Ram Lineman Bolinger Is a Player for All Seasons

When Eric Dickerson said Herschel Walker got his 2,000 yards in a minor league, the shock wave hit Russ Bolinger in Memphis, Tenn.

“I got a lot of heat for that,” said Bolinger, one of the Ram offensive linemen who had received engraved rings from Dickerson for helping him break the National Football League rushing record.

Three months later, Bolinger was playing for the Memphis Showboats of the United States Football League.

“They wanted me to give my ring back,” he said. “They wanted to know, ‘What’s this minor league (bleep)?’ I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound like Eric, so maybe he was just kidding.’ ”

Bolinger will have to wait to ask Dickerson about it. He reported to training camp over the weekend, but Dickerson was holding out for a guaranteed extended contract, waiting for the Rams to call.

Bolinger can relate to that.

“They never returned my phone calls, either,” he said.

The difference was that Bolinger, a six-year starter at Detroit until joining the Rams two years ago, was in his option year last season and became a free agent when the season was over.

In April, he signed a one-season contract with the Showboats that would allow him to return to the Rams in the fall, which is the way it worked out. Bolinger got $90,000 for playing part-time guard for part of the USFL season--”I was on the JVs,” he said--plus shares of two playoff games.

Now he has a one-year, no-option contract with the Rams that would allow him to play in the USFL against next spring, if the USFL were playing next spring. The USFL, however, intends to switch to the fall, spoiling Bolinger’s good thing.

“I might play baseball up in Alaska,” he said.

Bolinger, a man for all seasons--NFL, USFL, whatever--said he thoroughly enjoyed what he called his “off-season job.”

It was fun playing for Coach Pepper Rodgers, he said. “And Memphis is the barbecue capital of the world. The grease capital, too. I gained about 15 pounds. Chicken-fried steak, fried corn. Lot of fried food.”

Unlike many other USFL players, he never had to worry about getting his paycheck home from the bank. The owner, cotton grower Billy Dunavant, is one of the league’s wealthiest owners.

“He owns all of the cotton in the South,” Bolinger said. “This guy has too much credibility down there (not to pay his bills). He’s already lost $12 million. Now he’s gotta pay his staff 12 months.

“It’s his goal in the ‘80s to have a professional football team in Memphis, and if it doesn’t work out in the USFL he definitely wants to be in the NFL. To do that he has to show a lot of class so people know we are an NFL city.

“Great owner. Around all the time. Real serious. Nothing like Pepper at all. Needless to say, they never clashed.

“There was a lot of pressure on Pepper. When we were 3 and 4 the owner said: ‘Look, I want to be one of the stronger teams. I want to be in the playoffs. Get us in the playoffs, or else.’

“Pepper said, ‘Bring some players in.’ So they started bringing players in, we got in the playoffs, and we were one or two plays away from being in the championship game.”

The Showboats reached the semifinals of the playoffs before losing to the Oakland Invaders.

“I’m shocked you didn’t watch it,” Bolinger said, deadpan.

The club was appropriately named, and the coach himself was a caricature of the spirit.

“I’ve never been on a team with that many young guys,” Bolinger said. “It made me feel younger, really. They were having a good time.

“When I got there, Pepper fired the offensive coordinator and said: ‘We’re playing Pepper ball.’ I never figured it out. Throw the ball more, I guess.

“It was a real loose atmosphere and I thought, ‘We’re gonna have some trouble because we’re too loose.’ Then we started winning and I thought, ‘This is incredible.’

“Not to say that practices weren’t tough. Pepper ran two-hour practices in the heat, and down there when you say it’s hot, that’s the definition of hot.

“The first week I was there we were getting ready to play New Jersey and Pepper came into the team meeting with a tux and a top hat on like Doug Flutie and singing ‘Puttin’ On The Ritz.’

“The first flight when we flew up to Baltimore he came back in the plane with an old pilot’s helmet on--he’s an old pilot--and singing ‘Off We Go, Into the Wild Blue, Yonder.’ We were losing at the time, so he was trying to get us going.

“John Banaszak (a former Pittsburgh Steeler) looked at me and said: ‘You know, (Steeler Coach) Chuck Noll never did this.’ ”

Bolinger, who will be 30 next month, figures he has had the best of both football worlds.

“Everything at Memphis was first class, very much like here,” he said. “We had great facilities, the flights, hotel arrangements--all first class. We had a good owner who took care of us, very much like here.

“It would be nice if that league could hang around, for everybody involved, old guys and young guys. We had quite a few older players who had been released by NFL teams. This prolonged their careers a couple of years.

“And there were a lot of younger guys that were getting experience that never would have got on a team initially.

“As far as an off-season job, it was great. Treated me great. It wasn’t as if I was just going down there to get in shape. I went down there to seriously play football. I’m not getting any younger. If something were to happen here, that’s a team I could go to.”