Head Trainer at E.T.A. — the "wingless fly" and the shoulders ritual

texture · UNDATED (standing, ~YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (standing role, present-tense in YDAU)
• What: The E.T.A. consensus is that Head Trainer Barry Loach "resembles a wingless fly—blunt and scuttly". He works the weight room walking around with a clipboard he never writes on, watching and nodding (scene 055); shaves ankles and lays down the four-minute match-wrap, liner-sock, wick-sock, and pressure-gauged AirCast; and in the locker-room routine the players rest their hands on his shoulders while he works — "Everybody's had his hands on Loach's shoulders at one time or another." His register has its own player-side currency: the can't-miss state deLint calls playing out of your head, "Loach calls it The Zone" (Hal, scene 064). At the exhibition-day taping Hal muses aloud to him that the pre-match locker room feels recorded, its occupants "Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines" — as Traub reported it, anyway (Whale heard "Furrier Transforms"), with nobody able to say whether Loach responded one way or another. Loach also enforces ankle therapy (event 8).