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If you ain’t a wolf, you’re a sheep.  If you don’t see red, you’re yellow.  And if you’re not gonna take, you’re gonna get taken.  This was the mind frame that I showed up to camp with this year.  Survival of the fittest, kid.

So I did a head count. Two teams out, a dispersal draft, and an entry draft means about 70 players are going to be squeezed out of a job.  For cusp players like myself in Toronto, it’s the season of reckoning.

Last year, and pretty much my whole career, I have been a passenger, a dude with enough talent to make the ends meet.  As a person who likes to live his life with a certain level of ethics and integrity. What the *#@% is that?  The entire off-season of ‘07, this became a critical issue for me.  Very plainly, I said to myself, “either do something, or don’t.”

It’s with this type of self-imposed ultimatum that you either, never look wholly into the mirror ever again, or for the first time you actually look wholly into the mirror.  I realized it is these simple ironies that will ultimately define you in the end.  So willfully, I chose the latter.

So how did I prepare myself?  I abandoned conventional thought and re-routed my processes.  Apparently, whatever I was doing wasn’t working.  Instead of training like a lacrosse player, I trained like a decathlete.  I put in hard hours at the gym and blasted protein like a fiend.  I coached and competed against myself – pushing weights that were too heavy, busting through layers of lactic acid, and eating raw kidney beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Every time I wanted to stop, or crush a burger, I developed a slogan for myself, “no excuses.”  This was huge for me in every way imaginable.   I discovered with a “no excuse” mentality, the bar gets raised everyday.  If you can’t make an excuse, than there is no reason why you can’t do better.  This has become my manifesto.

After six months of conditioning myself this way, I was ready for a take-no-prisoners training camp.  Instead of playing against my teammates, I played against myself.  No matter what, I decided that I trained the hardest, and I’m the guy to beat.  Whether this was true or not, I doubt it.  But regardless, I earned a spot in the starting line-up, and I’m going to push past every plateau that complacency presents.  And to make it all the more legit, I tore cartilage in my knee last Wednesday at practice.  I get surgery today.  Nonetheless, I’m still mentally prepared to take this season on.  I don’t believe this is going to affect me.  There is no room to think otherwise.  I’ll be playing, because I don’t have an excuse not to.  The Rock is going to the Show.

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