It will be hard to read many of them, really read them, because of the veil of exhaustion that they all will don. It happens every summer - repetition, separation, hot sun, head slaps, hell. It is a formula as old as Halas, unity through brutal banality.

Still, though, some things will be obvious. The established veterans, those with secure jobs, will be unable to hide their disdain for the whole stupid business. The rookie draft choices, their wallets newly stuffed, will arrive with the cocksure look of people about to take over the world; when they leave, not so much.

The interesting people are the ones in between, the ones who hide their insecurity behind eyes that rarely leave the ground in front of their feet, the ones who always have their ear buds firmly in place. They are the ones who are not sure where they will be living in September.

You can see those players every day at Lehigh. You can read about some of them in a new book, "A Few Seconds of Panic," written by Stefan Fatsis. A Wall Street Journal sports writer, Fatsis spent training camp in 2006 as a 43-year-old kicker with the Denver Broncos. He will read from the book tomorrow at the Free Library, 19th and Vine streets, at 7 p.m.

The book is good on several levels - as the first NFL reprise of George Plimpton's "Paper Lion," 42 years later, but also for its portraits of the people beneath the helmets, especially the guys on the fringes.

One memorable character is Preston Parsons, who wasn't drafted, bounced around, and was given the impression he would have a real chance to compete for the No. 2 quarterback job when he signed as a free agent. Three months later, he watched helplessly as the Broncos maneuvered around and selected Jay Cutler, the Vanderbilt quarterback, with the 11th pick of the first round of the draft.

Parsons was screwed. There would be no competition now. No one from Denver called to explain. "There's no sorries," he says in the book.

It should be the NFL's official slogan. (Or at least the NFL Players Association's.)

You see it all the time. You see all of these guys at training camp, desperate for an opportunity. Eagles coach Andy Reid often tells the story about the speech he gives to these longshots - a speech he probably will give tonight at Lehigh, or sometime later in the week. It is about how you can't worry about how long the line of players is in front of you during a drill, that you can't fixate on the line, that you just have to concentrate on doing your best when it is your turn, whenever it is your turn.

But they all still count where they are, and quietly celebrate when they are maybe moved up a slot, and stew for hours when it appears they have been moved back, and try not to do something stupid or say something stupid.

Some are better at that than others. The all-timer might have been the kid who just couldn't take it anymore at one of Dick Vermeil's camps at West Chester and left the field in the middle of practice, climbing the steps at the one end of the field, peeling off his equipment piece by piece and flinging it away, along with a few choice expletives for his soon-to-be-former employers.

Most, though, just internalize the disappointment. But as Parsons says in the book, "They hold my career and basically my life in the palm of their hands. Right now, they're not opening up that palm, not letting me do anything . . . I've never felt like this. It's hurting my heart. It's giving me ulcers."

Parsons would end up on the Broncos' practice squad for a year, and then he would be gone. It is what happens to so many of them. If you are a high draft choice who makes it as an NFL player, a golden child, you live a life of lucrative anxiety. If you are on the edge of making it, without the guarantee of a pedigree, you are pretty much assured of a neurosis.

Fatsis writes, " . . . [T]he NFL, with its conga line of talent, the short attention span of its front offices, and the disposability of its players, is the most unmeritocratic of our professional sports leagues. My experience didn't make me more cynical about the NFL. It just showed me what players endure to get there and what they experience once they arrive. And it revealed the deep disconnect between what fans see on game day and what happens the rest of the week."

Training camp does open a little bit of a window, though, if you are willing to look. Start with the guys at the end of the line. *

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