I can also identify several funny stories that emanated from my college experience of being hazed on a daily basis.
I’ll start with an anecdote that made me think of writing this meditation … But, as you’ll see, some hazing stories aren’t funny at all.
‘Pajama Day’ at TES transported me back 4 decades …
Troy Elementary School recently hosted “Pajama Day,” which explains why my third-grade son was wearing his basketball PJ pants one morning last week.
My wife, Carrie/Mom, asked Jack if he was wearing underwear under his PJ pants. Sheepishly, Jack admitted he wasn’t.
Trying to assist Mom with her parenting duties, I said, “Jack, go put on your underwear.”
Little boys wear briefs, which I used to wear as well.
And then, in 1983, I pledged Sigma Nu at the University of Alabama and learned that Sigma Nu’s do NOT wear this style of underwear, which Sigma Nu’s called “grippies.” As I was to learn, we wore boxers …
… Unless we decide to “go Commando” and wear no underwear at all. (Don’t tell anybody, but for kicks and giggles, I decided to let Jack go commando at PJ Day.)
While my wife’s heard the following story 12 times, today, for some strange reason, I’ll share it with 8,000+ subscribers at my two Substack newsletters.
***
As noted, as a Sigma Nu “pledge” for six months in 1983-1984, I was hazed on an almost daily basis.
One night the “Actives” - fraternity members who’d previously survived their own hazing Rites of Passage - called a surprise hazing session. The members of my pledge class were ordered to go sit in the showers of the second floor of the frat house and wait our impending abuse.
One of the iron-clad Sigma Nu rules was members never wear grippies. We wear only (cotton) boxers. A good soldier/pledge, I followed this rule 99 percent of the time.
However, not when I was playing basketball. Prior to being summoned to the fraternity house, I’d been playing basketball at the campus rec center.
As fate would have it, while bunched like sardines in a shower stall with 30 pledge brothers, I was wearing grippies.
“Oh, shoot,” I thought. “They are going to hit us with a “Grippy Check.”
(As you will see from another hazing war story, this actually happened - actives would check to make sure pledges were wearing our boxers and not grippies).
Four decades later, I still remember the sense of panic and dread that engulfed me as I sat there in the shower in my tightie whities.
Fortunately, no active was guarding us as we sat trembling in the showers.
Summoning all my courage, I made a bold decision. I could sneak out of the showers, check all the doors of the fraternity rooms on the second floor, find one unlocked door, break in … and steal a pair of boxers from an active.
My pledge brothers must have been dumbfounded when I got up and did just that.
Thank God a fraternity brother with the nickname Mega Head hadn’t locked his door.
I quickly found some of Mega Head’s boxers (not exactly my size but underwear thieves can’t be choosers) … took off my grippies and put on Mega’s size-40 boxers. Then, after stashing my size-32 Haynes in a trash can, I returned to the showers.
“Hey, everyone. I’m back,” I said.
The Actives had pranked us …
The kicker to this story is that there was no “Grippy Check” that night. In fact, we didn’t get hazed at all. The actives had pulled a prank on us.
They’d made us think we were getting ready to have a terrible hazing session, when actually they threw a party for us! That night we all got to drink keg beer as we found out who our fraternity Big Brother was going to be.
Ha ha … Good one, Actives …
(I later figured out groups that often treat their members harshly mix in random enjoyable events to keep the crew from committing mutiny.)
This was the Real Thing …
The you-know-what DID hit the fan one unforgettable evening in early September 1983. “Hell Night” was the event when all pledges realized we were going to have to earn those fraternity pins.
On a Hades Monday - supper time at the old frat lodge - we pledges entered the main hall of our Old Row fraternity and were instantly assaulted not by two or three drill sergeants - but 100 drill sergeants … all the fraternity’s sophomores, juniors, seniors, plus a surprising number of 5th and 6th-year seniors, had convened to perform their assigned roles.
