Dave (Tiger) Williams, who was recently acquired by the Kings, is the NHL’s all-time leader in penalty minutes and, perhaps, the most feared player in hockey. Because his value to a team is measured in victims, not statistics, they call him . . . : THE TIGER

One look at Dave (Tiger) Williams’ distinctive face tells us almost everything there is to know about his 11-year career in the National Hockey League.

There are lumps on both sides of his forehead, scars and other minor disfigurements around his cheekbones and a particularly nasty gash that sits dangerously close to his right eye. His nose, partially flattened, curves to one side like a hockey stick. A writer once said that Williams’ face is so flat he could bite a wall.

Clearly, Tiger Williams is a throwback to a more violent era of hockey in which the sole function of many players was to beat the bejabbers out of the other guy. Old-time hockey, they called it in the movie “Slapshot.” The basic philosophy, handed down by Conn Smythe himself in 1931, was: “If you can’t beat them in the alley, you can’t beat them on the ice.”

As plain as the nose on his face, you can see that Tiger Williams has beaten them in the alley, on the ice, in the penalty box, the stands, the locker room and anywhere else he deems suitable. But he has taken his share of beatings, too, and also has been a party to some of hockey’s wildest and most brutal brawls in recent years.

Williams, acquired by the Kings from the Detroit Red Wings a month ago, is the NHL’s all-time leader in penalty minutes with 3,190. Not counting overtime, that’s the equivalent of 53 entire games spent in the penalty box, which must seem like a second home to Williams.

There isn’t enough space to list all of Tiger’s greatest hits. Besides, some are too intense for the squeamish. Lots of them have been delivered in stick-swinging situations.

Williams once sent Buffalo Sabre Coach Scotty Bowman crashing to the floor with a open head wound after Bowman had leaned over the bench to watch a fight in progress. Tiger was once brought up on assault charges after smashing his stick over the head of Pittsburgh’s Dennis Owcher. And over the years, he has been involved in many heavyweight battle royals with Billy Smith, the New York Islanders’ irascible goalie.

Long-time King fans may remember Tiger for his gruesome stick duel with the Kings’ Dave Hutchison 10 years ago in the playoffs. Fittingly, the incident took place in the penalty box. More recently, Tiger was the instigator of the bench-clearing brawl that led to the infamous Paul Mulvey incident of 1982, where Mulvey refused to fight after being ordered to by then-King Coach Don Perry. That same season, Williams went into the Forum seats and attacked a fan who had thrown ice at him.

Now, Williams fights his battles for the Kings, not against them. Almost as soon as he stepped onto the ice for the Kings, he was transformed from a villain to a crowd favorite. King fans, who used to bombard Tiger with cups, ice and obscenities, now chant his name.

“That’s the way it is in hockey,” King General Manager Rogie Vachon said with a laugh. “The physical guys get all the abuse, except when he’s your guy. Then, you cheer.”

It also is an accepted fact in hockey that there still is a place for physical players. You can bluntly call them enforcers and goons, or something milder like grinders and muckers, but they have always been a part of hockey. Probably always will.

Hockey has experienced a renaissance recently in which skating and scoring, not spearing and slashing, are emphasized. But the artistry of Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers notwithstanding, every team figures it needs a Tiger Williams. The Oilers have Dave Semenko, not-so-affectionately called Cement Head around the league.

So, at 31, Williams still is playing and adding to his road map of scars, mostly because he knows his limitations on the ice.

“It’s been successful for me,” Williams said after a recent practice. “So, why change? It’s a tough job, doing what I do. The way I look at it, Marcel Dionne is a great goal scorer and that’s why he’s stayed in the league so long. Other guys have talent to block shots, or backcheck or kill penalties. Some have the talent to be physical.”

Williams’ career statistics clearly show the area of his expertise. Williams, who has averaged more than 300 penalty minutes a season, has led the league in that category three times. Conversely, the most goals he has ever scored in a season is 35 and the most points 62.

But Williams’ value to a team is measured in victims, not statistics. Williams is at his best when he provokes an opponent--preferably the top scorer--into taking a penalty. Williams does this by verbal goading, a stick to the ribs, a quick elbow to the face or all of the above.

“Nobody likes to play opposite Tiger,” said Chicago assistant coach Roger Neilson, who coached Williams at Toronto and Vancouver. “You can stick him against a guy like Gretzky, (Denis) Savard or Lanny (McDonald) and he’ll do his best to take them out of their game. He knows how to get under a guy’s skin.”

