Schroeder Tried to Shoulder Too Much

The renovation of Jay Schroeder appears complete, from hair to toe. Somehow, wife Debbie steered him to a barber shop, where they snipped away the split-ends and uncovered a smile.

The new Schroeder aura has not gone unnoticed at Redskin Park, where he seems quite welcome once again, particularly in the weight room. As minicamp unfolds this week, the scales will show him slimmer, some 17 pounds lighter than when last seen with that 1987 chip on his shoulder.

Since then, the chip has fallen off, though the shoulder fortunately has not. At Redskin Park last week, he revealed his right shoulder separated twice last season, the first time in the opener against the Philadelphia Eagles--which everybody knew about--but also in a December game at RFK Stadium against Dallas. At halftime, he remembers trainer Bubba Tyer saying, “You really shouldn’t play.” And he recalls answering, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t, but I’m going to.”

If his passes fluttered, maybe they had every right to, because he began almost every play last year with the fear of his shoulder popping loose. The zip of his 1986 spirals dissipated, and not only was he overthrowing, but he was overweight. Doug Williams came to the rescue, and the rest is history, which is exactly where Schroeder would like 1987 to stay.

It’s not meant as a warning to Williams or Mark Rypien, but Schroeder now says he’s healthier and “hungrier” than in 1984, when he originally left baseball for quarterbacking. And it shows, primarily in his demeanor, which so worried Redskins’ management a month ago that Schroeder apparently fell below Rypien to third string and seemed to be nothing more than trade bait. At that time, the word most commonly used to describe him was “immature” or “childish,” but his act is so together now that one high-up Redskins official said the other day, “Sometimes your best trades are the ones you didn’t make.”

He is not out of the woods yet, of course, because minicamp is only his first opportunity to reconvene with teammates and coaches and mend his wrongs of 1987. Or were they wrongs? To some of his teammates and coaches he seemed aloof and arrogant much of the time after his benching on Nov. 15. Many teammates already were resenting him following his role in the players’ strike, and when he withdrew emotionally from them following the benching, he made more enemies than he knew.

As for Coach Joe Gibbs, the conversations between the two grew more terse, and even now, Schroeder raises the question as to whether they’ll be fine and dandy when working together again.

Truth be known, however, Schroeder also wasn’t talking much last year to Debbie, who he said didn’t know how badly he was injured for about a month and only suspected it when he began propping his right arm on two pillows every night as he slept. He said he hid the severity of the injury from her, from Tyer and from the coaches.

He said it was not aloofness at all, but an inward pride that made him go it alone. “I’d never been hurt before,” he said. And the folded arms and perpetual pout were products of his confusion and regret.

“People get a misconception of how you are, OK?,” he said. “I was being Jay Schroeder, OK? I want to play. If I don’t get that opportunity, I’ll be upset, OK? I’m not going to be happy standing there, OK? I don’t think anybody on the field is happy standing there.

“I’m sure even Doug last year at the beginning wanted to play. He wanted to be traded. Well, he ended up playing well, and now the roles are just reversed. It’s no different.”

Most young adults--at 26, that’s what Schroeder is--would turn to a girlfriend or a wife or a parent for help, but he turned to no one.

“I get real quiet,” he said. “I just deal with it by myself. I’ve always been that way. I’ve never been one to be in a big group of people or anything like that.”

Said Debbie: “Jay kept it inward. That’s how I’d explain it. You knew he was upset, but he didn’t know how to communicate it. . . . The hardest part is that we’re so young. We’re only 26. That’s a lot to be thrown upon us at such a young age. That’s why we can’t talk about it with people, especially with people our age. They can’t really relate to what we go through.”

At one point, Schroeder opened up to Debbie, but to no one else. He remembers laying in bed at night, the arm propped up, worrying.

“The only thing I really worried about was how sore was the shoulder going to be, how much was I going to be able to do the next day,” he said. “Because last year depended on what I could do every day. And I struggled a lot then. That weighed in the coaches’ minds (when they eventually benched him.) They’d see you out there struggling, and then go, ‘No way he can play.’ ”

With the injury, it became common in practice last year for Schroeder to overthrow the most simple out pattern three times straight. He had ballboys scurrying every which way. He said it was his job to play and, of course, if he didn’t play, Williams might never have given him the chance to get on the field. Before that Dallas game, he had just won the job back from Williams. Of course he wasn’t going to come out.

