THE ‘FORCE’ IS BACK : After 9 Seasons, Hayes Does His Job With Guile

It’s warming up again on that much chronicled hot spot, the Raider left corner, where Lester Hayes, once again a lean, mean, rumor-defying machine, is lining up for his 10th season.

At 31, Hayes is a sleek 203 pounds, a condition no doubt inspired by a winter of trade whispers and other slights to his reputation, like being left off the Pro Bowl squad for the first time in the ‘80s, and last season’s infamous Sports Illustrated poll.

“They say I’m the most overrated and weirdest,” Hayes squealed when it came out.

“And that’s by vote of your teammates,” defensive end Sean Jones said.

Hayes, listed at 200 pounds in the Raider media guide and perhaps in his dreams, is used to showing up a little heavier--212? 215?

“Try a little higher,” Coach Tom Flores said.

What is this, open season? Does everyone have a Lester Hayes joke?

If so, it’s only because his whole career has been, by design, an action comedy, like 10 years of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

“Empire” is an epic Hayes can speak of with some authority, having seen it, he estimates, “two or three hundred times.”

If you look at it just right, you can see the applications to his own life, the story of a young Jedi from Houston’s rough, tough 5th Ward, who encounters different life forms and wise men and rises to the top against overwhelming odds.

Is football insufficient entertainment? They play only one game a week, and something has to fill up the newspapers for the six other days. Hayes does his bit, calling out the Ram cornerbacks by announcing that he could play to age 90 in that rinky-dink zone of theirs, or subtly suggesting to the man he calls Coach Davis the wisdom of the new, multiple offenses.

Of course, there is also game day to prepare for. Hayes’ preparations can be demonic, down to the down-distance-route tendencies of the opposing offensive coordinator back when he was coaching some other team, or the one before that.

And not to be forgotten is this week’s material for the news hounds, all of whom he addresses as Scoopman. The scoop men require only that their material be fresh and if that’s all they need. . . . In Denver last season, where the Raiders’ had just won their biggest game, Hayes interjected himself into about 20 game stories with an allusion to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, believed to be the first ever made after an NFL game.

“I want to be different,” Hayes says. “I never wanted to be typical vanilla. My focal point is not to have a path-following mentality. I’m a trail blazer!

“I’ll give you a line. Put this on AP around the world. People ask me about my age. I say, ‘I don’t look at it as being a year older. I look at it as being one step closer to God.’ ”

Raider backfield coach Chet Franklin, whose secondary also includes Mike Haynes, generally considered the finest cornerback in the game, and safety Vann McElroy, a two-time Pro Bowl player, may get one question a week on each of them and 98 on Hayes.

Franklin has a set answer. He doubles over and moans: “Oh no! Not the judge!”

Judge is the nickname Hayes got at Texas A&M;, when he “sentenced” Texas’ Earl Campbell to a bad game, and the Aggie defense backed it up. He was Lester the molester as a young Raider and still signs autographs “37 Molester.”

He was also the egg boy, but that was awhile ago.

Like Archie Bell and the Drells, Hayes was born in Houston, Tex., where everything wasn’t always so funny.

“It was a very tough neighborhood, but the mentality I grew up with, we didn’t understand what poor was,” Hayes said. “The neighborhood was our total environment. We didn’t know the other side of town.

“I remember games where we played football, 70 guys against 70 guys. I would say most guys had a blackjack in their socks, or a knife in their pocket or a gun in their underwear. I’ve seen guys get shot before football games.

“Guys from the 4th Ward would play the guys from the 5th Ward. You come to our neighborhood, it was very, very difficult getting out.”

Did they bother to use a football in those games?

“Of course,” Hayes said. “Of course. It was unbelievable. I remember a .25 automatic falling out of a guy’s underwear. He was running for a touchdown and this .25 automatic falls down his leg.

“We had enough to eat. Tons and tons. As a kid, I sold chickens and eggs with my father. That was my factual father. He’s deceased now. He had the only farm in the city of Houston. We’d sell chickens and eggs Saturday mornings. I was known as the egg boy.

