Poet Laureate of Rage : Lyle Alzado Builds a Better Life Than He Was Born to Live

One of those crews with the light man, the sound man and the interviewer’s own makeup staff has just arrived in camp, and they’re not from any mere jocko show like “The NFL Today,” either.

They’re from “Entertainment Tonight,” and they’ve come to see Lyle Alzado. Out there in show biz, Lyle is happening in a major way.

What do they have in mind?

Would they like him to tear someone’s lips off, as he once threatened to do to Dan Marino?

Is he going to give them his favorite on-the-field threat: “I’ll kill you and everything you love!”

Now that would be entertainment, whether you’d need to rate it PG-13, R-40, or sell it as an underground video. Muscles and anger are hot, meaning that Lyle Alzado, the famous defensive end of the L. A. Raiders, is an idea whose time has just pulled up in the no-parking zone outside the bank.

They want biceps? Alzado has upper arms that would take an ant half a day to circumnavigate.

They want anger? Have you ever looked into those eyes? Have you ever been around on one of those days? This is the poet laureate of rage. If they want Conan, the defensive end, they’ve come to the right place.

And right now, they’re lined up back to Route 101.

Here’s Lyle, with his chest bulging in a black T-shirt, looming menacingly over a Sports Illustrated spokesman.

Here’s Lyle, squinting angrily at the Burger King president.

Here’s Lyle telling Honda riders to wear their helmets, as he does. (It’s better to leave out the time he fired one at the Jets’ Chris Ward. Might be mayhem on the freeways if that catches on.)

Those are just the TV commercials. There are deals working for a feature, or as they say in real life, a movie. Two more scripts were delivered to the Raider camp last night. Alzado’s agent at William Morris is going through them. Alzado plans to start acting school as soon as camp breaks.

Is he having fun, or what?

“You should see him,” said teammate Howie Long, who is as close to Alzado as safety permits. “He’s got this white Rolls-Royce with a laser-disc player in it. He’s got two motorcycles and he’s just learning to ride them. He goes around the block at 5 m.p.h.”

“Howie tell you that?” yelped Alzado. “I can ride my motorcycles. Howie makes fun of my Rolls because he doesn’t have one. Howie’s got nine Mercedes. He tell you that?”

For Alzado, who grew up so violently on the streets of Brooklyn, there is a chance for a happy ending. He has certainly paid his dues, as have some of the people around him, all of whom managed to keep their lips.

If barely . . .

Moody? I mean, he makes Sybil look like a common individual in society. --Howie Long So what is Lyle Alzado doing in Oxnard, which is not right next door to any sound stages, trying to bench press 500 pounds?

Practice is over. The rest of the defensive line, which is about 12 years per man younger than he is, has gone inside the dressing room to cool off, and Alzado is still out there pumping.

Maybe he isn’t sure why, himself.

Long: “Every morning under the goal posts, he says to me, ‘I’m 36 years old. What am I doing here?’ ”

Alzado: “What I tell him is ‘I’m 36 years old. What the bleep am I doing here?’ ”

Looking for love in one more place, most likely.

There is a temptation in discussing Alzado to get lost in the anecdotes. Alzado recounts his gantlet of a childhood in such detail and with such good humor that it gets to sounding like a boy’s carefree romp through a colorful but distant past.

But it wasn’t. This isn’t some cartoon. A childhood like his is a terrible price to pay for a line of great stories.

He was born in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, one of five children of an Italian-Spanish father named Maurice and a Jewish mother named Martha. Maurice was in and out of their lives, leaving for good when Lyle was 15, to Lyle’s relief.

“Baddest mother that ever lived,” Alzado says. “Or so he told me. I guess he’s 65, 68 now. He still drinks and battles more than any five men I ever met.

“Did he ever hit me? Yeah. I’ve been knocked out. I got the bleep beat out of me. No one else could ever do that to me.

“He tried to be a good man. He just didn’t know how. One Thanksgiving, he’d gone and bought us a turkey with all the trimmings. Then he came home drunk, took the turkey out of the oven, threw it out on the street and left my mother crying.”

Martha worked as a florist, never earning much more than $100 a week. Alzado fought everyone who crossed his path, and some who were trying to get out of the way.

At 15, he was 6 feet 2 inches, 190 pounds and was a bouncer in a bar. He says he stabbed two men one night who didn’t move when he told them to. In various fights, he says, he was stabbed four times.

“Look how I grew up,” he said. “Without a father, no food on the table, no clothes to wear, teachers making fun of me. The only thing I had in my life, I could fight. Anybody messed with me in any way, I beat their bleeping ass. That was my strength and pride.