King right wing Dave Taylor can attest to that. When Williams played with Vancouver, he always lined up against Taylor and always harassed him.

“He knows how to bother you,” said Taylor, understandably happy that Williams is now on his team. “He’s always hooking you, grabbing you, rubbing a glove in your face. A pest. He took advantage of me the first couple times we met, but then you learn not to retaliate, even though you want to.”

Dionne, long an opponent of violence in hockey, said Williams’ actions are strategic rather than malicious, and apparently that is all right.

“Tiger will stand up for teammates,” Dionne said. “We haven’t always had that on this team. No one here is asking him to go out and whack somebody.”

No one needs to ask Tiger to use his stick on an opponent. He does it on his own, sometimes without provocation. There are no official records, but it is believed that Williams leads the league in suspensions.

Among Williams’ most notable suspensions were his seven-game sentence in 1982 for hitting Billy Smith with his stick, the aforementioned clubbing of Bowman in 1980, and an eight-game suspension last season for trying to choke Calgary’s Paul Baxter with his stick.

Tiger’s most recent offense allegedly took place during a bench-clearing brawl between Detroit and Minnesota this season. After a few chaotic minutes of non-stop fighting, Minnesota’s Tom McCarthy slumped to the bench, hurt. The North Stars claim that Williams skated over and sucker punched McCarthy, giving him a concussion. McCarthy has yet to return to the lineup.

Asked about any particularly violent incident, Williams will plead innocent and devise novel and comical explanations for his actions. What irks most people is that Williams shows little--if any--remorse for his actions.

At first, Williams said he had no comment about the McCarthy incident. After pausing and smirking he added: “To be honest, I did nothing. He might have sucker punched himself. I’ve heard McCarthy is an unusual guy and I think he might have been masochistic enough to do it.” Asked about the incident last season in which he pinned Baxter to the ice and put his stick to his throat, Williams again slipped into his innocent “Who, me?” mode.

“Paul might have a bit of a career ahead of him as an actor,” Williams said. “All I can say is that the stronger man prevails. He rates a one or two on the strength scale. I’m a 10 or 11. What else can I say?”

Williams found something new to say when asked about the Scotty Bowman incident.

“His head was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Williams said. “Scotty Bowman’s job is to coach, and a coach is supposed to stay behind the bench. But his head was sticking out watching a fight. I just happened to skate by the Buffalo bench and my stick must have accidentally touched him.”

Neilson, who had been fired at Toronto and was serving as one of Bowman’s assistants at Buffalo at the time, witnessed the incident from the press box. Neilson says he didn’t actually see Tiger club Bowman, but he did hear it.

When Neilson rushed to the bench, he found Bowman stretched on the floor with blood streaming from his temple and Jimmy Roberts, the other assistant, standing over him.

“Jimmy kept yelling at me, ‘Your goon did this. Your goon,’ ” Neilson said. “I told him, I guess you’re right. . . . I guess the Tiger fight I remember most is when I was coaching at Vancouver and he and Smitty (Billy Smith) went at it on Long Island. Smitty used to butt guys with his stick--before they made him tape it--and Tiger retaliated once by pinning Smitty and choking him with the chain he was wearing around his neck.”

Williams tried to make light of his most infamous fights. But in his recent biography, “TIGER: A Hockey Story,” he describes many fights in such detail that you almost expect the pages to be blood-splattered.

Sample this excerpt about the Hutchison stick-swinging episode, Williams’ first heavyweight bout:

We had this sword fight, whittling our sticks down, and then a fan jumped into the (penalty) box. I had so much adrenaline that I laid into this fan, who was trying to attack me, and it was around about then that the benches cleared and we seemed to be on the verge of a full-scale riot. . . . They took me to the dressing room and locked the door. I was in there with a huge black cop. Outside, fans were hammering on the door, screaming my name. The cop could see I was getting a little anxious and he pulled his pistol out of its holster and laid it on his lap. He said to me, “Don’t worry, boy, if anybody comes through that door I’ll blow his brains out.” It was good to hear.

Most of the men who make their living from the NHL are hesitant to talk about fighting because they fear the sport’s image will be tarnished more than it already is.

Tiger Williams, however, will talk about the strategy, timing and intangibles of fighting. To him, it’s an art.

“I’ve had a lot of run-ins,” Williams said. “Some guys, I’ll just go after because they are wimp-asses. I give respect to the grinders and guys who give an honest effort. But I don’t respect wimp-asses, floaters. Billy Smith and I used to have some fierce battles with our sticks. If we were to do that now, they’d re-open Alcatraz for us. Those were the old days, when women wore the dresses in the family.”

