Tyler Would Prefer to Drop It, but . . .

The topic was fumbling, so the central character must have been Wendell Tyler. “Everybody wants to talk about fumbling,” Tyler said, sighing. “That’s part of my life. I accept that, like waking up in the morning.” Does anyone ask Frank Sinatra why he can’t sing the national anthem without his voice cracking? Was Napoleon second-guessed about his game plan at Waterloo? What made Ford think the Edsel was a better idea? Even the great ones goof, but few handle adversity as gracefully as Tyler, who has lifted the fumbling of footballs to an art form. He expected the subject to come up during the Super Bowl media blitz this week. He didn’t exactly look forward to it, but he expected it. Tyler talks about fumbling as willingly as a reformed drunk talks about drinking, except that Tyler hasn’t reformed. He fumbles as much as ever for the 49ers as he did for the Rams, and for UCLA before that. It seems Tyler has always fumbled. He probably dropped his rattle right off. One reporter asked Tyler if he hadn’t fumbled less this season. Tyler eyeballed the man from under his white Super Bowl cap. “This year?” he said, smiling. “Nah. I had 13 this year.” Wendell Tyler is honest, above all. Who’s counting? Everybody. “I do feel my performance outweighs the fumbles, but I guess sometimes some of the media hopes I fumble so they outweigh my performance,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me. You have a job to do and you’re gonna do your job no matter what I say. Sometimes I feel like that. You’ve got to sell papers, so you guys do what you do best. “I don’t make fun of it. It bothers me. I work on it. But I can’t do nothing about it. I’m not gonna kill myself over it.” Tyler was offended late in the NFC title game against the Chicago Bears two weeks ago when the officials stopped play to check his hands. “They were looking for stickum ‘cause we hadn’t fumbled,” he said. “They looked at (teammate) Roger Craig, too. That was kind of downgrading to us and our team.” Tyler’s only complaint is that he wants people to understand why he fumbles. “When I do fumble, I’m going for the extra yard,” he said. “I give 150% on the field, and that causes me to fumble. I’m sorry. Coach Walsh knows I’m giving 150%, and my teammates know it, and they know if they give it back to me, I might break one. It’s part of the game. “The media writes about it so the guys (defenders) go for it (the ball). Sometimes they talk to me about how they’re gonna make me cough it up.” Bob Baumhower, the Dolphins’ nose tackle, hinted this week that the Dolphins might work especially hard to force Tyler to fumble. “Well, I wish him good luck,” Tyler said. “If he can get a good lick, he’ll be one of the very few. I very seldom give up good licks, one on one. Hopefully, he’ll be getting blocked and won’t be able to get a good lick.” Tyler noted with only a grunt that Eric Dickerson fumbled even more than he did this season, and yet Dickerson is not considered a fumbler. “When I played my junior year at UCLA with a broken wrist, that’s when I got the stigma of fumbling,” Tyler said, wistfully. “Sometimes, I regret I played that year with that wrist. Maybe that rap wouldn’t have got on me.” Wendell Avery Tyler is a pleasant, gracious and intelligent person, a faithful husband to Carmen and the father of two. But he once pulled the curtain on interviews when the subject of fumbling came up. That was before the accident, the one that sent him tumbling down a West Virginia hillside early in the summer of 1980, after the Rams had gone to the Super Bowl. His brother-in-law was driving, and both fell asleep. When they hit bottom, Tyler’s right hip was broken and dislocated. Owner Georgia Frontiere dispatched an air ambulance to bring him home, but his career appeared to be finished. It seemed a miracle when he returned late that season to carry the ball 30 times, and when he started scoring touchdowns again a year later, he added a new flair. He always knelt in the end zone and made the sign of the cross. “I started that after I had my accident, when I received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” Tyler said. “It’s to give Him the praise and the glory. “I used to slam the ball, I used to give it to the fans, and I just like to show people that I am a Christian, and maybe it will touch their lives.” The conversion also changed his life off the field. “I really wasn’t a screw-up,” he said. “I wasn’t a bad guy, I wasn’t carousing. I was just sometimes too evil, not too understanding and too impatient. I didn’t like the press. “Now, no matter what they write about me, I like ‘em, anyway. That’s their job, and they have to do that.” Tyler’s only problem, he said, is that “I get kind of leery ridin’ around mountains now. I don’t go to sleep when somebody else is driving. I stay awake at all times . . . put on my seat belt and protect myself.” A 49er for two seasons, since the Rams abruptly traded him to make room for Dickerson in a single-back offense, he still lives in West Covina in the off-season. “I never had any bad feelings about the Rams because they overwhelmingly helped me out during my career,” Tyler said. “I was sad I had to leave all my friends and my family and my hometown folks, but it was like a new birth for me.” Tyler had little to say about Dickerson, his successor as the Rams’ resident running back. “He’s one of the greatest in the NFL so far. I met him a couple times . . . a nice, humble person. He has an attitude, but that’s his thing.” Asked to explain, Tyler said, smiling: “All running backs have attitudes. We all think we’re great. Some more than others.” Even as a running back, he feels an important part of the 49ers’ offense. He rushed for 1,262 yards this season--his best in eight years in the NFL and a club record, while catching 28 passes--and was voted into the Pro Bowl by the other players. “I feel myself as a pioneer because the 49ers really didn’t run a lot until I came here,” Tyler said. “After I leave here, the 49ers will truly have a running game. Me and Roger were the first two guys to establish a running game here. The guys that come after us, the plans have already been laid. “We complement each other. A lot of people were keying on me, but they found out Roger was a runner, too. Now they have to worry about Roger. “Our running game complements our passing game. We run a lot of draws and plays off the draw to set up the pass. We try to set up our passes with the runs. “But our success depends on our running game. We must be able to run to be able to get first downs, to take time off the clock, so Dan (Marino) doesn’t have a lot of time with the ball because, as we see, he has the golden arm, and that arm hasn’t failed him yet. “I don’t think we’re gonna try to dominate this game on the ground. You never know what’s in our game plan. You never know what’s in Bill’s mind,” he said, referring to Coach Bill Walsh. “But we’re a passing team. We’re gonna come out passing. “We’re not running a lot of sweeps right now. We’re running counters and traps up the middle, using my quickness to hit the hole and get into the secondary before guys come off their blocks. We’ve been able to do that quite successfully in the playoffs.”