“There were some people who helped. My older brother, Peter. John Maralotta, my high school football coach. My mom.

“Peter? He showed me how to kick ass. But he got me to football.

“I was going around high school, black jeans, black boots, a black T-shirt. I had a little bop in my walk. The coach comes up to me, puts his arm around me and says, ‘I’d like you to come out for the football team.’

“I said, ‘You can take your football and put it (see if you can fill in the rest.) I’m not comin’ out for the bleeping team.’

“So Peter told me he was going out. I was very competitive with Peter. He said, ‘Whatsamatta, you not tough enough to go out?’ ”

So Lyle became a football player and made it through high school. Then it was time to select a college.

New Mexico State brought him out, he says, and sent him home after hearing about his police record. “Fighting, breaking and entering, fighting, fighting, fighting.”

Kilgore Junior College in Texas tried him at wingback. Alzado said he once ran a 9.9 100-yard dash. He also said, “That was a joke.” He had to hitchhike home.

He wound up, in one of football’s more oft-told stories, at Yankton College in the southeast corner of South Dakota. A Denver Bronco scout found him while killing a day watching film in Butte, Mont., after having been forced off the road by car trouble.

In this particular life, all the stories are amazing ones.

I don’t care anything about the Hall of Fame or that stuff. I just hope that when I retire, somebody will go ask Art Shell what he thought about me, and if Art says I was a tough defensive lineman and made games hard for him, then, hey, that’s all I need. --Lyle Alzado, Denver Broncos Sport Magazine, Jan. 1978 “It was war,” says Art Shell, the eight-time Pro Bowl Raider tackle who is now a Raider assistant coach. “It was the closest thing to war I could think of.

“Lyle plays on emotion. That’s his game. The thing about the guy--before we’d play them, I’d always watch film and I’d always see him fighting with somebody. I’d say, ‘Geez, this is what I got to face?’

“I had a habit of greeting my opponent at the line of scrimmage. I’d go up to him the first play and say, ‘Hi, how you doing. Let’s have a good game.’ Lyle told me later the first time I did that to him, he just melted.

“He was as emotional as any guy I ever played against. (Gene) Upshaw used to get him mad. We had some plays where the guard would block him and Upshaw would be grabbing him and holding him. Lyle would get up screaming. We’d go back to the huddle and I’d say, ‘Gene, don’t make him mad .’ I was the one that had to contend with him all afternoon.

“They all hated the Raiders and he led the band. He’d throw his arms up and the crowd would get fired up. It was holy hell there in Denver.”

Alzado said: “I’ll always remember the time he comes up to the line of scrimmage, all 350 pounds of him, and he says, ‘How you feel today?’ I’m foaming at the mouth, cursing, yelling.

“Then he picks me up, drops me on my back and runs right over me. The best to ever play this game was Art Shell. I used to come out of the game with lumps on my head, he was such a great player.”

I have a dream that is really scary. I’ve had it a lot of times. I dream that I accomplish all I ever wanted--to win the Super Bowl, be player of the year, all that--and then I die. That’s a frightening thought but it keeps coming back to me. --Lyle Alzado Denver Post, June 10, 1979 It didn’t happen that way.

He was the NFL’s defensive player of the year in 1977. He had his own radio shows, one on which he played rock oldies, and a talk show on which he hung up on old women. He went national at the ’77 Super Bowl, delighting writers who had rarely heard juvenile delinquency described in the first person in such detail.

That season, his father called him in the dressing room after the AFC championship game. Alzado wouldn’t take the call.

In 1979, he tried to squeeze more money out of the Broncos, who peddled him to Cleveland without further ado.

Three seasons later, with less ado, the Browns peddled him to the Raiders.

It was a marriage made in heaven, or wherever it is Raider marriages are made. They were about to move to Los Angeles and Alzado already lived there. Plus, their tolerance for eccentrics told him he was finally home.

“We’re camped out on the edge of reality,” he once told former Times reporter Alan Greenberg. “It’s like a camp for outlaws, a hide-out for . . . the Hole in the Wall Gang.”

Also, the Browns did him the favor of dumping him for an eighth-round draft choice, resulting in a season-long frenzy that made him the NFL’s comeback player of the year in 1982.

He and his roommate, a budding prodigy named Howie Long, shored up an ailing defensive line. A year later, Bill Pickel and Greg Townsend were drafted, meaning that the passing-situation front four had turned over completely. The Raiders have led the NFL in sacks since 1982.

Long, 11 years younger, grew up quite violently himself on the streets of Boston. Right off, he and Alzado understood each other.