“The party’s over, boys!”
“Hit the floor!”
“Eat a hot pepper!”
“… You sorry, low-life New Boys. You’re not in high school anymore are you?”
***
While I’ve suppressed many of these memories, I do remember - for some inexplicable reason - I was wearing grippies that night and there was a Grippy Check.
Don’t ask why, but I was soon wearing those grippies over my head. I was then told “Walk like a Sumo Wrestler!”
There I was, squatting and duck-walking across the main hall, wearing grippies on my head as 100 crazed lunatics - boys from good families who’d previously told me how much they wanted me to be a Sigma Nu and assured me that I’d love being a part of their organization - were turning crimson in the face, screaming at me and laughing at me.
“Ah, so this is hazing,” I thought to myself. Once you experience it, it’s not very fun.
… Still, my older brother had also been a Sigma Nu. I knew a little bit about what was coming.
I’d accepted my “bid” and, although I didn’t sign a contract, I guess I agreed to the terms of the deal.
As you can tell from this Memory Piece, it didn’t kill me. It took a while, but I got a Substack column out of it … and six months later - frazzled and 10 pounds lighter - I got that little fraternity pin … which I lost in about two weeks and don’t particularly miss.
*** (Please don’t share this with people who get a sadistic thrill hazing others.) ***
Hazing can and does happen in high school …
It now occurs to me that Sigma Nu Hell Night was not the first time I’d seen or experienced such perplexing activity.
As a 9th grade high school student, I was thrilled when I was invited to join the Key Club, which was supposed to be a high school “service club,” but was really just a high school fraternity.
Now that I think about it, the Key Club “sponsored” a “hell weekend” for new pledges.
On a cold Saturday morning, all the pledges had to go to a farm owned by the father of an upperclassman where 15 young classmates spent eight hours getting hazed. This after a Friday night where we had to do a series of silly pranks.
But that was it - 11 hours of hazing. In exchange for this, we got to wear our Key Club jerseys to school for four years.
Being a part of the “in” group is important to people …
Even by the time I was a freshman at Alabama, I was familiar with stories of friends who didn’t get asked to be in the Key Club - of fantastic guys and girls who wanted to be in a fraternity or sorority who didn’t get asked to join.
I was in the group that did get invited to be a member of some special group, but even today I often think about those who did not get such an invitation.
Rejection hurts much more than wearing underwear on your head.
Now that I’ve grown philosophical in my old age, I realize people fear being rejected - being on the outside group - almost as much as fire.
To not be rejected, people will tolerate some weird stuff.
For many people, the quest to be part of the “in-crowd” is the most-important social driver of their lives. For those who are not chosen to be a part of these “status-elevating” organizations, this can cause great (and probably even life-long) pain.
Those who do get “picked” are, clearly, willing to submit to periods of ritualized hazing to enjoy the perceived benefits or status of being a member.
Maybe the thought is “no pain, no gain.”
One has to earn the right to wear that Key Club or Sigma Nu jersey (or put that Sigma Nu crest on the back windshield of your car … which, like all of my fellow fraternity brothers, I did.)
When one is 14, 18 … or 58, Status Credentials - and rituals - must exert a powerful pull on our psyches.
When a true leader speaks up … like Pat Trammell did
Just like pledge classes in a fraternity and platoons of recruits at Paris Island, football players often form a tight bond based on a shared experience.
For probably centuries, young adults have asked themselves the same question: “How are we going to get through this crap?”
My late father was an anomaly while a student at the University of Alabama. Dad was one of the very few members of the Crimson Tide football team who was also in a social fraternity (the SAEs, - long considered the “best fraternity on campus” and the “mother chapter” of this national fraternity).
Since he played football and was busy keeping Coach Bryant happy, Dad didn’t have to go through the SAE’s hazing program as a freshman.
(However, the “hazing” on the football team was infinitely more intense. Every day for three hours, assistant coaches were screaming incessantly at Dad and his teammates.)
