AFTER YEARS OF BEING COMPARED TO HIS BROTHERS AND TRYING TO PLEASE HIS FATHER . . . : This Brett Proves He’s First Rate, By George

There was a new toy at home, and George Brett couldn’t wait for the chance to try it out.

“I can’t believe I’m this excited about a bicycle,” he said almost apologetically, but the boyish grin showed he wasn’t really sorry at all.

Even World Series heroes have to play, especially when they come back to the old neighborhood. This wasn’t Penn Street in El Segundo, where father Jack and mother Ethel had reared one of the most athletic broods ever seen in these or any other parts, but it was close enough.

This was C. J. Brett’s, a restaurant in Hermosa Beach, where George and brother Ken had arrived for lunch with brother Bobby and John Altamura, a family friend and one of the restaurant’s operating partners. If it wasn’t the family dining room, it might as well have been--all of the Brett brothers, including the oldest, John, who wasn’t present, own a piece of the popular six-month-old establishment.

En route to lunch, George and Ken had stopped at a bicycle shop, where they’d bought matching Fuji Espree racers, which run about $300. Bobby already owned a bike, so there was some kidding about a race the next morning.

George, however, couldn’t wait for morning. The plan was to go see Bobby’s old high school basketball coach, Cliff Warren, at a tournament game at nearby Mira Costa High School, then on to a cocktail party at the Manhattan Beach Country Club.

But George was determined to squeeze in a ride that afternoon--not only was there a new bike to break in, there was a pair of black-rubber biking shorts to model. And sure enough, George and Bobby wound up taking a little sunset spin from Bobby’s condo on the Strand in Hermosa Beach. But there was no race, and according to Ken, there probably would never be one.

Sibling rivalries may never die, but in time they have a way of winding down.

“We don’t get real competitive with each other any more,” said Ken, looking out at the Pacific Ocean from a balcony next to the one owned by Bobby.

“We’re too old for that now. When we were kids, we tried to beat each other into the ground. Now when George and I play racquetball--10 years ago if he’d have beaten me I’d be swearing. Now, it’s no big deal. And if I beat him in tennis, that’s no big deal, either.”

It may have taken a dozen years, nine seasons of batting .300 or more, a run at a mythical .400 average, and now a World Series ring with the Kansas City Royals, but George Brett, the runt of the litter, has proven himself worthy many times over.

“When I was growing up, my brothers were all I ever heard about,” George said. “My dad would say to his friends, ‘Poor George, he’ll never be as good as Ken. He doesn’t run as good as Bobby. He doesn’t have the desire of John.’ So what am I going to come out to be? I couldn’t do anything compared to my brothers.

“They never gave me credit. They knew if I got the credit I wouldn’t have the desire, I wouldn’t work hard.”

Do they give him credit now?

“Not really,” George says with a laugh.

But while his brothers may have been a tough crowd to please, it turns out the show really hasn’t been for them. For 32 years, George Brett has been playing to hear the sound of one set of hands clapping--those of his dad, Jack Brett.

George Brett once told a national magazine he hated his father. But on this day, he stood on his brother’s balcony and shared a fantasy he someday hopes to realize.

“It would be very rewarding someday to make it to the Hall of Fame and have your father there,” George said. “It doesn’t happen very often, I think.

“You always see a guy saying I’d like to thank my wife and my coaches. . . . How often do you get to see a guy say, ‘I’d like to thank my father for keeping his foot that far from my ass, knowing that if I bleeped up, he’d kick my ass so hard.’ ”

“Don’t put me in there too much,” Jack Brett said from his office in El Segundo, where he works as a financial director for a division of Datsun.

“I’m nobody.”

Jack Brett didn’t go to the World Series this year. He stayed home. George’s mother, Ethel, now divorced from Jack, and his brother John, went to Kansas City, with Ken arriving for the seventh game.

“You can see so much more on TV,” Jack Brett said. “You go to the game, and you usually end up sitting next to some jerk who hates your team, or someone who says, ‘That SOB Brett is no damn good.’ ”

So he stayed in his own living room to watch the Royals rally from a three games to one deficit, just as they had in the American League playoffs, to beat the Cardinals, with George getting four hits in the seventh game. The Series had been over for two days before George called with a message: Jack may have received George’s All-Star rings, but the World Series ring would be an entirely different matter.

“What he said was, ‘I’ll tell you one damn thing. This is one ring you’re not going to get,’ ” Jack said with a chuckle.

For once, George--of whom so much had been demanded by his father--was giving no more.

Jack Brett is proud of his four sons: John, 39, is a general contractor; Ken, 36, played a dozen years in the big leagues; Bobby, 34, is an investment manager who handles George’s money; and then there’s George. All four played baseball professionally, although John and Bobby never made it to the majors.

“One of the things that is most gratifying to me is when people come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got four nice kids,’ ” Jack Brett says.

But there always has been a special place in Jack’s heart for Ken, an athletic prodigy when he came out of El Segundo High. Ask Jack about George’s performance in the World Series, and it’s striking how quickly the conversation will shift to memories of 19-year-old Ken pitching for the Boston Red Sox in the 1967 World Series.

