Anderson Lets Wife Do Everything but Carry Football
They met on an outdoor basketball court. He was in shorts and sneakers. She was dressed-up, having just returned from a chapel service. Never mind the setting. They both knew.
“There was just a great physical attraction right away,” she said.
“I never dated anyone else after we met,” he said.
“Well, he sure better not have!” she said, breaking into laughter.
As a freshman at the University of Arkansas, Gary Anderson was shy. Dazzled as he was by the young woman named Ollie, it wasn’t easy for him to be the aggressor in the courting process. They waited three years to be married. Even now, after two children and three years of pro football, he is withdrawn.
“It was hard for me to get him out of his shell,” Ollie said. “I had to get to know him little by little. It hasn’t been easy for him to open up. He’s still very shy. The place he’s most comfortable is at home, watching TV or changing diapers.”
This is the man who absorbed so much of Alex Spanos’ attention and checkbook during a protracted courtship this summer. Sprung at last from the Tampa Bay Bandits of the United States Football League, Anderson this week signed a four-year, $2 million contract with the Chargers amid a barrage of hype that stopped just short of proclaiming him a combination of Eric Dickerson and James Lofton.
Not everyone in pro football is sold on him as a superstar, but that doesn’t worry Anderson any more than courtroom banter about his supposed lack of intelligence. So long as he’s got Ollie, a combination of wife, friend, lover, mother, agent and business adviser, he should stay a few steps ahead of the critics and the cold manipulative types who prey on athletes.
“Ollie is more than a wife to me,” he said the morning after his arrival in San Diego. “She’s everything to me. I know I put too much on her sometimes. I don’t know how she puts up with me.”
Their first night in town, the couple was out until after 10 apartment hunting. The next morning, he reported to the Charger offices to study the Air Coryell system, while she went back out to find a temporary residence.
They’ve been separated from their two young children for a month--the kids are with her mother back in Arkansas--while getting the Charger deal completed. Naturally, Ollie can’t wait to be reunited with her babies.
Ollie will stay in San Diego while Gary accompanies the Chargers to Seattle this weekend. He is expected to play, though the team has been vague about how much.
Anderson made it to the Chargers after three seasons in the USFL because he and his wife had the perseverance to match that of Spanos. Somehow, they outlasted the seemingly interminable contractual squabbles that at one point spilled into a Houston courtroom, where Anderson heard his mental ability questioned as a legal ploy supposedly designed to help him.
“I don’t listen to that stuff,” Anderson said this week. “Since Ollie does more talking than I do, people assume I don’t know nothing. They take it the wrong way, but it doesn’t bother me. I just hate that it makes it look like the schools I went through taught me nothing.”
Said Ollie: “People who know Gary know he’s bright. The lawyer just brought it up to try to show he didn’t read his contract (and was thus misled into signing a document he didn’t understand). To this day people have assumed the wrong things about Gary.”
Scholar or not, Anderson appears to have better-than-adequate football intelligence, according to Al Saunders, San Diego’s wide receivers coach.
“From what we can see, his feel for the game is exceptional,” Saunders said. “We’re looking for people with football savvy and the ability to learn the game.
“The ability of a person to assimilate knowledge of movement and execution doesn’t always correlate with knowledge of English or mathematics. We’re impressed with his learning ability. We’re not paying him to write a novel but to score touchdowns.”
He scored 45 TDs in the USFL, 39 as a runner and 6 as a receiver. That ratio could be balanced out in the Charger offense.
“I see him as an Ahmad Rashad-type of guy,” Saunders said. “He’s not a big, strong runner like Eric Dickerson, but he has great quickness and acceleration. He catches the ball very well.
“A lot of the things we’ve been doing with Little Train James this year were designed with Gary’s arrival in mind. There are a tremendous number of things we can do with Gary and Train in combination.”
Anderson’s agent, Peter Johnson, reported a comment from an NFL executive, who said the player would be one of the top five backs in the league.
That opinion was challenged by one of the NFL’s most noted talent appraisers, Gil Brandt of the Dallas Cowboys.