I later learned that even the football players hazed other football players.
At Alabama (and probably other schools), the team has a lettermen’s organization, which is called the A-Club. If you earned a letter in a sport, you got to be a member. But, first, these members had to endure a weekend of hazing.
Dad later told me some of the things he had to do when he earned his letter after his sophomore season.
The most infamous/dreaded part of this tradition occurred when the new letter winners had to stand in a line waiting to get their “slats” from upperclassmen. (The players submitted to getting several, very hard licks, from a paddle or slat.)
We’ve all seen the movie “Animal House” and remember the scene where Kevin Bacon, a member of his college’s most elite fraternity, grimaces and says,
“Thank you, sir, may I have another!”
The A-Club - for decades - had a similar ritual.
Dad, who must have wanted to be in the A-Club, dutifully took his slats - which weren’t love pats - just like thousands of previous letter winners had.
But the player in the line behind Dad … did not.
That player was Pat Trammell, one of the team’s quarterbacks who would go on to become one of the most legendary leaders in Alabama football history.
As my father told me the story, right after Dad had taken his very-painful licks, Trammel stepped up looked at the guy with the paddle and said:
“You ain’t hitting me with that thing.”
I wasn’t there, but I bet you could have heard a pin drop.
According to my late father, Trammell was one of those people where it was easy to tell he meant what he said.
Trammell was not slatted, nor (I think, but might be wrong) was anyone at the back of the line.
I think I’m right in saying that was the end of decades of Alabama letter winners getting black, blue and crimson buttocks.
All it took was one different-type hombre to say, “Hell no.”
***
The reason I mention this story is because I think this anecdote defines a “real leader,” which Trammell obviously was.
Pat Trammell was the most important leader on a team that two years later won a national championship and a player Coach Bryant always called the greatest leader he was ever around.
Nobody on the team doubted Trammel’s toughness as a football player or person. But, here, Trammel proved his leadership … not by submitting to something everyone else had always submitted to, but by refusing to do something everyone else had always done.
Pat Trammell was brave enough to go against the pack.
(The same night, Dad told Trammell, “Thanks a lot, Pat. Why weren’t you in front of me in that line?”)
Aside: For another great “Pat Trammell story,” this one also involving my father, please see the Bonus Content in today’s Reader Comments section.
And a Bart Starr story …
A couple of years ago I read another story about the A-Club’s slatting tradition.
According to the widow of NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr, her husband suffered severe injuries when he was slatted after he earned his letter after his sophomore season as an Alabama quarterback (about eight years before Dad and Trammel played at Alabama).
According to Starr’s widow, the injuries partially explained why Starr didn’t play much his latter two seasons at Alabama.
Bart Starr was also one of the all-time great leaders in football history, but even he submitted to this physical assault and never said anything about it. (It was his wife who finally told this story six decades after the event happened).
One might ask why people submit to silly or minor hazing or even more severe hazing?
One answer must be because it’s very important to these people to be members of certain group, which they think confers status or benefits.
Or they are simply afraid of going against the leaders of the herd. They feel safer or more accepted being a part of the dominant group.
“John (or Karen), why did you get your Covid shot?”
“Why did you ‘haze’ your friend and neighbors who didn’t get their shots?”
But some people don’t go along with the pack. In fraternities, the Marines, service academies and football teams, some team members … quit. But many more … don’t.
The Junction Boys …
The most legendary tale of “football team hazing” might be the saga of the 1954 Texas A&M football team, coached by the squad’s new football coach, Paul Bear Bryant.
As the legend of the “Junction Boys” tells us, in a stifling hot and dry summer of 1954, more than 100 players travelled to an isolated outback called Junction, Texas.
Three busses were required to take team members to this 10-day training camp. Only one bus was needed to take the players back to campus at College Station. Approximately 60 players quit in those 10 days.
The survivors - who won only one football game Coach Bryant’s first season - became known as the “Junction Boys.”
