Broken Promise : Short on Passion, Ex-49er’s Career Became a Charade

He did not have a passion for the game, and in big-time college football that is a sin not easily forgiven. Coaches couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t lift weights and other players couldn’t understand why he wasn’t mean like them. He came to Cal State Long Beach for a free education, which football got him. He wanted a little glory too, but its price--for a gentle, nonconforming, easygoing kid from Santa Barbara--was too steep.

“I just used football,” Rick Trigueiro, a reserve tight end for the 49ers the last two seasons, said last week after his day’s classes. He wore surfer shorts, a sweat shirt, a tan and, because football has given him permanent arthritis in his neck, a pained expression.

Trigueiro had been a promising pass receiver. His acrobatic catches made him a second-team All-American at Santa Barbara City College.

“He was a good football player,” 49er Coach Mike Sheppard said. “We anticipated he would be our tight end.”

But when his career seemed on the verge of blossoming, it wilted because of a lack of desire. It’s over now and Trigueiro ended up, in his words and not to his surprise, a “very average, run-of-the-mill Division 1 player.”

Love Dissipated

Whatever love he had for football began to dissipate, ironically, when the 49ers signed him in 1984.

“After I got my scholarship, I never thought about eventually playing pro ball,” Trigueiro said. “I just wanted that scholarship. That was the big thing in my life--not to pay for school.”

Still, Trigueiro, 6 feet 1 and 220 pounds, thought he was good enough to play at college football’s highest level. And in his junior season he caught 17 passes for 233 yards. But his coaches thought his attitude problem had prevented him from accomplishing more.

Trigueiro and the football program were a match that never meshed. His heart wasn’t in it. He never liked contact and tried to avoid it--one of the reasons, he said, was a fear of being paralyzed by a tackle. He refused to lift weights, which was tantamount to sacrilege.

“I had a big problem,” Trigueiro said. “I wanted my off-season, and here there isn’t any. You were supposed to lift weights (all the time). I didn’t make the commitment. I never lifted weights once.”

Last season was a disaster for Trigueiro. He was depressed over the end of a five-year relationship with his girlfriend. He had suffered four “burners” (pinched nerves) in his career from getting “racked” by tacklers, and feared another.

“They’d scare me,” he said. “Your whole body goes numb.” He contemplated not playing but changed his mind because “I just didn’t want to be a quitter.”

But above all, he believes it was what he called his “Santa Barbara attitude”--a surfing, beer-drinking, things-will-fall-into-place approach to life--that made him a permanent bench-warmer. “I didn’t act any way I didn’t want to act,” Trigueiro said. “I’m a nonconformist completely.”

Greg Locy won the 1985 starting tight-end position and Trigueiro caught only 3 passes for 24 yards.

“Greg wasn’t much of a verbal guy,” Trigueiro said. “I say what I feel and they (coaches) didn’t appreciate that. I wouldn’t just listen to the coaches, I’d always say something after. I’d say, ‘What about this?’ and they’d say, ‘No, this is how it is.’ In the past I’d do my own thing. But in Division 1 if you do your own thing you don’t play.”

‘Coach, Come on’

But Trigueiro understood that coaches could not allow any disagreement.

“I’d say to Bresnahan (Steve Bresnahan, the tight-end coach), ‘Coach, come on.’ He’d say, ‘Hey, my job’s on the line; you either have to perform this way or I’m gone.’ And I’d go, ‘OK.’ ”

Bresnahan said Trigueiro “thought he could get by on ability. He wasn’t in great shape because he hadn’t worked out (in the off-season). At times he would loaf at practice but usually he worked hard. Any time you used any kind of mental motivation technique, he’d immediately lock you out. He’s a pretty smart guy, he knew what he wanted. He accepted the consequences of not paying the price. He became strictly a 10-12 play-a-game player.”

Trigueiro did not find everything about football distasteful. “I liked the team concept and the camaraderie,” he said. “And the finesse part of the game. I liked running away from people. I liked touchdowns (he didn’t score any as a 49er). It’s fun to look up in the crowd. Like when we played UCLA (before 40,000 in the Rose Bowl in ‘84) . . . that was an experience I’ll never forget.”