“Howie is like my little son,” Alzado says. “He’s 6-5, 280. I cuddle him and say, ‘Howie, don’t worry, it’ll be OK.’

“Then he grows into this bleeping raving monster, the best in the business.”

They won the Super Bowl in 1984 and Alzado, then about to turn 34, talked of retiring. He had gotten everything he wanted from the game. He says he was financially set.

And here he is.

“I came back because I thought anything else would have been disloyal to Earl Leggett (his defensive line coach), Al Davis and Tom Flores,” Alzado said. “I’m going to play until they tell me: ‘We have someone else to play there, move over.’ And I will politely move over.

“I wish I’d never played in Denver. I wish I’d never played in Cleveland. I wish I’d played my whole career right here. I wish I had another 10 years to give Earl Leggett.

“Nobody in my life really stood by me before.”

Reporter: What is he like when he’s not teed off?

Howie Long: On the verge of being teed off.

These stories always seem to end with the hero settling down into a peaceful adulthood. Alzado may be, too. It’s just that he had so much farther to settle.

He is now allowed a room by himself as befits a Raider of his years. In the room Long shares with Pickel, they’re trying to remember things Alzado says to opponents during games.

“ ‘I’ll kill you and everything you love,’ ” says Pickel, laughing. This, apparently, is the current favorite.

And out of games?

“He’s kind of like Mount St. Helens,” Long says. “I say hello in the morning and take his mood from there. I’ve gotten used to him. I put him on the Richter scale. His 5s and 6s, I can handle. When he goes beyond 7, I don’t know what he’s thinking.”

One generally finds out in a hurry, and it can vary.

Sitting for an interview, Alzado is friendly, funny and won’t take offense at the most pointed question. If the interviewer seems to be having trouble spitting it out, Alzado will assure him it’s all right.

He is gracious with the fans waiting outside the dressing room here after practices, and signs autographs patiently. His love of children is legendary. He became a special-education major at Yankton after walking into a classroom filled with retarded children. He does a lot of charity work and is a winner of the players’ association’s Byron (Whizzer) White award for community involvement.

He can be gentle and laughs quickly. He can also be hurt easily. He prizes honesty and hates any hint of insincerity.

But there is so much of it. Or, put another way, he still has these moments . . .

Who to trust? That’s a tricky little question for him.

“I have a few friends here and there,” he said. “The people I’m close to know who they are. I’ll tell you something, the hardest thing to find are people who’ll stand by you. What really makes a person to me, is if he’ll stand there and take it with you, instead of bleepin’ headin’ for the hills.”

When to leave? Life has nothing but tricky little questions.

“I know it’s coming,” Alzado said. “I’m going to be 37 years old (next April). Physically I’m capable of playing this game till I’m 40. Mentally, it’s another story.

“Every dream I’ve had in this game, it went beyond that and gave me more. It was like God just said, ‘Here, here’s some more.’

“It’s easy to know when it’s time to leave, but the bravest thing to do is to leave. And most don’t. A lot can’t. A lot of players don’t take care of their finances.

“Another thing, this game doesn’t help you grow up a lot. You have to grow up on your own.”

Last winter, Alzado went to see his father, now living in Inwood, Long Island, for the first time in 15 years. Once again Peter had led the way.

“Peter was the first one to go to my father,” Alzado says. “And Peter suffered the worst. My father used to beat the bleep out of him. Peter told me, ‘Go see Dad. Go see Dad.’ So I went to see him.

“It was different. My father used to be so powerfully built. He was older and smaller. I just felt like I wanted to protect him, even after the wrong he’d done. Sometimes people do things without knowing what they’re doing.”

You could say that Lyle Alzado is mellowing, with only the occasional lapse.

He threw a chair in the direction of The Times’ Greenberg last season. He later said his only regret was that he missed, but now says he bears Greenberg no ill will. A flying chair clears the air.

“There was the movie theater deal (Westwood, several combatants quieted, no complaints brought),” Alzado said. “A few other things. I had one this off-season. A couple weightlifters were messing with me. It was a real quick thing. I just slapped ‘em around, embarrassed ‘em.

“I just do it to protect myself and the people with me. I don’t do it like I used to do it, just to have fun. I can rip somebody’s throat out, but I don’t look to do it.”

On behalf of all our throats, thank you.

We get too soon old and too late smart. That’s one of those homilies they put on the wood-cuttings that Mom buys to hang in the kitchen. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Right now, everything’s groovy. Alzado reclines on his bed in the Raider camp, bubbling along, 265 pounds of puppy dog.

He’s wearing an “I’d Rather Be Dancing” T-shirt with a ballet figure in full stride across it. Who said there were no second acts in American life?