For Non-Kingpin, Esiason Will Do in This Situation

Boomer Esiason has long had this theory that certain quarterbacks in the National Football League are untouchable -- “kingpins,” he calls them. He has operated under the assumption that Joe Montana, Dan Marino and John Elway have done so much that their status will be virtually unquestioned.

Well, Elway and Marino are well into the offseason and Montana is fighting every week to keep his starting job. It’s Esiason, not one of the kingpins, whose passing rating for the Cincinnati Bengals led the National Football League from Week 1 through the season finale. It’s Esiason, not one of the kingpins, who threw twice as many touchdown passes as interceptions. It’s Esiason whom the Associated Press picked as the NFL’s most valuable player.

Reminded of all this in a telephone conversation this week, Esiason interrupted and said, “Wait a minute, those guys are kingpins and they should be. Guys like me, Warren Moon and Jim Everett, we’re trying to achieve that status. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I want that status because I’m the type of guy who needs the challenge of trying to get there. I need the incentive. Always.

“If I reached the top, I might just retire. It would be very hard for me to come back after that.”

Those who know him scoff at the thought, but agree with the point he makes about himself and what drives him. He has always been at his best when someone has told him he’s not that good.

Just when it looked as though Jerry Claiborne, then the Maryland coach, was about to exclude Esiason from his plans in 1981, Esiason unexpectedly won the starting job and made himself a professional prospect. He was so angry at being passed over in the first round of the 1984 draft he vowed to show every club in the league how badly they had been mistaken. And since last season, his worst, when many people in Cincinnati tried to run him out of town, Esiason has been almost obsessed with showing them how wrong they were.

With that thought waking him up almost every morning, Esiason has had a kingpin season.

“His biggest development has been that he’s made great decisions,” his coach, Sam Wyche, said. “He’s understanding defenses, not just plays but entire defenses. And he’s using that knowledge, and plugging in his plays.”

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It’s impossible to discuss any part of Esiason’s success this season without understanding what he went through a season ago, when the Bengals lost 11 of 15 games, some under bizarre circumstances in the final minutes.

One would think Esiason would have built up some good will in Cincinnati; he threw 27 touchdowns to only 12 interceptions in his first full season, 1985. The next year, with the retirement of Kenny Anderson, Esiason came back with 24 touchdown passes to 12 interceptions. But in 1987, with the team in a shambles following the NFL players strike, Esiason threw 16 touchdowns and 19 interceptions.

On a radio sports talk show, a caller actually wished “deformed children” on Esiason and his wife Cheryl, who are childless. In the northern Kentucky community where the couple designed their 8,000-square-foot dream house, certain neighbors would blow their horns when they drove by after a Bengals loss.

It got to be so much that Esiason and Cheryl packed and left for more than four months. Over dinner one night in Phoenix, he said, he told team president Paul Brown and son Mike, the general manager, that a trade might be best for all concerned. “There was a time, unquestionably, when I wanted out of here,” he said.

Esiason, a Long Island native, would have liked to be traded for Jay Schroeder or Ken O’Brien or Phil Simms; anywhere back east. Paul Brown said no way.

It was probably a blessing for Esiason, because he has always addressed problems, not run from them. So, he mended fences, first with Wyche and then with Paul and Mike Brown.

“Sam and I had a stormy relationship, but it only boiled over twice,” he said. “It was better to have him as an ally than as an enemy. And I couldn’t leave after that kind of season. During that breakfast (with Wyche and the two Browns) I just gave them a reconfirmation of my coming back with a vengeance.”

Wyche isn’t sure “stormy” is the word for their relationship. “I get mad with my wife more than I get mad with Boomer,” he said. “You’re not going to always walk away with your arms around each other. You’re going to have to battle through the season to get the best results you can.”

Getting the confidence of the team was relatively easy for Esiason. He had done that during the strike. As the Bengals’ union representative, he had told the players he didn’t believe in this particular strike, largely because he wasn’t certain the membership at large was sufficiently committed to it.

Even so, when the Bengals voted to strike, Esiason was out front. He handed out about $300,000 (25 percent of his salary) in loans to players who needed money, a teammate said. And when the replacement team attempted to come into the practice facility, Esiason sat on the ground in front of the bus. Several Cincinnati players have said that if Esiason had some detractors before that episode, he didn’t have any afterward.

