Warning: This is a story about athletes who have crapped their pants on the field of play

Dave Wyman doesn’t smile, doesn’t laugh, doesn’t betray any emotion whatsoever as he says, “You haven’t lived until you shit your pants.”

Right at that moment, the waitress walks over and sets down sliders and fries, plus a pile of chicken wings. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more appetizing than hearing a grown man talk about shitting his pants while snacking on saucy, messy chicken wings.

“Smells good,” Wyman says, meaning the wings, not the other thing.

Wyman played nine years in the NFL, first as a linebacker for the Seahawks, then with the Broncos. When the Seahawks drafted him out of Stanford in 1987, two things happened. One, he would get so nervous before games that he would throw up and get what he calls “bubble gut.” And two, he started to hear horror stories about players who had succumbed to intestinal distress.

“That was a big fear,” Wyman says. “You don’t want to be that guy.”

So imagine his concern when he played one game with a 103-degree fever and plumbing problems on both ends. “I remember hitting somebody and being on the bottom of the pile just clenching my butt together so hard that I was sore there the next day,” he says.

Or his desperation before a preseason game, when nature called before kickoff and he rushed off the field, into the locker room and crammed into a stall, shoulder pads and all. As he sat on his porcelain throne and conducted his royal business, he heard his name boom over the stadium.

From Stanford, linebacker, Dave Wyman.

The starting lineups.

He ran onto the field late. But for another day, at least, he had staved off disaster. He had not become another member of sports’ semi-secret fraternity.

Just in case it isn’t painfully obvious by now: This is a story about athletes who have crapped their pants on the field of play.

It happens! It really does!

Yes, this is a gross, nasty, uncouth topic of conversation. But it is also an inevitable part of sports and the overall human experience. Athletes get sick, they have stomach issues, they get food poisoning, and yet they go out and push their bodies to their limit.

Sometimes their bodies push back. So let’s talk about it.

If you want to blame anyone for this story, blame Paul Pierce. He’s the one who said, on ESPN recently, that he had a confession to make: His famous wheelchair game with the Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals was nothing more than an elaborate cover-up.

“I just had to go to the bathroom,” he said, adding, “Something went down.”

"I just had to go to a bathroom."@paulpierce34 admits the only reason he left the 2008 Finals in a wheelchair was to go to the bathroom 😂
— ESPN (@espn) June 6, 2019

Pierce later tweeted that he was joking, but as they say: Never let The Truth get in the way of a good story. Plus, Jalen Rose, Pierce’s ESPN colleague, later went on to tell everyone, “It’s OK to poop in your pants.”

He’s not wrong. George Brett, the Royals Hall of Famer, did it in Vegas. Gary Lineker, an English soccer player, crapped his pants during a World Cup game. Just this week, Brock Huard, the former Huskies quarterback and Wyman’s co-worker at 710 ESPN, shared with listeners his own experience. Baseball players, football players, marathon runners and NASCAR drivers and even surfers: All have lost a battle with their bowels in the heat of competition.

Scot Pollard, who played with Pierce at Kansas and the Celtics, said it was common enough that there was even a joke about it in the NBA: “If you ever see me looking like I pulled my hammy,” he says, “just know that I sharted.”

If that sounds specific, it’s because Pollard wasn’t discussing a hypothetical situation. “I was in a game in Sacramento and I was like, ‘Whoa, uh oh,’” he says. “I just acted like I pulled my hamstring and went straight to the locker room. Changed clothes, changed shorts, cleaned up and came running back out.”

Rick Griffin, the longtime Mariners trainer, knows it happened at least once in Seattle when catcher Bob Kearney was sick on the day of a game but decided to tough it out and play.

“Two or three times during the game, as soon as the inning was over, he’d run over, run into the bathroom,” Griffin says. “Catchers wear a different kind of cup so it’s a little more of an elaborate process to get the cup on and off. He did that three or four times, and I think it was the sixth or seventh inning when he finally said, ‘Screw it. I’m just letting it go.’”

Larry Izzo, an assistant special teams coach with the Seahawks and former Patriots linebacker, once crapped on the sideline during a game — and received a game ball for pulling it off from none other than Bill Belichick.