“He’s a very, very talented player who dominated the USFL, and I don’t want to downgrade him, but I don’t see him as a dominant force in this league,” Brandt said. “He’ll do a good job, and he’s well-suited to the Charger style, but I don’t see him as a Walter Payton or Tony Dorsett.
“Some people prefer redheads, other likes blondes. Maybe if he was our player and I was excited about him, I’d predict bigger things. The guy he reminds me of is James Brooks (an ex-Charger, now with Cincinnati), but he’s bigger and faster.”
Brandt seemed more excited talking about the potent pairing of James and Anderson in the same backfield.
“They are really going to give some teams headaches,” Brandt said. “If they can get somebody to block the Richard Dents and Howie Longs, those two will be something.
“I know the Charger fans have learned a lot this year about Lionel James, who I think is truly a delightful person. He could be the first black president of the U.S. in my book.”
Leaving politics behind and bringing this back to fundamentals, as coaches are inclined to do, Saunders addressed the matter of Anderson’s transition from the USFL to the NFL.
“The other league was definitely less competitive than ours,” Saunders said. “A dominant player’s skills become even more dominant in a setting like the USFL, but when that same player matriculates to the NFL, he finds those skills need developing. It can be slow going at first, but a great player is going to be a great player.”
If it sounds as if Saunders was being slightly evasive, that’s understandable. The Chargers aren’t eager to pile any more pressure on the shoulders of their lithe, 6-foot, 185-pound halfback.
“The level of competition in the NFL is so extraordinary that even a great college player finds his ability doesn’t overshadow that of others,” Saunders said. “Look at the example of John Elway, who was the greatest quarterback prospect in a decade. It’s taken him a couple of years to come into his own.”
Anderson’s tendency is to cover the ear holes of his helmet when the yapping starts. “He has his pride, but he isn’t going to brag on himself,” Ollie said. “I don’t think there are any limits on him as a football player, and I don’t think he feels any pressure, either.”
If he does feel any, Anderson doesn’t show it. Just as he has practiced giving tacklers only a small piece of his body to hit, he has learned to minimize talk about expectations.
“I want to show I was worth it for the Chargers to use a first-round draft pick (in 1983),” Anderson said. “I know people expect me to run for 160 yards or something every game. But I’ll just take it as it comes. I don’t have any fear. I know what I can do.”
Like all great runners, Anderson lets his instincts take over on the field. Mental is secondary to natural reaction.
“When you get the ball, it’s just you and the defense,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s just a guess. But not all the way. I’m getting better at following my blockers. I used to run up their backs.
“Another thing I try to do is miss as many licks as I can. I want to avoid those head-on licks. I slice one way or the other and try to measure the tackler’s angle.”
As Saunders said, this guy is plenty cerebral in discussing his craft.
Anderson, who grew up in Columbia, Mo., didn’t try football until his sophomore year of high school. Until then, he had devoted himself to basketball.
Left fatherless as an infant when his dad was killed in a work-related accident, Anderson was raised by his mother. She was working for the University of Missouri when Anderson was recruited by a host of colleges interested in his football skills.
Coach Lou Holtz persuaded him to play for the University of Arkansas, and he never regretted it. “Gary is a class person and I never had a problem of any kind with him,” said Holtz, now the head coach at Minnesota.
“While we had Gary, we played in four bowls, and he was the most valuable player in three of them,” Holtz said. “After his final game as a senior, we held a team banquet and told the players to wear their finest clothes. Gary didn’t even own a sport coat, as I recall, which shows he didn’t get anything illegal from us.
“He didn’t even have a car until his last year, when he started driving some old thing about 8 years old. The reason I mention this is because I’m so happy to see a guy who did it the right way, who made it to the pros and earned every penny he received.”
Both Holtz and Anderson foresee continued success.
“He’ll get beat-up some, but he’s going to bring the crowd to its feet, I can promise you that,” Holtz said.
“Football always came naturally to me,” Anderson said. “I hope it keeps on.”