Love’s the winner, says kissing coach
It is one of the most brutal sports in the world, played by hulking gladiators in helmets who spend their afternoons trying to knock each other over or escape a clobbering.
Yet to one leading American football coach a less violent form of human interaction holds the key to his players reaching their full potential: the man-to-man kiss.
Tom Herman, the head coach of the Houston Cougars, the thriving team of the University of Houston in Texas, greets all of his players before a game with a peck on the cheek and preaches a creed of brotherly love in the locker room.
Several of the Cougars players grew up fatherless and some had never been kissed by a man before but now look forward to their coach planting a smacker on them.
‘‘From what I can gather your importance to the team is directly related to the duration of your kiss,’’ said Tyler McCloskey, one of the Cougars’ senior players.
‘‘If you stay more than five seconds there, you’re a ‘dude’.’’
‘‘A kiss on the cheek is when he shows his love for us,’’ said Garrett Davis, a sociology student in his second year with the team. ‘‘Noone here is thinking, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t let him kiss me’.’’
In the global sport that Americans call soccer, hugs and kisses have been part of goal celebrations for decades, but in the macho culture of American football Herman’s methods verge on the revolutionary.
Niobe Way, a psychology professor at New York University, believes that Herman has found a way to get the best from his players by tapping into American boys’ need to connect with other males – an urge they tend to suppress as they get older, fearing that they will be stigmatised as gay.
‘‘He’s disrupting a stereotype about boys and men, a notion of masculinity that says boys and men are only driven by the desire for competition and autonomy,’’ she told The New York Times.
Way said research indicated that humans were motivated by ‘‘the desire to be in connected communities’’.
Herman, 41, thinks that the carrot is more effective than the stick when demanding painful sacrifices from his players.
‘‘How do you motivate a human being to do things against his own nature?’’ he asked.
‘‘There’s two things: love and fear. And to me, love wins every time.’’
– The Times