“Larry would be so mad at me if I said that this did not happen because he takes ultimate pride in this whole deal,” Patriots receiver Wes Welker told ESPN’s Dan LeBatard several years ago. “Of all the special-teams tackles and Pro Bowls he’s made, I guarantee you that game ball is probably a more prized item for him than his Super Bowl rings.”

But in the storied history of Seattle sports, no No. 2 looms larger than that of Seahawks offensive lineman Robbie Tobeck.

It was 2001, and the Seahawks played the Redskins in D.C. Tobeck felt fine on the flight over and fine that afternoon, but in the evening, his stomach started sounding alarms.

“I guess violent would be the word for it,” he says.

It was so bad that the team quarantined him, moving out roommate Steve Hutchinson. Tobeck didn’t come out of his room, but by Sunday afternoon — and with the help from some medication designed to clog him up — he thought he could play.

“I’ll never forget Holmgren,” Tobeck says. “I walked by Holmgren before the game and he just looked at me, real serious, and said, ‘Tough it out.’”

Backed by those uplifting words from his coach, Tobeck took the field for the first series of the game. He was locked in hand-to-hand combat with Dan Wilkinson, a 340-pound defensive tackle nicknamed Big Daddy.

“I’ve got to deal with the stomach issues, plus I have to deal with Big Daddy,” Tobeck says.

Then, disaster. Shaun Alexander took a handoff and, without anywhere else to go, rammed into Tobeck.

Say Tobeck: “Knocked the wind out of me, knocked everything else out of me.”

Tobeck stayed in the game, but when he finally left the field, he asked the trainers and equipment staff for a new pair of pants. And a bucket.

“I would come off to the sideline and there was a bucket there, and the poor guys had to stand around me with a towel,” he says. “I was shitting in a bucket on the sideline during a game.”

Tobeck, it’s worth pointing out, played center, and at some point during the game, a trainer had the sense to walk over to quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and tell him he might want to stop licking his fingers.

Things didn’t get better for Tobeck after the game, either. “I’m literally laying in the training room as miserable as I can, and I’m farting probably about every 10 or 20 seconds,” he says. “Just big old farts. I don’t even care that point, I’m so miserable. And I remember Chad Brown turning around and looking at me and going, ‘Are you serious, man?’ I was like, ‘I just want to die right now.’”

The sickness abated for a short time, but by the next game, it was back with a vengeance. Knowing what her father was going through, Tobeck’s oldest daughter decided to Saran wrap the toilet in the upstairs bathroom.

“She did a good job because I didn’t notice it,” Tobeck says. “There was no compassion from either coach Holmgren or my kids. I was on my own.”

The story has trailed him through the years. ESPN The Magazine did a big story in 2010 and called Tobeck. Just last year, he bought a new house in Florida, and his new neighbors Googled him.

“They softened me up, asked me about my career, fired me up a little bit first,” he says. “And then they said, ‘Hey, by the way, did that really happen?’”

It did.

Brown, the Seahawks linebacker who heard Tobeck’s titanic farts, has his own “in-game, shit-your-pants story” to share.

The Seahawks were playing in Atlanta, and Brown threw up on the tarmac in Seattle. All Friday and Saturday, the team’s training staff filled him with fluids, to the point that he felt waterlogged and sloshy. Still, he played.

“I rush the quarterback, beat the tackle to the inside, and right as I’m hitting the quarterback and bringing him down, Cortez Kennedy falls right on my stomach,” he says. “That was more than I was able to hold in.”

Pause.

“There was a tremendous explosion in my pants.”

Luckily, it was third down, so he ran straight to the locker room and changed. Brown played in the NFL for 15 years, so it is not a stretch to say (drum roll, please) he has seen a lot of shit.

“I saw it on all three teams I was with: with Pittsburgh, with Seattle, and I saw it in New England. I saw it with star players, I saw it in training camp practices.”

He starts laughing. “No one has to be ashamed about this!”

Which brings us back to Dave Wyman. He is definitely not ashamed.

Wyman never did crap himself during a game, but he has had so much experience in the matter away from the field that his wife once encouraged him to write a book about it. Plus, he just finds the whole topic hilarious. He picks up a couple of fries and drinks his Blue Moon.

“I’ll probably shit myself on the way home,” he says, but no worry. His truck is stocked with extra underwear, wet wipes, ammonia.

Just in case.

(Top photo of Robbie Tobeck: Brian Bahr/ Getty Images)