RICHARD DENT : Chicago’s Fierce and Underpaid Defensive End Will Be a Problem for Rams’ Offensive Line--but He Is Having His Own Problems With the Bears’ Management

Money has always meant a lot to Richard Dent. He grew up poor in Georgia. He took jobs before he reached his teens. “I had a bank account when I was 12,” Dent said. “It wasn’t much, but it felt like I was on a roll.”

He is still on a roll, but he still feels short-changed. The All-Pro defensive end of the Chicago Bears reportedly earns $80,000 a year. Contrast this, say, with an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers--a no-time All-Star--who recently said he would lose his lunch if he had to swallow a three-year contract at a million bucks a year.

Dent feels he’s got a dirty deal. And even the average working stiff who would be glad to make half of 80-grand a year probably can understand where Dent is coming from. Anyone who watched this Chicago Kodiak maul the New York Giants last Sunday must wonder if that reported $80,000 wasn’t missing a zero.

It was in this 21-0 playoff success that Dent personally accounted for 3 1/2 sacks, 6 1/2 tackles and the near-decapitation of Phil Simms, who must have gone to the Soldier Field showers that afternoon expecting Dent to come at him like Anthony Perkins came at Janet Leigh.

It also was on this day that Dent, arguably, became a star. The playoff setting and national television exposure might well have catapulted him into the community of superstar defensive players, an exclusive group that includes Lyle Alzado, Lawrence Taylor and, maybe, Mark Gastineau. Football fans who did not know Dent’s name Sunday morning sure did know it by Sunday afternoon.

Much of the focus on Sunday’s National Football Conference championship game between the Bears and Rams is going to be on whether the latter can keep Dent from drawing and quartering quarterback Dieter Brock.

The Giants feebly tried to shield Simms by putting one man on Dent. “Anytime they’ve got me going one-on-one with somebody, I ought to get three or four sacks,” Dent said.

John Robinson, coach of the Rams, said of his team’s strategy: “We’ve got to make sure we don’t put him in situations where he gets to do his thing. In baseball, they pitch around certain guys. I think you have to pitch around players that have a chance to hurt you the way Dent does.”

Yet, as popular as this player has become of late, particularly in Chicago, he stands a chance of alienating his public as quickly as is humanly possible. With one dumb decision in the days to come, Richard Dent could go from godlike status to being one of the most unpopular fellows in Chicago since Capone.

For that is how The Man Who Boycotted the Super Bowl would be thought of, even by his closest admirers. Even, perhaps, by his teammates.

Dent is in this contract quandary, see, with Bear management. He has been waiting for months for the Bears to re-scale his pay. He and his agent, Everett Glenn of Oakland, say they are fed up. And Jerry Vainisi, general manager of the Bears, does not approve of Dent’s timing, and says things like: “If he wants to take a walk, let him take a walk. You don’t use playoff games as a hostage to negotiate.”

Nothing really is new about all this. Athletes have used playoff situations as Let’s Make a Deal forums before. Willie Hernandez did it in Detroit during the 1984 World Series.

Dent and his agent, though, went one step further. They issued a veiled threat that if the Bears do not come through with the bucks, and quickly, maybe the Bears will have to find themselves another right defensive end for Super Bowl XX at New Orleans.

While it is very true that the Bears have not qualified for that event as yet and that the Rams could see to it that Dent’s next football game after Sunday is the Pro Bowl, not the Super Bowl, just consider the magnitude of that threat.

To skip the baseball All-Star game, as Joaquin Andujar did, is one thing. You cost no one anything important. To spurn the Academy Awards, as Marlon Brando and George C. Scott did, is a matter of personal choice that affects no one else.

But to skip the Super Bowl would be to let down not only hundreds of thousands of Chicago fans, but Dent’s teammates. They understand sports star wars. They understand Al Harris and Todd Bell sitting out the entire Bear season. But would they understand Dent deserting them at a time when not only big money but a form of immortality is at stake?

Dent has never had much of anything, so he wants it and wants it now. He was an eighth-round draft choice out of Tennessee State. Even the reason that he went so low in the draft had to do with something he could never afford to have--good teeth.

When Bear scout Bill Tobin studied Dent, he saw “the best pure pass rusher I’d seen in a long time.” But Dent’s 6-5 frame carried only 220 pounds. The kid had an eating problem. Tobin checked into it and found out Dent’s dentures were so bad, he had trouble with food.

So, the Bears, who had no fifth, sixth or seventh picks in 1983, took Dent in the eighth round and immediately arranged to have his teeth fixed. His weight jumped from 220 to around 240 overnight. Right now, he is 263.

He is part of a Bear defensive line that overpowers people. Irv Pankey, the Ram left tackle who will have Dent in his face Sunday, did not want to discuss him Tuesday, but tight end David Hill didn’t mind. “Very physical, very fast off the ball--what else can I say about Richard Dent? Awesome.”

Buddy Ryan, Chicago’s defensive coach, is trying to goad his team, as usual, into a good effort, this time by saying, “The Ram offensive line has whipped us three years in a row.” Hill agrees, to a point.

“We’ve had some success against them in the past, but the Bear defense is unique now. You can’t make an adjustment to stop one man because the rest of them are too good.”

Told that it still must feel good to at least be knocking on the door of a Super Bowl, Hill said: “But it’s a real big door. And it’s got a moat and a drawbridge.”

Richard Dent is the sentry. He is a large, menacing-looking man with a fuzzy goatee and a gruesome scar that runs like a railroad track along his left arm. Away from the action, he doesn’t say a lot--”You should show it, not talk about it”--and almost never raises his voice, but on the field he is a runaway train.

A man asked Dent if he is full of rage, full of turmoil on a football field. “I’m full of whatever you want to call it,” he replied.

He is also full of pride. But if the Bears go to the Super Bowl and Dent does not go with them, it will be very sad to hear what Chicagoans think he is full of.