“Ken’s a sweetheart,” Jack Brett says. “Everybody loves him. He never should have been a pitcher, he should have been a first baseman or outfielder. He might have been one of the greatest hitters who ever lived, I think.

“Oh God, he had a knack to hitting. He didn’t swing hard, he just snapped his wrists. He had something indefinable.”

And George?

“I remember when George was drafted, I thought to myself, I hope I live long enough for him to get to the majors,” Jack said.

While Ken embodied a father’s fondest hopes, George lingered on the other end of the spectrum. In George’s imagined acceptance speech at the Hall of Fame, he wasn’t imagining the part about the placement of Jack’s foot.

It happened after a Babe Ruth game, Jack said, in which 15-year-old George committed two errors and Jack was the official scorer.

“We got in the car to go home and we didn’t say a word,” Jack said. “But as we got to the front door, then I kicked him in the ass.”

Jack said he worried for his youngest son.

“I remember talking to his mother when he was 16 or 17 and saying, ‘What the hell is going to happen to him?’ ” Jack said. “He can’t read, he can’t write, he hates school, what’s going to happen.

“Mommy being mommy said, ‘Oh, he’ll be all right.’

“John worked hard, Ken had ability, Bobby was always very clever. And here was George, poor George. Home alone, my good God, with the tyrant.”

Jack was asked if it had hurt him to read that George hated him.

“Oh no, I was tough on him,” Jack said. “Actually, my rules were very easy--do what you’re supposed to do. Do what I tell you to do. I’ll tell you a second time, but if I have to tell you a third time, I’ll probably whomp you a couple of times.

“I used to tell them, ‘If your mother was standing there, would you do that? If the answer is no, then don’t do it.’

“They loved their mom.”

Do they love their dad?

“I think they tolerate him,” Jack Brett said. “I think they’ll realize more when they have their own kids.”

Jack continues to prod, even when his advice is not wanted. Once, he asked George why he wasn’t doing something at the plate in a certain way, and George responded that Charlie Lau (his batting mentor who died of cancer) had told him not to.

“I said, ‘Bleep Charlie Lau,’ ” Jack said. “George said, ‘Bleep you, Dad. That’s how I knew how he felt about Charlie Lau.”

“George is a big boy now and my Dad is well aware of it,” Ken Brett said.

Even so, George Brett admits he still is trying to please his father.

“You have to have some internal drive, no matter what the subject is,” George said. “And with me, first of all it’s my father.

“If I have a bad game he has a bad day at work. That’s always something I think about.

“It’s not like, ‘If I don’t get a hit my dad’s going to be unhappy.’ But when I’m driving home at 1 or 2 in the morning, or if I’m in the shower after a game, I think about how my dad’s going to be happy when he gets up and sees the paper the next morning.”

Brett wasn’t lacking in motivation last season. “George Brett: Something to Prove” was the title of one magazine cover story, and Brett didn’t argue the point. He had batted only .284 in 1984, unacceptable by his standards, with just 13 home runs and 69 RBIs. Injuries to his knee and hamstring had limited him to 104 games. Worse, he was in the poorest shape of his life.

“Last winter I weighed 214 pounds, and it was solid flab,” George said. “Double, triple chins. I couldn’t even run a mile when I first started working out.”

The Royals, who had signed Brett to a lifetime contract, had asked him to make an effort to get into condition, and Brett responded. When he reported to camp last spring, he weighed 188 pounds, and club officials were shocked.

“They thought I was sick,” George said. “They were panicking. They thought I’d lost too much.

“People say now, ‘Oh, you must have gone through hell.’ I didn’t. I worked out, an hour or two a day, that’s all.

“I still went out. I still played golf. I cut back on my alcohol intake. There’s nothing wrong with a couple of beers now and then. I’m not an alcoholic, I know that. I like to go out and have a few beers. I like to go out and have dinner.

“But I watched what I ate and I didn’t drink anything for a month.”

That brought laughs from Ken and Bobby. “After 30 days, he was like this: ‘Hey, Bobby, how you doing?’ ” Bobby said, imitating a man with the shakes.

“He had no fingernails, his hair started falling out,” Ken said.

“He’s never been more miserable in his life,” Bobby said.

“I’ve never felt better,” George said.

“And I looked better in my uniform. Not good, better. Some guys look good in their uniform, I looked better. The last time I looked good in a uniform was in high school, when I weighed 170.”

With the exception of 1980, when he made his assault on .400--he wound up at .390--George probably never played better.

“A Hall of Fame year on top of a Hall of Fame career,” is how Royal Manager Dick Howser described it.

George batted .335 in 1985. He hit 30 home runs and drove in 112 runs. He hit five home runs in six days in the last week of the regular season, then three more in the playoffs against Toronto. He batted .370 in the World Series, including the four-hit night in Game 7.

And then, last week, he won the first Gold Glove of his career, recognition that he was the best-fielding third baseman in the American League. The year before, Howser had taken Brett out of games for a defensive replacement, Greg Pryor.

