In the era of Donald Trump’s forced kisses and a campus sexual assault crisis that’s festered on college sports teams, it’s rare to read about locker-room smooches that have nothing to do with sex crimes. As such, a quick glance at the New York Times’ report of the pregame football tradition at the University of Houston—players lining up for kisses from their coach—initially struck me as a piece about sexual coercion in college football.
Not so! By all accounts, these kisses are consensual and limited to the players’ cheeks. Coach Tom Herman says he’s been kissing his football players for the last decade of his coaching career, a logical extension of a recruitment promise most colleges make to prospective players and their families: that the coach will take care of his team members like they were his own sons.
To Herman, that means murmured nothings and physical touch. Before every game, as the University of Houston players arrive at the stadium, they file past Herman as he embraces and kisses each one, sometimes whispering a few affectionate words. “A kiss on the cheek is when he shows his love for us,” player Garrett Davis told the Times. If that quote didn’t worm its way into your steel-encased heart, please look at the photo in the Times article, in which a slightly embarrassed–looking wide receiver has moved his headphones up to his forehead to accommodate the nuzzling of Herman’s goatee.
Herman’s first University of Houston kiss was bestowed upon the team’s strength coach; players were reportedly shocked, but soon got used to the idea. The team has been doing well; “If kissing us on the cheek before games gets us wins, then it works,” Davis said. According to Herman, love by way of smooches is one way to convince players to push their bodies and subject themselves to a sport that carries with it certain physical harm. The other way, presumably, is yelling at players during halftime and playing tic-tac-toe on a whiteboard.
Regular coach-player kisses, in this one particular scenario, seem to model healthy masculinity in a sport beset by rigid gender norms and homophobia. (See: the disgusting backlash against Odell Beckham Jr., who has dared to dress well and post goofy videos with his male friends on social media.) For men, fear of intimacy in same-sex platonic friendships is a direct result of anti-gay bullying, and it keeps men from having the kind of deeper friend relationships women more often enjoy. Even the famous butt pats of football seem more like a macho-dom move than a gesture of care. On a sports team, trust and camaraderie between players and coaches are paramount to success. That’s why Herman requires “a two-handed embrace” between a player who scores a touchdown and the first offensive lineman he can get his hands on.
Herman told the Times that he was “disappointed” to find out that he was the first man who’d ever kissed some of the players, many of whom didn’t grow up with fathers. With his hugs and tender words of encouragement—“I love you, buddy!”—he’s trying to normalize man-on-man affection. Isn’t locker-room talk great?
