Ed White--King of the Mountain Home : Grand Pooh-Bah of Laziness Isn’t Supposed to Get Older or Get Hurt--but He Did

A mountain lion recently raided the chicken coop, creating a little stir at Oak Lake Ranch, a five-acre empire loosely ruled by the Grand Poohbah of Laziness.

The ranch, which is several winding miles down Highway 79 from the center of this mountain metropolis, boasts as its primary structure a 30-year-old converted farmhouse, headquarters of the Pooh-bah himself.

For company there is a weathered deck, trimmed with a rusting apple press and a wooden wheelbarrow, plus a noisy kennel and an eclectic art studio hung with Pro Bowl helmets, posters depicting the human skeletal system and a curling photograph with Ronald Reagan at its center. With a breeze rippling through the tops of the pines, Oak Lake Ranch is the centerpiece of a setting with instant appeal.

After a couple of years up here, Ed White probably wouldn’t want to leave. Ever. But life in football goes on, even though he has thrown his last block, and such dark thoughts as whether his art can sustain him don’t linger in his mind.

Living at an altitude of more than 5,000 feet, White has mostly lofty thoughts. The sculptors Henry Moore and Rodin come to mind. So do the names of former adversaries Howie Long, Richard Dent and Randy White. And a surgeon, Gary Losse, who last winter carved out the interior of White’s arthritic right knee, inspiring hope for an 18th season in the National Football League.

After the operation, White spent a month on crutches, waiting for cushioning tissue to be regenerated inside the knee. The solitude of Oak Lake Ranch was more inviting than ever as White wondered if his career might be over.

He finally decided last week that the playing part of it is history, although he remains a Charger, having signed on as an assistant line coach.

“This place up here has always been special to me,” White said. “I need a place I can drive to after work. I lived in an apartment across Friars Road from the stadium one year, and it nearly drove me crazy. I looked out the window and there was the stadium.”

White grew up in a semi-rural place, Lemon Grove, Calif. He got his first glimpse of himself as a person of some worth and a football player with a future on a lawn in front of Lemon Grove Junior High, where he played tackle football with a group of friends on weekends.

He has been coming up to Julian since boyhood. It was a favorite escape of the family from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.

Even after he moved away, to attend college at Berkeley, and later to begin his NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings, some of the essence of the Laguna Mountains went with him. When he was with the Vikings, he lived in a rural town, Rosemount, Minn. He could walk out the back door and hunt pheasants.

When a trade brought him back to San Diego in 1978, White and his wife bought property in Julian and began planning a new home.

Years passed, and they couldn’t agree on just what they wanted in their dream home. Finally, they agreed to look around for something already built. When they happened upon Oak Lake Ranch, they swapped their land for it and moved in.

This is just the spot for teaching three children how to be best friends. Or composing the story of Harvey the Hippo. Or just falling onto an overstuffed sofa and not moving.

“Let’s be honest,” said a friend, Dan Fouts, who has a slightly more urbanized retreat at Rancho Santa Fe. “Ed White has moments of tremendous laziness. He calls himself the ‘couch potato,’ and I think that’s fitting.”

Fouts always made it an annual project to get White to come down the hill and get in shape for training camp. For that alone, Fouts was valuable to the Chargers.

White’s precise weight, like the worth of the wealthiest men, has a shifting value. It is never less than considerable, and if one must hazard an estimate, 300 pounds is reasonable.

To help sculpt this mass into something recognizable as an offensive guard, Fouts sometimes accompanied his friend to the Pacific shore, where the men rode boogie boards or body surfed.

“One day, on the way to the beach, we drove past the Self Realization Center,” Fouts said. “I think it was Big Ed who came up with the idea for our own Self Relaxation Fellowship. Big Ed is the Grand Pooh-bah of Laziness, and I’m his devout disciple. Our altar is a couch.”

Fouts can talk about White that way because of a special bond between them.

“Ed reminds me of friends I had growing up, and I mean my earliest friends,” Fouts said. “He doesn’t take himself too seriously. In fact, I’m not sure what he does take seriously.

“Ed is a very refreshing guy. He makes me happy. I can call him up anytime, and five minutes later, we’ll both be laughing our behinds off about life in general. He’s my director of entertainment.”

White, who once ran onto the field with his jersey on backward, is a bit more serious about football than Fouts’ remarks might suggest. He wouldn’t have lasted 17 seasons in the NFL if he hadn’t been.

In fact, age just sort of sneaked up on White, who turned 39 on June 4. He never expected to be an old football player. All those years with the Vikings, he was a young buck surrounded by graybeards such as Alan Page and Carl Eller and Jim Marshall and Roy Winston. Then one day he was Ed White, the Chargers’ elder statesman.

In one of the more isolated spots in one of the more densely populated regions of the country, a chubby man fast approaching middle-age draws pictures of life down the hill.

Every picture tells a story.

In Ed White’s case, you have to decide which picture best tells the story.

It could be the one of the happy hippopotamus who has persevered through all the jokes about being too fat and found his niche in life, along with some jeans that fit. Sounds like kid stuff, which it is, the stuff of a planned children’s book.

Or it could be the more impressionistic picture of flying body parts, dripping vital juices, a darker view not sanctioned by the league office.

White has put something of himself in each of these felt tip pen-and-ink renderings. Jolly, but not too. Bloodied, but not misshapen.

Of course, there’s a lot more depicted in the sketchbook carried in the leather attache case bearing the initials E.A.W. And a lot more to the man whose creative acts extend to sculpture and landscape architecture.

Whether he’s hunting coyotes, teaching 16-year-olds at Julian High School how to block, or strolling off an airplane without his carry-on luggage, White defies a pithy synopsis. Great bulk, carried well, so that you almost don’t notice. Almost.

