What Worries Chargers Is Boz’s Act on the Field
The Boz is coming to town. Max Headroom’s punk brother. Gag us with a spoon. Right?
The word association on this guy is pretty straightforward: Steroids. Rattails. Posters. Peroxide. Earrings. Shades. Commercials. And bile.
The Boz is all about turbo-powered, stereophonic, cassette-driven, hi-tech, new wave, rad gall, mad ball, bad taste. Right?
What you see is what you get. And what you get leaves his name on the tip of your tongue and a bad taste stuck to the roof of your mouth.
Brian Bosworth. Left inside linebacker. Seattle Seahawks.
The Boz.
The American-sports-pop-cinema-music-video-culture-machine keeps cranking these guys out. Schnozz. Cooz. Cos. The Fonz. Tooz. To name a select few.
And The Boz.
Some of those guys are lovable. Some laughable. Bosworth is supposed to be detestable--every parent’s worst living nightmare.
So why did a recent and random cross-sampling of Chargers turn up an almost unanimous grudging admiration?
If Bosworth showed up at Joe Phillips’ front door to take his daughter out on a date, here’s what would happen: “I’d tell her what I’d tell her about anybody,” Phillips says. “That creep touches you, and I’ll break his flipping neck.”
Phillips is a defensive lineman for the Chargers, who play Bosworth’s Seahawks Sunday at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium in their home opener. Phillips is lucky he doesn’t have any daughters within 20 years of Bosworth.
Here’s the catch: Phillips doesn’t think Bosworth is such a bad chap after all. Neither does Charger defensive end Lee Williams. Or linebacker Keith Browner. Or right guard Dennis McKnight, the Charger who will most often be responsible for blocking Bosworth Sunday.
--Phillips: “I think Brian Bosworth is a guy with a pretty good publicist. There are always going to be guys, I guess, that are either lucky enough, probably intelligent enough, to capitalize on that element of football that likes those flashy sort of guys.”
--Browner: “I think he has taken good advantage of his opportunity. He’s arrogant. But he backs it up when he plays. If you play linebacker, that’s the way you’ve got to be--you have to have people hate you.”
--Williams: “He may even be classified as a maverick. But what does that mean? Does that mean he’s a bad guy? It’s a free country. You can do what you want to do. On Sunday, it’s the same deal. You can’t see the haircut and the earring when he’s got his helmet on.”
--McKnight: “I don’t care what a guy I play against does off the field. Bosworth’s reputation and gimmick have made him a lot of money. He’s sure not going to have to work as hard the rest of his life as I am.”
“Hey, I’d take advantage of the same thing,” Phillips adds. “But then again, is it in your personality to be a creep all the time? Or to be Brian Bosworth all the time? I guess it doesn’t bother him.”
And in a year, or two, or three, somebody else will come along to muscle Bosworth off his perch atop the romantic pantheon of pro football’s beery, rowdy, mythic anti-establishmentarians. There will always be a Bobby Layne, an Alex Karras, a Paul Hornung, a Joe Don Looney, a Lyle Alzado, a Jim McMahon.
More recently, Phillips says, “it’s gone from Mark Gastineau and his long hair and his dances to Brian Bosworth and his short hair and his image and his book and all that stuff.”
The name of the book, released this summer, is: “The Boz: Confessions of a Modern Anti-Hero.” In it, Bosworth says things that will make you laugh out loud no matter what you think of him. He calls toothy Denver quarterback John Elway “Mr. Ed.” He describes NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle as having a face that makes him look like “a turtle without the shell.”
But Bosworth also talks openly about college teammates at Oklahoma free-basing cocaine on game days and about steroids being passed out like aspirin in the locker room. He claims teammate Buster Rhymes once stopped a snowball fight by firing 150 rounds from an Uzi machine gun over the heads of teammates.
Predictably, Bosworth’s former Oklahoma teammates wanted to know why The New York Times best-seller list categorized the book as “non-fiction,” and said as much recently in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“I think Brian has just sold out,” former Oklahoma kicker Tim Lashar said. “He’s writing sensationalistic type stuff just for a buck. And I don’t care if it’s Brian Bosworth or anybody. It just turns my stomach.”
