Tony Joiner picks himself up off the turf of Florida’s practice field. Rivers of sweat flow freely in the 90-degree heat at 5 p.m. He is exhausted, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Five more yards and then Mickey Marotti’s whistle blows. He hits the turf again. This time it will take all his strength to get back up to his feet. Ten more yards to go and the final 100 yards will be covered.
The official name for this punishment drill is “up-downs.” Perhaps a better name for it would be living hell. This is just a part of what happens when you use poor judgment and violate the trust of Coach Urban Meyer and the Florida football team.
If the punishment seems overly tough, that’s because it’s designed to be that way. It’s tough so that offenders know that team rules and responsibilities must be taken seriously. It’s also designed tough to weed out quitters, slackers and those that just can’t seem to live within the structure of a team that has its rules and regulations. If you can’t handle the rules and and fit in with the structure of the team, then you will quit rather than take what Joiner is getting.
There is no quit in Tony Joiner. He makes the final 10 yards, finishes the drill and walks off the field slowly, painfully. Every drop of sweat represents an ounce of pain. The sweat has no end, nor does the pain. At the practice field gate, he grabs a Gatorade and in two long swigs, 90 percent of the bottle is consumed. The walk to the locker is an agonizing one step at a time affair.
These are tough times for Joiner, who was arrested 10 days ago and charged with burglary for trying to retrieve his girlfriend’s car from a towing lot at 4:30 in the morning. Joiner had made arrangements to come pick up the car but when there was no one at the lot, he grew impatient and decided to drive it off although with the intention of paying the $76 towing charge. On the way out, a tow truck driver returning from a call saw Joiner, called the police and the senior strong safety from Haines City was arrested by the Gainesville police.
The charges were subsequently dropped — towing company owner Stan Farron agrees that Joiner did call in advance and he did arrange to pick up the car — but even so, Joiner made a very bad and immature decision when he let his impatience get the best of him. Now he’s paying the price for a bad decision that has brought embarrassment to the university, to the football team and most importantly, to Joiner himself.
He is truly embarrassed. He has a hard time holding his head up when he talks about what happened. The hurt is obvious but he knows that tough times never last but tough people do.
That’s why he’s toughing out the punishment. As much as Urban Meyer heaps on him, he will take it.
“Just paying my debt to the team because I feel I let my team down,” he says as he shuffles toward the Florida locker room. “That’s one of the easiest things about doing what I’m doing right now — taking the punishment I’m taking because I let a lot of people down that had high hopes in me and looked up to me. It makes it a lot easier to go through it.”
The punishment — the up-downs are only a small piece of what’s been doled out — isn’t easy and it’s a grim reminder that he made a bad error in judgment. He’s not bitter, though. He’s humble. He wants desperately to somehow make up for what he’s done.
“You learn from your mistakes,” he says. “You learn from a lot of things so right now I’m doing a lot of learning.”
It has helped that throughout this entire incident, Joiner has remained humble and straightforward. When the tow truck driver arrived and accused him of stealing the car, Joiner didn’t try to run away. He waited for the police to arrive and when they got on the scene, he didn’t try to worsen matters by blaming others or trying to point fingers when the problem was one of his own creation. Farron admits that he was impressed that Joiner was the perfect gentleman throughout.
Joiner’s polite demeanor probably had plenty to do with the charges being dropped by the state attorney last Friday.
“You just got to be humble with the situation,” he said. “I was wrongly accused, but I had to look at the positive side, be humble. I couldn’t be some douchebag about it.”
All this happened the week of Florida’s encounter in Baton Rouge with top-ranked LSU, a game the Gators lost, 28-24. Although the distraction of Joiner’s arrest didn’t factor in the outcome of the game, it was still a distraction and unwanted publicity for a young team trying to make its way through a tough Southeastern Conference schedule.
Because Joiner is a senior and because he was a team captain — a player the young guys on the team look up to — there had to be punishment. He was out at 4:30 in the morning and that alone drew Meyer’s ire. He compounded that by making the kind of poor judgment that Meyer might expect of a freshman, but certainly not of a senior captain.
There had to be punishment and part of Joiner’s punishment was that he didn’t start the game against LSU although he did play. That part was tough. Being stripped of his team captain status was another part of the punishment. That hurt the worst.
But in the midst of all the troubles, one thing stood out for Joiner. Meyer’s punishment was tough to take, but Meyer left the door open for Joiner to make a decision. He could come back if he wanted. He would have to earn his way back into the good graces of the team and the coach, but he had to understand that it wouldn’t be easy.
Nobody got Tony Joiner into trouble except Tony Joiner. And, only Tony Joiner could decide if he wanted to earn his way back. Joiner chose to come back.
“I gotta work my way back,” he said.
Working his way back won’t be easy, but even through the tough times he’s going through with the extra punishment and the embarrassment of no longer being the team captain, he knows he has a friend he can count on.
“He’s never going to turn his back on a player; that’s one thing I know about Coach Meyer,” Joiner said. “That’s one thing he told me. I just gotta work back into building the trust again and keep doing the things I was doing before this incident.”
Tony Joiner knows he made an impulsive, impatient and very wrong decision 10 days ago. Whatever price he’s paid already, there is more to come but whatever he has to do to restore himself as a teammate and as a person, he’s going to do it.
He’ll get there because he knows he has to. He’ll get there because the one person pulling the hardest for him to get there is the same guy that doled out the punishment.
Tony Joiner let Urban Meyer down once. He won’t let it happen again. You can bet the farm on it.