“I knew he’d come back from all that, because he’s done best when challenged,” college roommate Jess Atkinson said. “I wouldn’t call this season sweet revenge for him. But let’s face it, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned about Boomer, it’s that Boomer loves to be right. What Boomer wants, Boomer gets.

“I really believe if he makes it to the Super Bowl he’ll have one of those Doug Williams games. He’s at his best when he, for whatever reason, feels he has to prove a point.”

Atkinson and Esiason and two others shared a room at the University of Maryland, and all four have achieved a dream of playing professional athletics. Atkinson, a kicker for several NFL teams, earned his Super Bowl ring last year with the Washington Redskins. Frank Reich is the backup to Jim Kelly at Buffalo, the Bengals’ AFC championship opponent Sunday in Cincinnati. And Alan Sadler, a fireballing pitcher in the minor leagues, may get his shot at the big time this spring.

In the spring of 1984 they were all sitting in the room watching television and waiting for a phone call from an NFL team, telling Esiason he had been its first choice in the draft.

It didn’t come. Offensive lineman Ron Solt and defensive lineman Pete Koch, Maryland teammates, went ahead of him even though he had been rated higher.

Esiason has been through any number of theories on why he wasn’t taken in the first round. But he knows it didn’t help that he had suffered a separated shoulder in the Citrus Bowl the previous December, and hadn’t thrown the ball at all until the pre-draft NFL scouting combine workout in New Orleans.

“My passes were flying all over the Superdome,” he said. “That might have scared people off, too.”

Atkinson said he thinks it’s the best thing that could have happened to Esiason: “He takes everything so personally. With the draft thing, the team not winning last year, the strike, he just takes it all personally.

“There was no better way to make him hungry and focused than for 28 teams to overlook him in the first round. After that, there was no way he was just going to be satisfied playing a few years in the league. All the teams that he wanted to play for who passed on him, he won’t forget. Honestly. And I guess that’s okay, because it’s served him well, real well.”

This season, Esiason outplayed all his contemporaries. In fact, he’s outplayed most of them three of the last four seasons.

In 1988 he was one of only four quarterbacks in the league to have a 2-to-1 ratio in touchdowns to interceptions (Dave Krieg, Moon and Ken O’Brien were the others). His 28 touchdown passes were three fewer than league leader Everett. But Esiason had four fewer interceptions.

Esiason’s 28 touchdowns tied Marino, but Esiason threw 214 fewer passes and nine fewer interceptions. In Elway’s best season, he hit for 19 touchdowns, yielded 13 interceptions and completed 56 percent. Esiason hit 57.5 percent in 1988.

And Esiason’s 9.21 yards per pass thrown is phenomenal. In 1984, when Marino passed for 48 touchdowns his yards per pass was 9.01. Montana’s best is 8.4, Kelly’s 7.5 and Elway’s 7.8.

And Esiason compiled these numbers in a year when the Bengals have two rushers (Ickey Woods and James Brooks) who combined for nearly 2,000 yards.

“The only thing that’s separated him from his kingpins,” Atkinson said, “is that the Bengals had been underachievers, while the other teams had been achievers or overachievers.”

Bob Trumpy, the former Bengal who is now a network analyst, told Newsday, “Never have I seen the success of a team tied to one man like I’ve seen it this season with Boomer. He’s done it with an honest, competitive, feisty verve.”

It also helps that the defense isn’t as porous and that the Bengals have perhaps their best one-two backfield punch ever.

In the playoff victory over the Seahawks last week, Esiason completed only seven of 19 passes. But the 254 rushing yards took the Bengals to a 21-13 victory. Esiason threw so few passes he jokingly referred to himself as Jamelle Holieway. But those who thought he was upset were apparently wrong.

“I remember getting beaten to death throwing for 400 yards against Pittsburgh last year and being booed,” he said. “It would be stupid not to run if we’re gaining seven and eight yards per pop. We were throwing 35 times and losing, now were’re throwing about 24 times a game and winning.”

It’s even become pleasant for him to go home and stay there. The same few people who harassed Esiason and his wife last year are awfully quiet now.

“There are about 150 ‘Boomer’ signs in the neighborhood now,” he said. “I guess things change.”