Keith Browner Finally Finds a Home With Chargers : After Bouncing Around, Bulking Up, He Takes Advantage of Holdout, Injury to Start at Linebacker

Hours after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers selected USC linebacker Keith Browner with the 30th pick of the 1984 draft, Chicago Bear scout Jim Parmer called it the worst choice of the day. Publicly.

That was just the start of Browner’s NFL troubles.

According to Browner, the Buccaneers would have needed a bathysphere to sink any lower. They were at the bottom of the NFL’s measurable depths. And they needed excuses.

“Baaadddd teams there,” Browner says now. “Losing attitude. I hated going to practice every day. It was work. Not football. Every day it was just like, ‘Ohhhhh, here we go again.’”

That has all changed . Browner starts at outside linebacker for the Chargers. Their bad run of luck -- Chip Banks’ holdout and Billy Ray Smith’s nagging calf injury -- have turned out to be Browner’s good fortune. He was second on the team in tackles with six Sunday in the Chargers’ opening-day loss to the Raiders, and it appears he has found a home.

That counts for a lot. The Warren, Ohio, home he grew up in has produced four NFL players. Older brother Ross won the Outland Trophy at Notre Dame, older brother Jim played defensive back for the Bengals. And older brother Joey, a safety for the Vikings, has played in the past three Pro Bowls.

But the Buccaneers won just 10 games in Keith Browner’s three seasons with the team. In 1986, his last season there, he spent three days on the suspended list.

Parmer and a lot of other people had gotten word that Browner was inconsistent and didn’t hustle. The Tampa Bay coaches, according to Browner, also fixed on Browner’s college reputation.

“They expected me to perform and handle the pressure better than small college players,” he said.

On Feb. 27, 1987, the Buccaneers traded Browner to the 49ers for a sixth-round pick in the 1988 draft. It would get better now, Browner told himself.

It got worse.

The 49ers released Browner on Sept. 7, 1987. Three weeks after that, they signed him as a replacement player. Two weeks after that, they traded him to the Raiders for cash. Twelve days after that, the Raiders placed him in injured reserve with a bad ankle. Two weeks after that, the Raiders tried to release him. But the release was voided because of his injured status and they had to return him to injured reserve. The Raiders waited and released him again Nov. 24. The Chargers signed him as a free agent April 13.

This is not the profile of a successful professional football player. Ross Browner had endured a two-month drug suspension in 1983 for violating the league’s drug policy. And people were beginning to wonder how far the apple had fallen from the tree. The people from United Way did not ask Keith Browner to do a commercial.

“Reputations are hard to beat in this league,” Browner says. “But it just made me want to work harder.”

The Chargers had heard the whispers. They knew why Tampa Bay Coach Leeman Bennett had disciplined Browner. The Buccaneers later explained it as “chronic tardiness.”

“Leeman had wearied of fining him for being late,” said Rick Odioso, the team’s public relations director. “So he suspended him.”

But the Chargers were intrigued about a guy who had come into the league at 235 pounds and had bulked up to 270. Ron Lynn, the Charger defensive coordinator, is nothing if not creative with his limited personnel. Lynn wanted to see if Browner could still move. He would also watch to see if Browner showed up for meetings on time.

“You do some investigating on your own,” Lynn said. “And if the guy’s a flat, bona fide bum and has no redeeming grace or qualities or anything like that, then we weigh that. But by and large, we like to give a guy the benefit of the doubt, wipe the slate clean and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ”

Lynn says the jury will still be out on Browner until the end of the season. “You can’t let early rave reviews go to your head,” he says. “And you can’t let early negative reviews go to your head.”

Fine, Browner says. Just treat me with respect.

In Tampa Bay, he says, the coaches would single out his mistakes on film. They would run them back again and again. He says they didn’t do that when other players messed up. “Just because my name is Browner, was I supposed to make all the plays?” he asks.

In San Francisco, Browner says he later found out the 49ers were just “using me up” during training camp until injured linebacker Milt McColl could return. The Raiders, he says, never gave him a chance. “The Raiders think they have good players. What they have is old players.”

Suddenly Browner was beginning to feel old. He was 14 and in eighth grade when his father died. The patriarch of the Browners had worked 22 years in the steel mills and was 49. “The thing he wanted me to do was be somebody in my life and make sure that I was the best I could be at it,” Browner says.

Keith Browner was an “ancient” 26 by NFL standards and just lucky to have the chance to live up to his father’s expectations. He credits his memory of his father and the support of his wife, Charisse, who has been with him since college, for not allowing him to quit.

The Chargers signed him as a pass rusher, which was where Browner had always wanted to play and why he had put on so much weight. Banks’ absence has left him at linebacker. But he will drop into a three-point stance on certain passing downs and rush the quarterback.

“I’m big enough now that I can stand in there against 300-pounders and not get knocked aside,” Browner says. “And against tight ends, they’re lighter than me now. When I first started at 235, they were pushing me around. Now I’ve got the leverage. It’s fun knowing you can be a force.”

And it’s fun being in a place where so much of the public focus is on the search for a successor to retired quarterback Dan Fouts. Almost unnoticed in the Chargers’ 24-13 loss to the Raiders was a run defense that contained Marcus Allen by limiting him to 88 yards on 28 carries. No other Raider running back carried the ball. After one week, the Charger defense ranks fourth in the conference against the rush.

Browner says the Tampa Bay coaching staff treated him like a dog. And he says he appreciates the fact that because the Charger coaching staff treats him like a human being, he’s willing to work like a dog.

“Whatever they ask me to do,” he says, “I’m going to do it. I’ve finally found this place now, and I don’t want to give it up.”