“I lived with my grandparents. My mother moved to Washington, D.C., with my younger brother and my stepfather. That’s a fascinating twist here.

“Did I ever get in trouble? Like I never got caught. For what? I can’t talk about it. It’s bad, very bad. We had a couple of serious gang fights.”

At Wheatley High School, he was a football lineman, a 6-foot center on the basketball team and a track sensation. The basketball coach, Jackie Carr, a Texas schoolboy legend, remembers him as tough on the court, a delight off it.

“He played on a team with three high school All-Americans,” Carr said from Houston. “The only reason Lester wasn’t an All-American basketball player is he played football. He might have been the only boy in school who could make my team coming off football. He’d be two months behind. Coming off football, you couldn’t hardly make my team.

“He kept the team loose, even on the bench. And he could never be still. When he got into the game, it was sure something was gonna happen. He was always harassing someone on defense. He made something happen.”

At about 6-0, 190, he was a football lineman, and even in the hot-house atmosphere of Texas high school football, an overlooked one. He stayed that way until his senior year, when the Texas A&M; coach he calls “a great man named Emory Bellard” came to see him.

By mistake. Bellard, who invented the wishbone while he was a Texas assistant, wasn’t there to see Hayes.

“I’ll tell you what,” Bellard said from Houston. “That was probably the strangest recruiting case I was ever involved in. An assistant and I went to Houston to watch two boys playing on the other team. We didn’t know anything about Lester. He wasn’t being promoted or pushed. We didn’t have his name as a prospect.

“Before the game was over, I said, ‘Forget about those other two players, look at that defensive end.’ Lester was flying all over the field. And he was flying . Not doing sound-type things, but exceptional things. Chasing down plays from far behind. And when we got to looking at the films, he was doing it every week.

“He was the sixth man on the 4-A state basketball champions. The first week after the state basketball tournament, he went out for track and with very little preparation, he ran a 9.5 100 and a 21.6 220. I always felt like he could have been a world-class sprinter because he could run. He runs like a gazelle. He has great spring in his legs.”

Bellard was introduced to the young Hayes by the football coach and the two were left alone. Bellard remembers talking for an hour and Hayes saying absolutely nothing. “I thought I had failed miserably,” Bellard said.

Hayes’ coach had neglected to tell Bellard that Hayes stuttered badly. When nervous, he wouldn’t say anything.

Hayes does not like talking about his stutter, although it must have had an impact on him. He has struggled mightily with it and has been seeing a speech therapist since 1980, which has helped him. He now occasionally even talks to large groups.

Anyway, after the first meeting, Bellard and Hayes got along famously.

“We were the only Southwest Conference school recruiting him,” Bellard said. “I visited him seven times. I told him, ‘This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever been involved with. Nobody wants you but me, and you won’t tell me you’re coming.’

“He did sign with us. We had him as an outside linebacker as a freshman. His sophomore year, we made him a safety. He’s the kind of athlete who could play anywhere. He’d have made a great outside linebacker in professional football. He had the size, about 215.

“You going to see Lester any time soon? You give him a great big hug from me.”

For Hayes, College Station and Texas A&M; were revelations.

“It was a distinct change of venue,” he says. “College Station was very slow. I was a street kid. I had a street mentality. I was slick. Making that transition to that slow life style was a needed change. Coming from the 5th Ward, I was on the exact same path as the other individuals in my neighborhood, a path of detriment. I was blessed by God to escape the mentality of the 5th Ward.

“I had a ton of tutors. I talked to a lot of guys at the University of Houston, and these guys were P.E. majors. They were staying in school, taking Basket Weaving 101, Basket Weaving 102, Ping Pong 103. I thought Texas A&M; was the same mentality. I was as wrong as two left shoes.”

By his senior year, he was an All-Southwest Conference safety and had gotten some All-American mention. In 1977, he went to the Raiders, in the fifth round. That was lower than he had been hoping for.

The Raiders wanted to move him to cornerback. That was hotter than he had been hoping for.

“I was anticipating taking (free safety) George Atkinson’s job,” he said. “I knew I knew more football than George. I was bigger and faster. George weighed 160 pounds, but he had the intestinal fortitude of a titan! Ah, good statement.