Marines and Sigma Nu’s might think they were hazed and subjected to over-the-top abuse. For comparison purposes, they could imagine how many days they would have lasted under Bear Bryant at Junction, Texas.
Fear is the Greatest Motivator …
Some people change and learn from their experiences and Coach Bryant was one such person.
In his autobiography Bear, he candidly admitted that he went way too far trying to implement his coaching philosophy at Junction.
“I would have quit too,” Bryant later said and wrote.
Personally, I doubt Coach Bryant would have quit. Bryant, like many people, was really motivated by fear.
Bryant’s greatest fear was returning to a childhood of extreme poverty and hardship where he thought other people in town looked down their noses at he and his family.
He was going to show these people that he was special and he ended up using a sport (football) to prove this.
He became convinced that hard work, sacrifice and toughness were the keys to achieving status and a better quality of life.
He intentionally designed an extremely tough program for his players to try to find out who the team’s “winners” were.
He came to believe if he pushed players to their maximum level of fatigue and they didn’t quit, he’d be much more likely to “win” with such players on his roster in the future … and the players would derive benefits from proving they were not quitters.
Bryant said he hoped and prayed every night his players wouldn’t quit, but he went ahead and implemented a program seemingly designed to make large numbers of them do just that.
“I’d rather them quit now than in the fourth quarter of a tight ball game,” he later said.
Another famous Coach Bryant quote was that he didn’t want players to quit - because he thought once someone quit once, it would be easier to quit the next time.
For the record, the program … worked just as intended, but even Coach Bryant said he pushed it too far that summer.
(A couple of years later my father played for the “more mellow” and sensitive Coach Bryant, who didn’t organize a Junction-like torture camp for UA players … although the kinder-and-gentler program didn’t seem particularly mellow to my father.)
Coach Bryant might have modified his coaching techniques in future seasons - fewer players quit - but his core philosophy didn’t really change.
The Junction Boys’ Epilogue …
When Coach Bryant suffered a heart attack and died in 1983, press reports said the legendary coach was not wearing one of his six national championship rings at his death.
Instead, he was wearing a ring that had been given to him by the 35 or so players who survived Junction, a ring they gave their former coach at a team reunion decades later.
Coach Bryant and other journalists later wrote about that reunion. When Bryant was invited to the reunion, he said he wasn’t sure what reception he might get. He worried some of these now-grown men might have a few choice words to belatedly give their former coach.
Instead, the players had passed the hat and purchased an expensive ring for their former coach … and thanked him.
The former players had come to believe his coaching techniques had made them better men and citizens and prepared them for a life where they’d invariably face great challenges and setbacks.
I too learned some lessons from my hazing experience …
In a sense, I’m glad I was once hazed because this experience gave me excellent insight into one aspect of human nature … or the madness or power of mobs.
My observation is that a small percentage of people become the most intense abusers. These people seem to enjoy this activity.
A fraternity pledge program gives such people license to exert control over other subordinates, people who are not likely to defend themselves or register any form of protest.
Even today, I can pick out two or three members who, if I saw them today, I might “fire a flipper” (an elbow) into their nose.
Thinking about this makes me wonder why I didn’t do this 40 years ago.
I guess I never came close to doing this because it was more important to me to be a part of the group.
For the more sadistic members who got too much of a thrill from hazing, they did it because …. they simply could.
***
When I read about sports commissioners who fined unmasked NFL players $30,000 or watched late night TV comedians make jokes about unvaccinated patients they’d let die in a hospital, I thought about some of the more infamous hazers at the Sigma Nu house who got laughs from peers by humiliating a lowly pledge.
The victim who can’t or won’t fight back is an easy target for people who would never summon the courage to abuse others if he wasn’t surrounded by so many accomplices who were cheering him on.
Also, the bully who has always picked up other people probably loves it when he can do the same thing as part of an organized and sanctioned “pledge/hazing program.”