Williams, who writes in his book that his political preference is to the right of Ronald Reagan, has been with the Kings a month and is having problems adjusting to the Southern California life style. He still shakes his head in disbelief over people he’s seen with spiked hair and men wearing earrings.

One thing that upsets Tiger is women in the locker room. He simply believes there is no place for them. A few years ago, Williams grabbed sportswriter Lawrie Mifflin, then of the New York Daily News, in the visiting locker room at Madison Square Garden and threw her out. Mifflin met with Vancouver Coach Harry Neale and was eventually re-admitted to the locker room.

Mifflin filed a complaint with NHL President John Ziegler, saying that Williams had used obscene language and had handled her roughly. Ziegler ordered Williams to apologize, but he wouldn’t do it. Finally, Neale apologized to Mifflin for Williams.

It’s obvious from reading Williams’ book that he considers himself somewhat of a policeman--on and off the ice. In his book, Williams details a citizen’s arrest he made in Toronto a few years ago because a driver threw a paper wrapper out of his car.

I leaned out the window and asked him how he’d feel if I went round to his house and threw garbage on his yard. . . . I chased him about 25 miles. He went through stop lights, over curbs. Eventually, he pulled into the police station and ran up to the desk shouting, “There’s a guy out there who wants to kill me.” I went into the station and said I wanted to make a citizen’s arrest. It turned out that the litterbug had a long list of driving convictions and unpaid fines.... The judge sent him down for 18 months, without parole. He also called me an upright citizen.

Williams, of course, will never be considered an upright citizen on the ice. NHL Vice President Brian O’Neill, who is in charge of player discipline, has suspended Williams for offenses much worse than littering.

At least once a season, Williams is summoned to Montreal to face O’Neill and the videotape of Williams’ latest incident. Williams’ defense usually is the same as he said in this interview, which is probably why he has never successfully appealed a suspension.

“The worst thing that ever happened to me was the use of videotape,” Williams said, laughing. “I never use my stick. Somehow, players grab me and my stick and put it in their own face. For some reason, the league feels the need to give me a holiday at least once a year. Brian O’Neill is like my personal travel agent.”

When Williams does go on vacation each spring, he usually heads to the Yukon to hunt bears. Of course, Tiger doesn’t use a conventional weapon such as a gun. No, that would be too easy. Williams uses a bow and arrow.

To bag a bear under those conditions, Williams has to get within 40 feet.

“I get a lot of bears with the bow, but never a grizzly,” Williams said. “I got close, no further than the length of an ordinary room. But never a successful kill.”

Although he is a bowhunter, Williams is not anti-gun. He owns all types of firearms, including a handgun.

“I’m a gun fanatic,” Williams said. “But I only use them for hunting. I liked it when I got traded to Los Angeles because they have this great gun shop. When I played with Vancouver, I used to go there all the time.”

The trade to the Kings also was welcome to Williams because it kept his hockey career afloat.

Like many Canadians, Williams started playing hockey as soon as he could walk. He grew up in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, a dot on the Western Canada prairie. Williams’ father, a painter at a mental hospital in Weyburn, never played hockey but he did the next best thing. He was a boxer in his prime. He shared down his expertise with his sons.

“I’m the only boy in the six Williamses that didn’t win an amateur boxing championship,” Williams said. “But we all played hockey, too. We lived over a river and we’d go out the back door and slide down to the pond. You know, I’ve been on the ice since I was little and, through 11 years in the NHL, I still can’t skate worth a damn.”

Apparently, that didn’t stop Williams from telling the other kids in the neighborhood that he was going to make it to the NHL. They laughed at him. He punched them. Even then, Tiger was preparing for his future.

Oh, about the nickname Tiger: He got it at a youth hockey game that his older brother was refereeing. The story goes that Tiger didn’t like a call his brother made and slugged him. After that, he could never again be called something as common as Dave.

After a successful junior career, in which he played left wing on a line with the Kings’ Terry Ruskowski and former Vancouver teammate Ron Delorme in what had to be the most feared trio in the league, Williams was Toronto’s first-round draft choice in 1974.

When Williams met with then-Toronto vice president King Clancy to negotiate his own contract--Tiger doesn’t trust agents--he decided to keep a blank expression no matter what offer Clancy made. Clancy offered $75,000, more than Williams thought he’d get. But Williams, keeping his poker face, walked across the room to where Clancy had a fish tank filled with piranha. He looked at the fish, then looked at Clancy and said: “When I’m a pro, that’s the way I’ll be. A piranha.”