What he lacks in ego, he makes up in mass--and staying power. He’s as tough as a Minnesota winter, as he proved in surviving nine of them, pre-Metrodome.

He began playing pro football in the early years of the Nixon Administration. White was football’s answer to Bill Shoemaker, Pete Rose, Jack Nicklaus and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He might have absorbed more punishment than any three of them combined.

At an age when he ought to have known better, White was drawing a paycheck by attempting to drive his helmet through rivals’ jawbones. Ten years is a long time to do this, but 17?

Some of White’s art, depicting the reality of pro football, is unsettling to people who prefer their game sanitized by a TV screen.

He has done a bronze statuette, the Hit Man, which will fit in the palm of your hand. But it contains a lot of detail, depicting a tackler overtaking a ball carrier from behind. The tackler’s head is embedded in the spine of the runner. One of the tackler’s feet is missing, along with the opposite lower leg. There’s a pool of blood at the base of the piece.

“Tom Bass (the Chargers’ former defensive coordinator) loved it,” White said. “Most people don’t like it. I was just trying to express a feeling about this game. I have sometimes felt like my ribs were going to come through my body. So, in my mind, this piece is successful in expressing a feeling.”

White went a long way in football by never moving very far. He played 241 games, more than any other blocker. Basically, he was a containment vessel, trying to dominate his opponent right at the line of scrimmage. Like a good referee, you didn’t normally pay attention when he was having a good day.

The most entertaining thing he did was at the start of the game. Upon being introduced, he sprinted onto the field with the top-heavy uncertainty of a B-52 taking off. You got the feeling a sudden wind gust would have been a calamity.

Those short strides--baby steps, really--helped prolong his career. Taking small steps, he was never planted in the ground to absorb the full shock of a blind hit.

Well, almost never.

Last fall, while trying to make a cut, he came down straight-legged and chipped the inside of his right knee. The bone had to be surgically scraped and ground. The doctor put a hole in the bone to make it bleed, so worn-out cartilage would grow back.

For a long time, White held out hope that he could play another season. As late as May he was saying: “The passage of time has helped, and in the last month, it’s gotten a lot better. I’m still gimpy, but I’ve been told by Dr. Losse I should be able to play 16 games this year.”

It didn’t work out that way, though, and White realized at a family picnic, when his daughter had to run for him during a softball game, that he wouldn’t be playing football this year, or again.

As a coach, White will take a serious cut in salary. Money, though, was never his motivation. As a player, he was well paid--$350,000 a year--but look how long it took him. Kids today come out of school, get a salary like his and a signing bonus big enough to buy a starter estate and an exotic automobile. White’s bonus was $15,000, enough for one bad investment, which he quickly made.

He knows how real people live. His dad started a construction business, which never rivaled A.G. Spanos Construction Inc. His wife happens to be a school teacher. Her career earnings may not approach the middle six figures.

White still loads all the family’s weekly refuse in the back of his battered yellow Ford pickup and hauls it off to the dump. Beats paying someone $15 a week to do it, he said.

White got a small taste of coaching when he served as a volunteer aide during Julian High’s recent spring practice.

One day, he showed up half an hour before practice and carried worn-out tires onto the field. They would be used in an exercise to help players improve their knee action. Not just any old immortal would stoop to dragging dirty tires onto a dusty field in a tiny mountain town.

White sat with the team’s regular coaches, imparting ideas about organizing practice, utilizing personnel and designing a passing attack. He used a phrase, pattern tree, that could only have come from Don Coryell . . . and he spoke knowingly about it, as if he really understood the concept.

Once the players arrived--all 20 of them--White opened practice with a period of stretching exercises. “Concentrate on your muscles,” he said. “Feel what’s happening in your muscles.”

A few minutes later, he was showing the players how to assume a proper hitting position. “This is where your power comes from,” he said, squatting and looking quite threatening.

Then the players were directed to chop their feet and rotate one direction, then another, like a turret. They were supposed to yell “eagle!” each time they pivoted.

“Aw,” White said, “we could get the girls out here and they would make more noise.”

His folksy, but still serious manner held the players’ attention as practice moved on. White was doing something he wanted to do, and never mind that NFL Films wasn’t there to record it.

Much as White enjoyed the game, and the people in the game, he had to get away from both of them after the season. Then, when he came down the hill every July for training camp, it was like a reunion.

Fouts said he discovered White in their first training camp, which was 1978.

One evening after practice, they retired to the pool-side lounge at Torrey Pines golf course. Fouts and White were accompanied by tight end Pat Curran, now the Chargers’ business manager.

“It was a warm night, and we were having a few beers,” Fouts said. “Pat bet $20 that big Ed wouldn’t dive in the pool. Ed, of course, didn’t have a bathing suit with him.

“I looked at Ed and he looked back, and then Pat pulled the 20 out of his wallet. Big Ed stood up and stripped down and jumped in. I didn’t know if he was going to make it, because he was so tired, but he managed to swim the length of the pool. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw.”

Such moments fit into what White describes as the need for “levity” to balance the serious side of football.

And, contrary to what Fouts may imply, football is serious stuff to White. His forthcoming children’s book on the life of Harvey the Hippo serves as a parallel to his own life, and the place of football in it.

“Whether it’s sports or not, we all have to be able to identify something we’re really good at,” White said. “All kids have the frustration of wondering, ‘What am I good at? Where am I going?’

“I was lucky. I always knew. Under my picture in my high school yearbook, it lists my ambition: To be a pro football player. But until I got into football, I felt handicapped. I was the fat kid who didn’t belong to any group. In football it was easy to see I was better than most of the other kids.”

Harvey the Hippo doesn’t have to look for himself anymore up at Oak Lake Ranch. He’s going to go right on fitting in with the Chargers. And taking his lazy time when he can get it.