“I think Brian’s the type who will say anything for money, even cut down on his friends.” said former Oklahoma linebacker Dante Jones, now a Chicago Bear.
Former Charger offensive lineman Sam Claphan makes his off-season home in Norman, Okla. He attended school there. And although he never played on the same team with Bosworth, he still works out at the team’s facilities in the off-season.
“(Bosworth) should check himself out in the mirror first,” Claphan said. “He should ask himself if he’s being truthful or just trying to sell a book. I guarantee what he’s saying is totally untrue.”
But there’s no arguing with the truth of Bosworth’s improvement on the field. And that’s what concerns the Chargers this week.
“He’s fast, he’s strong, he’s big, and he’s only going to get better,” McKnight says.
As a rookie in 1987, Bosworth finished second on the team in tackles with 81 and third in sacks with four. The Seahawks rewarded him by moving him from weak (right) inside linebacker to strong (left) inside linebacker--a position that puts him more in the flow of opposing offenses.
McKnight says the Seahawks are positioning their linebackers in a deeper set this year, which gives Bosworth the added advantage of building a bigger head of steam on his way to the point of attack. After two games, Bosworth leads the undefeated Seahawks with 12 tackles.
He has refused virtually all print interviews since the book came out, choosing to talk only on game days in the locker room. But he has told at least one television interviewer that he is “misunderstood.”
Coming out of college, Bosworth said he didn’t want to live and play football in Seattle. In July, he announced he was building a house in the Seattle area.
“This is my home, where my roots are going down,” he said. “Those coaches are my father figures, and the players are my brothers.”
It is interesting to note that the “Personal” section under Bosworth’s name in the Seattle press guide is one of the shortest on the team.
By way of comparison, the “Personal” portions of the Charger press guide are where you will find out that McKnight played a thug in a movie filmed in the off-season with actor Mark Harmon; or where you will find out Williams is an avid fisherman; or where you might be surprised to learn that former 340-pound Charger offensive lineman Curtis Rouse’s nickname is “Boo-Boo.”
Under Bosworth in the Seahawk guide it just reads: “Attended MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, where he was a member of the National Honor Society. Has worked with Children’s Hospital in Seattle.”
Bosworth once criticized major league baseball players for not being good athletes. To which Houston pitcher Charlie Kerfeld responded by saying: “I’d like to see him get his Mohawk butt up to the plate and try to hit my fastball.”
But McKnight says he can identify with Bosworth in a way. When McKnight grew his hair long in high school, his father made him shave his head. McKnight was one of the first players in the NFL with a pony tail. He was one of the first in the league to wear an earring. He has three tattoos and wouldn’t bat an eye if Bosworth showed up at his front door to pick his daughter up for a date.
“It’s what’s inside that counts,” McKnight says. “I don’t have a status quo appearance myself. If I got to know him and knew him inside, I wouldn’t care what he looked like as long as he treated her good, and they were happy.”
Former Oklahoma teammate Caesar Rentie says there are two Brian Bosworths.
“It was kind of weird,” Rentie said, “because we’d go to a movie or something and he’d be The Boz, and, after we got to the locker room, he’d be Brian Bosworth. Brian Bosworth is personable. He’s humble. He talks to everybody. The Boz, he’s hidden behind the shades, the different personality, the macho image.”
Like it or not, San Diego, The Boz is coming to town Sunday. Maybe if we’re lucky, Brian Bosworth will show up, too.
Charger Notes
Charger free safety Vencie Glenn has this explanation for why the team has no interceptions this year: ‘They’re not throwing ‘em.” . . . Charger left tackle Gary Kowalski was unable to practice again Thursday but remains “probable” on the team’s injury report. Kowalski has a strained neck. . . Seahawk wide receiver Steve Largent said he has not read Brian Bosworth’s book. “It costs too much,” Largent said. Suggested retail price: $17.95.