That impressed Clancy so much that Williams went back to Weyburn with a $30,000 check as a signing bonus. He cashed it in $10 bills and then counted them, bill-by-bill, at the local pool hall. Yes, Tiger Williams had proved the doubters in Weyburn wrong. He had made it to the NHL, but it was obvious why. Williams could fight.

“He can put the puck in the net,” Ruskowski said. “He’s a great defender and, even in juniors, had a good wrist shot. So, he can play.”

But Williams has never fooled himself into believing that he was another Gordie Howe. In his book, Williams bluntly says: “You didn’t need anyone to draw pictures, to tell you what you had to do to get in the game. For someone like me it couldn’t have been more simple. I fought--or I disappeared.”

Williams has had some good seasons offensively. He scored 35 goals and 62 points and led the league in penalty minutes for Vancouver in 1980-81. After that season, Williams’ limited offensive skills started to erode. He scored only 15 goals for Vancouver last season and was traded to Detroit in the off-season.

Williams renegotiated his contract with Red Wing General Manager Jimmy Devellano, giving him a two-year contract worth $150,000 with an option for a third year if he scored more than 15 goals and 40 points in the previous two seasons.

Williams, who had only three goals in 55 games with Detroit, was put on waivers in mid-February--he went unclaimed--and was subsequently sent to the Red Wings’ minor league team.

Tiger figured he’d stay in the minors the remainder of the season, but the Kings swung a deal with the Wings only a few hours before the March 12 trading deadline. The Kings got Williams for next to nothing--future considerations they call it--and sources said Devellano is paying the final months of Williams’ contract this season.

It is no mystery why the Kings traded for Williams. The Sunday before the trading deadline, the Kings were beaten up by the Buffalo Sabres in a bench-clearing brawl, and they had been intimidated a week earlier in a 7-0 loss to Calgary. Vachon and Coach Pat Quinn said they needed an another experienced player who would stand up to opponents.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Tiger.

“We were looking ahead to the playoffs,” Vachon said. “He gets a lot of respect around the league. A lot of players fear him. You don’t need an enforcer, but a guy that will stand behind you.”

So far, Tiger has been unusually tame. He’s had his share of fights and a game misconduct for being a third man in a fight. But he hasn’t been involved in a stick-swinging episode. So far.

As an added bonus, Williams has scored three goals and three assists in his seven games with the Kings. That’s the same number of goals he scored in 55 games with Detroit. Williams’s first goal as a King came against Detroit, which pleased Tiger because he and Devellano don’t like each other.

Asked about Williams, Devellano says: “I’m not going to make something out of nothing. He scored three goals for us. That’s nothing. He’s not a factor in anything. I’ve never seen a guy get so much media attention for having so little skill. It’s unbelievable.”

Always quick to retaliate verbally as well as physically, Williams said of Devellano: “Jimmy is the only guy in the history of the NHL to ever have his secretary send a guy to the minors. Jimmy wasn’t even man enough to tell me himself.”

Devellano was right about at least one thing: Williams does receive considerable media attention, perhaps more than he deserves. But the NHL office could take lessons from Williams on the art of promoting.

Williams has parlayed his fighting ability and marginal talents to celebrity status in Canada. He has daily radio shows in Vancouver and Detroit, works part-time for Nike apparel and has formed his own sports consulting firm that represents several hockey players in contract negotiations. His book is on the Canadian best-sellers list, and Tiger brought a suitcase full of copies to Los Angeles.

Tiger also lends his name to various charities in Vancouver, including the Special Olympics.

“I’ve always approached hockey as a business,” Williams said. “I believe in being ethical in business until 7:35 each night (game time), then I do what I want. You have to look out for No. 1. I’m always going to do what I can for people, too. That’s why I’m involved in charity and have my own golf tournament for retarded children. It makes me feel good.”

The somewhat softer side of Williams is something fans don’t see. Tiger said he makes a conscious effort to avoid having his on-ice behavior carry over into real life.

In his book, Williams writes: “You develop two personalities. You have the emotional equipment you need for the game, and then you have to strip that away as you go about your own life.”

Tiger Williams may have two personalities, but only one face. But he’s learned to live with a face that’s significantly altered from the one he grew up with. Like everything else, Tiger has even made it work to his advantage.

“When I retire, I’m going to rent myself out to bite off wallpaper from the walls of those rich mansions in Beverly Hills,” Williams says, laughing. “Anything for a buck.”