“I’d come in after practice, and Bubba would look at my shoulder, and I shouldn’t have been out there,” he said. “But if I didn’t practice during the week, you know, you just have to know the coach, Coach Gibbs. If you don’t work during the week, he doesn’t like to throw you in there during the game. So you’ve got to work.

“I’d go home and have my arm wrapped in ice all night, and things like that, and I’d come back the next day and sit in the whirlpool and try to get it warm and go out and practice . . . There were certain things I knew I couldn’t do as well as I wanted to. You get hesitant at zipping the ball 20 yards downfield. At the end of the year, I was going to have to put a little arc on it to get it there. . . . But that’s all behind me now. I’ve come out the last couple days and been zipping the ball. Now, I can go back in and say, ‘Hey, if a guy’s step for step, I can still get it in there.’ ”

Tyer confirms Schroeder re-injured himself against Dallas, so this is no full-blown excuse for his 48.3 completion percentage and 10 interceptions. But whatever it was, it cost Schroeder this football team and perhaps this city. Williams currently is owner of both, and it must hurt Schroeder because he remembers a night at RFK in 1985 when Joe Theismann broke a leg and Schroeder then broke the New York Giants. Afterward, he remembers it taking him an hour to reach his car at 1:30 a.m.

“There were probably 10,000 people in the parking lot,” he said, “And we were thinking to ourselves, ‘Don’t these people have to go to work tomorrow?’ ”

Nowadays, a common bumper sticker here is, “I root for Washington, and I like Doug,” and Schroeder figures that the only way to see some “I like Jay” stickers is if he throws a touchdown or two or 20.

As for his teammates, he said, “I have to come out and prove myself all over, and that’s what I plan to do. If I play well and do the things I’m capable of, I can get them back.”

During the strike, many teammates accused him of being a “leak” to Gibbs, which is ironic considering the Gibbs-Schroeder relationship now. As assistant player representative, Schroeder took some stands--mainly he hated the strike. He said he asked them to cross the picket line as a group against union wishes, and some players felt he held the union in too little esteem.

“I think the strike hurt me (among teammates),” he said. And he adds that he took “a lot of heat” about being a leak to Gibbs.

“Everybody said I was calling him every day,” he said. “I didn’t. I tried to organize workouts, and people said I was calling him and telling him who was there and who wasn’t.”

Nowadays, Gibbs and Schroeder are on speaking terms, but apparently not on terms of endearment. They have had two meetings, where Schroeder apparently asked twice to be traded, and clearly no resolution between the two was made, at least to hear Schroeder talk.

“We got some things out, aired some things out,” Schroeder said. “We’ll go from there. . . . We gave our opinions.”

Naturally, Schroeder wasn’t traded--sources indicated General Manager Bobby Beathard had more qualms about the trade than Gibbs--and his spirits have been high ever since. Apparently, he was charmed the Redskins wanted so much in return for him, more than two No. 1 draft picks.

“It’s nice to know you’re wanted,” Schroeder said.

To a man, his teammates say keeping Schroeder was the correct move, the injury-riddled Williams being one of them. “No one thought Jay would go down the first day (of 1987),” Williams said. “It’s always good to have insurance.”

On the other hand, Williams said he “can’t feel sorry” for Schroeder just because his shoulder popped out a couple times and he got benched.

“You want my perspective?” Williams said last week. “Well, Jay, first of all, was fortunate to be with a team like the Washington Redskins, a team with a lot of talent around him. He never faced adversity until this last year. . . . But I don’t really call this adversity. At that age, making that money ($900,000)? That’s not adversity, that should be a cakewalk. If I had that type of adversity . . .

“He didn’t have to fight for five years in Tampa. . . . This is a gold mine for a young quarterback to step into. . . . I’d hate to even think what it had been like if I’d walked into a situation like the Washington Redskins my rookie year. It hurts me just to wonder. . . . You can’t pick a better team to be the future of than the Washington Redskins. I wish I was 26, 27 years old now. Instead of looking 2-3 years down the road, I’d be looking 10 years down the road.”

Schroeder agrees he never lost a wife as Williams did, but said he’s faced his own little adversity and conquered it, too. And he’s not looking 10 years down the road; he’s looking a couple months up the road to Carlisle, Pa., and training camp..

“I just want a shot,” he said. “If (Gibbs) gives me a shot, we’ll see what happens.”