“I’ve always been known as a hitter,” Brett said. “Finally, this year, I think I deserved some recognition as a fielder.

“I remember when I first started playing, I was so bad. I remember thinking I’d probably be the only player in baseball to get 3,000 errors before 3,000 hits.

“The greatest line I ever heard was from (Pedro) Guerrero, when somebody asked him what he did when he was playing third base, two outs and the winning run on third. He said, ‘I pray they don’t hit it to me, and then I pray they don’t hit it to Sax.’

“I was like that when I first came up. I used to say, hit it to Freddie Patek, hit to Frank White, hit it to John Mayberry. But I’ve gotten in the habit now of saying between pitches, ‘I want the ball.’ ”

Being in shape has made a big difference afield as well. “I’m quicker, my hands weren’t as heavy, my feet weren’t as lazy, and I had better footwork, which is why I didn’t throw many balls away.”

Perhaps his most celebrated play in the World Series came when he slid into the Royals’ dugout attempting to catch a foul fly.

“The problem was that field (Busch Stadium) didn’t have a warning track,” Brett said. “I figured I’d slide and stop, but it looked like I picked up speed. Next thing I knew, I was on my back and spinning around, and once I realized there was nothing underneath me, then I got scared.”

At lunch, someone mentioned Kirk Gibson, the free-agent outfielder with the Detroit Tigers, and the rumors about how he’d love to play in Los Angeles.

“He’s the type of guy who would eat up the publicity,” George Brett said. “He’d be the bad boy in town. He’s not the kind of guy you’d want your daughter going out with.”

“As opposed to George,” Ken Brett said deadpan as those sitting around the table erupted in laughter.

With a lifetime contract from the Royals, George is financially secure for the rest of his days. He also is blue-eyed, handsome, charming and available--though not for a lack of trying, both on his part and those women who aren’t shy about doing some pursuing on their own.

While George was eating, a waitress brought over a business card from an attractive woman sitting alone in a nearby booth. George, not wanting to disappoint one of his fans, got up and joined her for a few minutes.

Asked if a change in his single status was forthcoming in the near future, he said, “Not that I know of, although I might get lucky tonight, you never know.

“I wouldn’t mind getting married. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think marriage is bad. I’d like to be married and have kids. I love children.

” . . . (But) I’m so set in my ways. I do what I want, whenever I want to. If I decide I want to go to Europe for a month, I go.

“I think it would be a tough adjustment, to have somebody there and say, ‘I’ll be home at 4 dear, do you want anything at the store, I’ll stop on my way home.’ ”

Brett said his wealth has changed him little. For one thing, he says he hasn’t seen a paycheck in years. His brother Bobby handles all of his money and endorsements. “I have faith in him,” George says. “He knows my No. 1 priority is baseball.”

He owns a Mercedes, but is just as apt to drive his Ford Bronco, and his off-field uniform is almost as consistent as the one he wears on the field: faded blue jeans, deck shoes, no socks, and either a white polo, tennis or golf shirt.

He lives in Kansas City during the season, near a golf course in Rancho Mirage during the winter. He loves to go fishing--the day of the Royals’ victory parade in Kansas City, he went fishing afterward.

He admits, however, that he has made some necessary adjustments in his life style.

“Sleep is required now,” he said. “Before, it wasn’t a prerequisite for a game--just a couple hours’ nap. I mean, you couldn’t do that every night, but you could play.

“Now, sleep is required, a minimum of eight hours. I’m at a point where I’ve really got to start taking care of myself.”

Now, Brett goes few places without being recognized. While driving to Bobby’s after the basketball game, a guy in a pickup truck ahead of him leaned out the window and mouthed the words “George Brett” in an inquiring way. When told that it was, indeed, Brett, the guy waved and flashed Brett the “V” sign.

“I think he’s become a little more of a recluse,” Ken Brett said. “I don’t think he likes going out and being harassed in the middle of a meal. Most of the time he’ll go along with it, but deep down he doesn’t like it.

“That’s changed him a little bit, he’s a little short with people.”

The subject was Bret Saberhagen, and the wonder of a 21-year-old pitcher winning 20 games, the seventh game of the World Series and the Cy Young Award at such a tender age.

“Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, Buddy Biancalana, Darryl Motley, they don’t know what it’s like,” Brett said, referring to some of the Kansas City kids who experienced in October what he had waited 12 seasons for.

Asked what advice he’d give Saberhagen, Brett said: “I’d tell him it’s not always going to be that easy--if it is, he’ll set some kind of record.

“That’s one thing I’ve always told myself--you can’t live in the past. Like 1980, that was five years ago.”

And as far as he is concerned, the past season is already history.

What is left to motivate Brett to continue to play at such a high level? There is, of course, Cooperstown. There is his own exacting standards of performance.

And there is Jack Brett. The hate has been stated, but the unspoken fact is that George Brett may be doing it for love.

Asked if he had satisfied his father yet, George Brett answered: “Yeah, but next year is another year. There’s a long way to go, but hopefully he’ll be around when I’m through.”