Let’s end this meditation with an anecdote about Change …
In 1983, I was no Pat Trammell. I just remained quiet and submitted to my hazing, figuring it was one of the prerequisites for being a member of an important group that might provide a few Life Benefits.
However, by 2020, I’d grown into another man - one who, just about every day, wrote articles saying, “No, this is wrong.”
As I viewed our “New Normal” protocols, millions of people were still being “hazed” or bullied by the most powerful “leaders” of society’s myriad herds.
In the process of growing into a man, I’d changed. These people, I now decided, weren’t going to haze me. If these were the dues for being a part of the In Crowd, maybe I could make my way as an outcast, away from this toxic herd.
***
(I now have my own club of friends, many of whom, I found here on Substack.)
BONUS CONTENT - MY BELINDA CARLISLE STORY ...
Once I was initiated, I never hazed a fellow fraternity member. To me, the hazing rituals were stupid and the thrill some of my fraternity brothers got from hazing underlings gave me the Heebie Jeebies.
Still, even I had to admit the program had its merits.
For example, pledges had to sign in every morning at the fraternity house and then sign-in at other times.
But having to wake up and go to the fraternity house every morning made it impossible to sleep through a morning class. And once we were up and at the house, we wanted to get out of the house as fast as we could - which meant going to class or the library.
The fraternity must have had some good leaders because our leaders always seemed to appoint the most mature and sensible members to be our pledge trainers or study hall proctors.
Thanks to mandatory nightly study halls - and the fact I never blew off any classes - I almost made the Dean’s List my first two semesters at Alabama - academic achievements that plummeted once I was no longer a pledge.
Thanks to the pledge program I learned the words to the Alabama fight song, learned valuable lessons like I should never wear grippies. (Also, I should should never wear polyester or a gold chain).
I learned to stand up when a lady came to the table and to always carry a lighter in my pocket so I could light a lady’s cigarette.
Aside: This habit later gave me one of the greatest thrills of my life.
A perk of being in a fraternity is the social chairman puts on a band party about every weekend in football season.
At one of these band parties, I went into the little bar in the basement where the beer kegs were and almost spit out my drink when I looked to my right and saw … Belinda Carlisle, the lead singer of the Go Go’s standing there.
Each fraternity has a couple of genuinely cool members and one of our supremely confident members had somehow met Miss Carlisle at the concert the Go Go’s put on a Memorial Coliseum earlier that night. He then invited her back to the fraternity house.
It just so happened when I went for a beer refill, I ended up standing next to her … and she had a cigarette in her mouth. Thanks to the Sigma Nu’s excellent pledge program, I lit Belinda Carlisle’s cigarette.
Belinda: “Thank you.”
Bill: “You’re welcome.”
Someone might ask why parents who were on the cusp of reaching upper middle class would spend so much money to cover their son’s fraternity dues.
Well, there’s your answer.
Another Pat Trammell story …
Dad later told me this story, which I’ve also read in articles about Trammell. That is, teammates confirm this story.
As noted, Pat Trammell, the quarterback, was the undisputed leader of a football team that went undefeated and won a national championship in 1961.
In one game, I don’t know what year, Dad was in the huddle with Trammell when the P.A. announcer bellowed, “And now scores from other games.”
I don’t know what stadium this was in or what the score of the game was at the time, but this seems like something my father might have said:
Dad: “Damn. Did ya’ll hear that? Auburn just beat Tennessee.”
Pat Trammell: “Rice, get your *&^### ass out of my huddle right now!”
Even today, I can hear the radio announcer telling a million listeners, “And Bill Rice, the big tight end from Troy, is now leaving the game.”
Pat Trammell was The Man.
… For those not from Alabama, Pat Trammell graduated in 1962 with my father. He then went to medical school and became a doctor. At age 28, he died of brain cancer.
Coach Bryant says he was the greatest leader he ever coached.