FitzPatrick Is Taking New Stock in Old Self

Charger tackle James FitzPatrick says he wasn’t his real self last season, which better be true because he didn’t block anything but the breeze last year.

A No. 1 draft choice in 1986, FitzPatrick had a contract dispute last July and missed the first week of training camp. So now he’s here a week early to make up for lost time, and you wouldn’t recognize him.

Besides the fact that he’s relatively skinny, FitzPatrick, formerly known as “FatsPatrick,” is wearing his hair to his shoulders, a beautiful diamond earring in his left ear lobe and “Grateful Dead” T-shirts.

FitzPatrick showed up with short hair last year. “I was doing everything I could to fit in,” he said. “But that wasn’t me.”

And now . . .

“I’m trying to be me,” he said Sunday after the Chargers’ morning workout. “I remember we had a team meeting before mini-camp this year, and I came in wearing faded jeans with my hair long, and I had a dangling cross earring on. I walked in, and I swear to God, the whole room shut up. Everybody was looking.

“And I was trying to avoid Coach (Al) Saunders at all costs. My earring was in my left ear, so I tried keeping him to my right. As for my hair, I’ve always had this Samson attitude. I don’t want to get it cut.”

But since FitzPatrick has never seen Saunders’ hair uncombed, he’s still a little concerned that the coach will send him to a barber. At USC, where FitzPatrick was an All-American, he says the coaches used to give him money for haircuts.

Saunders, asked Sunday for his opinion of FitzPatrick, said: “Earrings and hair have never prevented someone from knocking a defensive player on their butt.”

But can he do the job? The Chargers drafted him to be Pro-Bowler Jim Lachey’s bookend at right tackle, but now they are moving him to guard for a while to see how he does there. FitzPatrick, 6-feet 7-inches, was 312 pounds when he reported last year. Now he’s down to 280, the least he has weighed since 1984. Guard seems to be a better position for him.

“It (playing guard) is fun. You get to run around,” said FitzPatrick, who spent 12 weeks on the injured reserve list last season. “It’s total headache material, though. It’s like you’ll have this 15-to-20-yard run at an inside (line)backer). I mean, it’s full-speed collisions all the time. At tackle, it’s like two dancing bears, mostly. You’ve always got somebody on your head. You bang into each other and dance for a while.”

Last year was nothing to laugh at, unless you like failure. Before the draft, FitzPatrick tested positive for marijuana use. And after the draft, the Chargers saw how slow he ran and said they might cut him.

“Total woes, man” said FitzPatrick, who giggles after almost every sentence. “Like last year, I used to get up to the line and my mind would be in a total scramble trying to figure out what to do (giggle). . . . The press was all over me. I mean, they’d write stuff like, ‘Worst draft pick ever’ and ‘FatsPatrick’ and ‘He should be cut (giggle).’ And I read that, too, and how’d you like to be the only first-round draft pick ever to be cut or something like that (giggle)? That tends to get at your confidence level, you know (giggle).”

The peer pressure got to him, though. At home in Beaverton, Ore., he said old acquaintances were saying: “Ah, Fitz was always a jerk. He was always overrated.” This caused FitzPatrick to get into a few fights around Christmas time.

Finally, he swallowed his pride and stopped swallowing so much food. He moved permanently to San Diego and has worked out almost every day since Jan. 1. He says he was in the weight room every morning by 8:30.

“It wasn’t easy, too,” he said, giggling again. “Because I still like to live a little bit of a night life, and you know how San Diego is in the summertime.”

In essence, FitzPatrick has made three major breakthroughs since last season:

--He controlled his eating habits and his beer intake, to a degree.

“Well, I don’t think I drink too excessive,” he said. “Actually, I cut out the food. I went home to Oregon for a week this summer, and I was really worried because I usually gain weight with my mom’s cooking. But I didn’t eat for a week. I went out and drank every night with my buddies, though. Hadn’t seen them in a while. But I ended up losing five pounds.”

One of his biggest problems last year was that he hadn’t worked out before to training camp.

“I spent the whole summer (of 1986) up at USC not having really anything to do,” he said. “I had knee surgery and I took the last semester off and I just had too much free time on my hands. I was kind of laying around getting fat. . . . It killed me.”

--He teamed up with Big Ed.

Ed White, the former All-Pro lineman with the Minnesota Vikings and Chargers, became FitzPatrick’s unofficial guru. He told FitzPatrick to forget any negative thoughts.

“You should have heard my answering machine at home,” FitzPatrick said. “It’d say: ‘I’m out and about. Leave a message, but if you have anything negative to say, don’t bother.’ . . . I left the thing on 24-hours a day. I was screening all my calls.”

--He realized how big he is.

FitzPatrick has always had this crazy idea that he’s a normal-sized guy.

“The one thing I’ve got to learn is just how big I am,” he said. “I don’t think of myself as a really big guy. Throughout my career, I’ve had this problem.”

In other words, FitzPatrick wasn’t even utilizing his long arms. Before, he’d let smaller defensive linemen crowd into him, but now he’s extending his arms to keep them away.

So is his roster spot still in danger?

“Everybody’s in danger,” said Dave Levy, the Charger offensive line coach.

But Saunders sounded sure that FitzPatrick will get a long look, even with all that long hair.

“Now, everything’s like second-nature to me,” FitzPatrick said. “I can just concentrate on knocking people down now, and that’s when you do better. Before, when somebody moved on defense, I was saying, ‘Oh my God. What do I do now?’ I’d be hoping my guard would help me, but the next thing, the ball was snapped and, bammmm! Some guy would smash me right in the nose (giggle).”