“I remember in Oakland, Al Davis was talking to (then-coach) John Madden on the field. I walked over to Coach Davis and said, ‘Why are you playing me at cornerback?’ Coach Davis said it was my destiny to be a left cornerback. So I said, ‘Well, so be it.’ I went home and got a crash course from my mentor, Pat Thomas (the former Ram cornerback, also an Aggie).”

Davis had noticed that Hayes could run and cover. With the bump rules then in effect, he was devastating. He started by the end of his rookie year. In 1980, he intercepted 13 passes, with the help of his trusty stickum.

By that time, the legislators were hard after him. They restricted defensive backs to bumping only within five yards of the scrimmage line and prohibited foreign substances. One of Hayes’ basic rules these days is, “There is no such thing as an invulnerable cornerback any more.”

He was tough enough. In 1983, the year Mike Haynes came over from the New England Patriots, Hayes had an 18-yard interception return for a touchdown in the playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, and an interception and a 44-yard return the next week against the Seattle Seahawks. In the Super Bowl, he and Haynes shut down the Washington Redskin wide receivers and were proclaimed the world’s greatest tandem.

In 1984, Hayes slumped, though people caught on slowly. He was named to the Pro Bowl again.

But he came back last season, amid whispers that he was slowing down. When he was torched on a nationally televised Thursday night game by the Kansas City Chiefs’ Bill Kenney and Carlos Carson, his reputation took a fast dive.

At one point early last season, Hayes was reported to have missed a practice. Hayes has confirmed that Davis was threatening to trade him to the 49ers. The names Ronnie Lott and Randy Cross were mentioned.

After that, with a little extra deep help from the safeties, Hayes played well but the damage had been done. He finished fourth in the Pro Bowl voting to Haynes, the Denver Broncos’ Louis Wright and the Patriots’ Raymond Clayborn. Only the top three go. Hayes, stung, stayed home and didn’t watch it on TV.

“I think in 1984, I snuck in by some method because I had a semi-off season,” he said. “I played the last eight games with a torn calf muscle. I couldn’t cut. I was scared. I was nervous. I took injections. I still made the Pro Bowl. Baffling!

“This is the most absurd, asinine thing that I’ve heard of in the past nine seasons. The beginning of the 1985 season, I thought it was my epitaph.

“Everybody said I couldn’t function anymore, although everyone knew I was hurt. They knew but they didn’t want to know. So be it. I’m back, baby.”

You want to know how tough it is playing left corner for the Raiders?

Anyone who has covered them for a half-hour has heard Hayes explain the rigors of the man-to-man defense Raider corners have to play, and the special problems of being on the left side in the AFC West, where the quarterbacks and offenses are predominantly right-handed.

“Lester always has a plan,” Chet Franklin said. “It might not be one that you and I necessarily agree with, but he has a plan. He’s not just flopping around out there. He’s a very smart player.”

You want to talk X’s and O’s? This is your man.

It started back in Houston, watching “The Tom Landry Show.”

“The first grade, I was almost expelled,” Hayes said. “I was so intrigued at beating the safety on 99X-post. I was 6 years old. I was diagramming pass routes instead of doing my homework. My teacher called my mom. I got in a lot of trouble.

“I would go home, get on the floor and play with toy soldiers. They’d be the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins, four-five hours playing make-believe football games.

“I’ve always been intrigued by offense. I have a curious mentality. I’m always dissecting things. I always want to learn something new daily. I want to know what’s happening in all walks of life.

“The IBM age is at hand. Teams are getting smarter. I’m following coaches now because the coaches’ mentality changes very minimally. Certain coaches like to call certain types of pass routes on certain downs. That helps me out a lot. I followed one offensive coordinator for four different teams. Last season, he finally devised a pass route to beat me.

“Who? I can’t tell you. That’s top secret. I’m a generation ahead of most individuals in the NFL.”

For relaxation, Hayes fishes, in his own inimitable way.

“I study fish psychology, fish schooling patterns,” he said. “I like to go into a fish’s domain and sever his family ties.”