Kosar Is Playing It Cool : At 21, Browns’ Quarterback Has Already Shown His Poise on and Off the Field

In Cleveland, the big story unfolds despite itself as Bernie Kosar, boy quarterback, takes over the Browns and ducks under the rush.

Opponents, who want to see what a 21-year-old making $1 million is made of, are blitzing to the max?

No sweat.

Bernie swivels his hips, gives them a leg and takes it away, just as they did in Jack Armstrong’s day. He’s gone, gone, gone, like a cool breeze.

The press is pounding on the door?

No problem. Bernie has had these guys’ numbers since adolescence.

He fires off a couple of quick maxims--”I’m just trying to get the most out of every day”--and they get bored, fall asleep, go bug someone else.

“I used to screen calls for him,” says his former roommate at Miami U., defensive end Julio Cortez.

“ ‘Who’s this? He’s not here.’ He’d be right next to me. Everybody and his mother were calling.

“I spoke to him last week. He said compared to this, Miami was nothing. He can’t go out. He asked me to come up, but he said we’d have to just sit around the apartment. He says if he goes out anywhere, it’s just a mob scene.”

The world awaits the latest chapter: Prodigy from small Ohio town leads Nowhere U. to national championship as redshirt freshman, graduates a year later, end-runs away from one NFL team, signs for $1 million a year with hometown Browns. . . .

And now what?

REPORTER: What do you remember about the Raiders from your exhibition meeting?

KOSAR: Well, I remember, obviously, they’re very aggressive. They play good team defense.

Good team defense? On Aug. 30 in Cleveland, the second Raider defense held Kosar to 4 for 14, intercepting two of his passes, one of which Stacey Toran returned for a touchdown.

On Kosar’s first two plays from scrimmage, the same rookie halfback fumbled the ball away. On Toran’s interception, the ball deflected off Ozzie Newsome’s hands.

Nevertheless, Kosar was, for him, disconsolate.

He said he felt miserable. “Obviously I still have a long way to go.”

Obviously, he’s covered a lot of ground since. He was 18 for 54 in exhibition games and watched the first four games, which the Browns split.

In Game 5, Gary Danielson was hurt. Kosar made his first NFL appearance to a rousing hometown standing ovation . . . and fumbled his first snap from center.

Then he completed his first seven passes and took the Browns on a 53-yard fourth-quarter drive for the winning touchdown. Afterward, Danielson, asked how long he’d be out, said, “It could be a week or 15 years.”

Kosar started, for the first time last Sunday at Houston. The Oilers blitzed most of the roster. Kosar isn’t supposed to be able to run, but he kept lurching out of the pocket, escaping without ever being sacked.

He completed only 3 of 12 in the first half, at which time the Browns had two first downs and trailed, 6-0.

On his first possession of the second half, though, Kosar hit Clarence Weathers on a 68-yard scoring play. He completed four more passes for 96 yards and the Browns won, 21-6. Coach Marty Schottenheimer won’t say who will start Sunday, but if it’s Danielson, it’ll be an oblique compliment to the Raider defense.

Schottenheimer said: “I remember going down the runway before the game, seeing Bernie and Gary Danielson chuckling to one another. Here’s a young man, barely 21 years of age, about to start his first NFL game, and he had absolutely no anxiety about it whatsoever.”

Said a headline in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Kosar nonchalant after his first pro TD pass.”

An excerpt from the paper’s story:

“ ‘My performance was acceptable,’ Kosar said coolly. ‘The main thing is we won.’

“The older men in the locker room, the ones with the notebooks and microphones, seemed more excited than Kosar.”

Whoever is buried in Grant’s tomb might be more excited than Bernie Kosar. Who is this dude, anyway?

He was a phenom almost from the beginning at Miami, if you remember that he sat out his first season as a redshirt, waiting to begin.

His rookie season ended with the upset of Nebraska in the Orange Bowl and the national title. As a sophomore, said a sportswriter who covers Miami U., his public exposure was already very controlled: one short weekly mass interview and few one-on-ones. Kosar would be polite, succinct and unemotional.

The possibility of early graduation and becoming eligible for the NFL arose. Kosar issued almost- denials, such as: “I plan on being at Miami next season.”

He is said to have been angered by a Miami Herald story quoting his father, who said an informal agreement had been reached with an agent, who would determine Bernie’s NFL worth.

During interviews at the Fiesta Bowl, he was cool, poised and uninformative, a curly haired young man with a pair of sunglasses hooked into the front of his shirt, saying polite nothings.

Then began the NFL intrigue. The Vikings traded up for the first pick, which they intended to make Kosar.

Kosar’s representatives argued that he didn’t have to turn pro until after the draft, and could opt, instead, for the supplementary draft.

The Browns traded for the first pick in the supplementary draft.

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle ruled for Kosar.

Rozelle’s critics, the ones in residence in El Segundo, for instance, said that Rozelle was just taking care of his friend, owner Art Modell of the Browns.

Anyway, Kosar was a Brown.

The question remains, though: Who is this dude in the eye of this storm?

“He’s very low key,” Cortez said from Miami. “He doesn’t like to cause much commotion. He likes to go out and be by himself with his friends.

“He’s a good friend. He’s very family oriented. He takes care of his family. He’s quite humble, I’d say. Everybody tells him how great he is and it doesn’t affect him in any way.

“We became friends when he got here, his freshman year, my sophomore year. He was a third-string quarterback. He and I were a lot alike. We didn’t like to be around big groups of people.

“Was I surprised at how good he became? To be honest, I used to look at him and wonder. We joked all the time.

“We had this guy, Vinnie Testaverde, who’s the quarterback at Miami now. Bernie used to say: ‘I don’t know how I’m going to start ahead of this guy. This guy is bigger than I am, he’s faster than I am, he has a stronger arm than I have.’

“I said, ‘(Bleep) that. You’re smarter.’

“Bernie never said he was not going to do it, but I think he kinda surprised himself. Howard (Schnellenberger, Miami coach) knew what he was doing. I guess it was a shock to all of us.

“What really makes Bernie is his intelligence. He doesn’t have much coordination as far as running goes. You look on TV, he doesn’t run worth (bleep). But he picks things up as easily as you can. He can read defenses. He can audible. He doesn’t have an arm like John Elway, but he’s accurate.

“He graduated with a double major, finance and marketing. He was behind me and he graduated before I did. He was taking college credit courses in high school. His father told him to. His father is just like him.

“Did he study a lot? When he had to study, he studied. A major exam, he’d study maybe an hour. People would be saying they’d been up all night, they hadn’t slept, and they wouldn’t get half the grade he would. I would sit behind him and cheat off him.”

Sunday, he could be taking a major exam, all right. In this kind, giant grown-ups he’s only heard of threaten to tear his lips off.

Joe Cool, meet the silver and black.