From the Golden Dome to the Silver and Black : Beuerlein Looks for a 2nd Chance

The apprenticeship of Steve Beuerlein, All-American boy turned Raider, continues with our hero poring over his new playbook, hardly believing his luck.

At Notre Dame, where he was expected to shake down the thunder from the skies, everything seemed to change weekly: The players around him, the coaches’ moods, the coaches themselves. He had three offensive coordinators in four years, which makes the present continuity welcome. The Raiders, of course, have been running the same offense since Moses came down from Mount Sinai with it.

“Steve’s got a great football mind,” said Gerry Faust, Beuerlein’s first Notre Dame coach, from his University of Akron office. “He’ll pick up the concept real well.

“He’s a real leader, a mature kid, and he retains real well. He’s a competitor, I’ll tell you. He’s a tough kid, a gutty kid.”

Between the beginning of their romance, when Faust recruited Beuerlein at Servite High in Anaheim, and the present, there was a little problem. If you were unkind, you might say it was their entire time together, but it really just centered on the ’85 season.

Beuerlein was a promising junior. Faust was a potential goner. Beuerlein was coming off surgery. Faust was going into the last year of his contract.

“My freshman year was great,” Beuerlein said. “I came in and started. We went on a big winning streak. I don’t think I threw an interception for five-six weeks. Same thing as a sophomore. I set a bunch of records. Then I hurt my shoulder. That was the beginning of a lot of problems.”

The Irish were 3-1 and rated No. 17 in Beuerlein’s sophomore year when Miami came up to South Bend and crushed them and him. He came out of the game with a sore right shoulder, finished the season and had it operated on the next spring. When camp opened before his junior year, speculation abounded.

“It was like a Jim McMahon situation,” said Notre Dame publicist John Heisler. “It was August and he hadn’t done much of anything. But Steve was always so positive about everything. You never heard him say a discouraging word.”

According to Beuerlein, Faust heard him say one, all right.

“I wasn’t ready,” Beuerlein said. “He wouldn’t let me redshirt. I was just coming off shoulder surgery and I was about 55-60%. I think I started 9 of the 11 games.

“It got very rocky. A lot of things happened that I didn’t think should have happened. He wanted to succeed so badly and he knew the only way he could succeed was if I performed well. He just didn’t understand I wasn’t ready to play. I was 20 pounds overweight, from not being able to do anything in the off-season.

“I never went crying to the papers, telling them what my problem was. I can do it now because it’s two years later. All that season, I took a lot of criticism from everybody, including Coach Faust. He had to know I was hurting. He also knew he had no other quarterbacks with experience.

“So he took a lot of things out on me, pointing fingers. He didn’t do it in the papers and he didn’t really yell at players but the point is, the team is supposed to be a source of support. It got to be a pretty bad situation.”

“The whole situation got to him. You could see it took a toll in how he aged in the five years. You could tell he was desperate to win.”

Beuerlein’s completion percentage--58% the season before--fell to 50%. The Irish, who had been to bowl games in his first two regular seasons, went 5-6. Faust went to Akron.

“I do know we were very pressed for quarterbacks,” Faust said. “Our other guys were young. We may have felt that even with Steve coming off surgery, he’d be better. That’s a possibility. I don’t know.

“I know this, we felt we needed him back that season. That’s why I went to talk to Dr. (Frank) Jobe, who performed the surgery. The one thing I asked was if he’d be ready for the season. Dr. Jobe said he would be.

“Early in the season, we knew his arm wouldn’t be as strong but we sort of figured it would improve as the year went on. Looking back in retrospect, we’d have been better off letting him sit out.”

By the season’s end, Beuerlein, once the star of his class, was in the nether world of prospects. The new Irish coach, Lou Holtz, couldn’t turn the program around in a year--the Irish went 5-6 again--but he turned Beuerlein back the way he was going when he left Servite: a 60% completion percentage, a 13-7 ratio of touchdowns to interceptions.

“I knew coming into last year, I was projected somewhere between the ninth round and a free agent,” Beuerlein said. “I made a big jump. I couldn’t help but think what might have happened if I’d had one more redshirt year. That year not only didn’t help me, it set me back a ways.”

The Raiders got him in the fourth round. The club on which Ken Stabler had to serve a three-year apprenticeship will serve up no young quarterback before his time, but they’re glad to have him.

Since Beuerlein and Faust are back on good terms and everyone’s employed somewhere, you could say it worked out OK all around.

“When he left, he wrote me a nice note,” Beuerlein said of Faust. “He’s said a lot of good things about me. He’s been quoted in the papers saying he knew Steve Beuerlein could do it, so I appreciate that. It was just a little personality thing he and I had going then but I never felt that I couldn’t talk to him.”

What’s a little misunderstanding? At El Segundo and Akron, worlds are waiting to be won.

Raider Notes

The Raiders cut their return man of the last two seasons, Fulton Walker, plus No. 10 draft pick Mario Perry and free agent safety Collins Hess. Walker had a good ’85 season but an unspectacular ’86. . . . Chris Wood, newly acquired from Canada, is the new No. 1 return man. . . . Henry Lawrence, scratched in the right eye in Sunday’s practice, needed 27 stitches. He’ll be out two or three weeks. Lawrence, the long-time right tackle, lost his job late last season. There have been reports that he had been asked to consider retiring. . . . Linden King suffered a broken nose in Sunday’s practice and didn’t work Monday. Howie Long has missed two days with back spasms. . . . Ron Fellows, acquired from the Dallas Cowboys for Rod Barksdale, reported. A three-year starter, he’ll back up Mike Haynes.