A color photo of Trigueiro diving for a pass against UCLA adorned the cover of a 49er promotional brochure for the ’85 season. He talked about that a lot last spring, but it still didn’t inspire him to get with the program.

Trigueiro said he wasn’t fond of some of the defensive players on the team.

“They were mean,” he said. “I’m not into being mean. I’m really mellow. You do something to them on the (practice) field and they’d want to kick your butt afterwards. These are big guys. I’d say, ‘Come on, dude, I got pads on out here. Inside it’s a whole different ballgame. I’m not into things like that. Let’s go have a couple of beers or something.’

“Defensive guys have a different attitude. They’re tough; that’s what they have to be, that’s what they teach them to be, to be hard hitters, ruthless, and some of that carries over (off the field). That’s the part of football I didn’t like, having to be tough on and off the field. It was hard for me to pretend I was a football player. You have to be physical to play football. I realize it is important, but it wasn’t important to me.”

That attitude did not set well with the coaches or the players. In the middle of the 1985 season Trigueiro, who was unhappy that his playing time had been confined to stints as a blocking back in short-yardage and goal-line situations, approached Bresnahan. “He asked me why he wasn’t playing,” Bresnahan said. “I told him it was because he was too passive.”

Trigueiro suddenly got physical, which for him was weird behavior. The coaches welcomed the change--until Trigueiro went too far.

“I was mad that they thought my worth was nothing,” he said. “I was bitching and moaning. I became just a mean mother out there (in practice). I wasn’t myself and he (Sheppard) knew it. I was dirty as hell. I had changed my logic. I said, ‘Is this how you guys want me to play?’ ”

With four games left in the season, Trigueiro said that Sheppard asked him to quit “because of my poor attitude.”

“I had been bitching and moaning,” he said. “My life was completely in turmoil. I was doing some things (playing dirty) I didn’t want to do, plus my girlfriend was giving me a heartache. I guess I was causing the team to wonder about me, which hurts the team.” (Some of the players, in fact, had sought out Trigueiro and advised him to shape up.)

Sheppard said he called Trigueiro to his office and “I told him I was concerned about his attitude affecting the other players. He indicated he didn’t like football and I suggested maybe he shouldn’t play.”

The suggestion was worded, “Turn in your gear,” Trigueiro remembered. That shocked him and he thought to himself, “The middle of the season and I’m going to turn in my gear and quit in front of everybody? No, I’ll finish the season.”

He asked if he could finish, and Sheppard let him.

And so Trigueiro finished the season and finally gained a measure of respect.

“I blocked pretty good,” Trigueiro said. “I was still mad. I started (hitting everybody real hard) and going crazy.” But he did it within the rules.

Bresnahan said, “He did an outstanding job (of blocking) the last four games.”

The anger is gone now because Trigueiro knows he will never put on a football uniform again. Freed of that burden, he has actually begun to lift weights. “I feel like I’m doing it for me, to improve my physique,” he said. “Before I felt I would have been doing it for them.”

He believes that the coaches try to avoid him. He laughed and said: “I’m not too welcome, especially now when I use the weight room and I never did before. But I have no bad feelings toward anybody. I had a bad situation and a lot of it was my fault. But I have no regrets.”

Trigueiro is 23 years old and trying to focus on a hazy future. He has a 2.8 grade-point average and is a semester shy of finishing the free education that football has given him. He is thinking of possibly a career in real estate.

He has a small apartment in Long Beach but goes home to Santa Barbara as often as he can. “When I go back there I’m still living with my parents,” he said. “Up there I have money (his parents give him). Down here I have nothing. I am living prolonged adolescence.”

Trigueiro’s younger brother Tim is a nationally ranked tennis player at UCLA. Their father is a tennis coach at Santa Barbara High and their mother works in real estate.

Trigueiro knows he will not grow up until he finds something to commit to.

Football wasn’t the answer.

“All of us are a little disappointed he didn’t achieve at a higher level,” Sheppard said.

Trigueiro knows that couldn’t be helped.

“John Robinson (coach of the Rams) spoke on campus and said you have to have that passion for the game,” Trigueiro said. “I didn’t have it.”