SUPER BOWL XXIII : CINCINNATI BENGALS vs. SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS : A STEP AHEAD : Although 49ers’ Craig Isn’t Much of a Dancer, He Has Shown He’s a Rusher to Be Reckoned With

For those of you who have been lost in the woods, Roger Craig will be the running back today who has never done a commercial with his mom, worn his hair in a ponytail or celebrated a touchdown with a shuffle. None of that Ickey stuff.

“I don’t believe in dancing,” Craig said.

Who-who-who? Roger Craig, the plain-wrap San Francisco 49ers back with two first names who is not ever to be confused with the Cincinnati guy whose first name might easily have been inspired by the touch of a hand under a theater seat.

Not that rookie Ickey Woods of the Bengals isn’t cute or hasn’t been a breath of fresh air in a not-so-super-week. But it seems almost funny that Craig should be the second most-talked-about runner in Super Bowl XXIII.

When Craig tells you he worked hard for this moment, you need look no farther than an assortment of welts, bruises and burns covering a body that was long ago lent out as a human projectile, all for the sake of a few super days such as this.

A spinal cord is a terrible thing to waste, but Craig has given willingly of his for a Super Bowl Sunday. That is one reason why chiropractor Nick Athens has to snap, crackle and pop Craig’s vertebrae back into place every week.

“Your spine is very important,” Craig was saying last week, “You get it knocked out of alignment every game. You have to treat your body like a car. You get your tuneups and wheel alignments.”

Off the field, Craig cruises in a Mercedes-Benz. On it, he is one, driving his knees high like pistons on his weekly drag races through defensive lines.

When he tells you he will run harder and longer and better than any running back alive to meet his objectives, you need only grab a film canister marked Oct. 16, 1988, a date that earned Roger Craig a spot on Hollywood’s run of fame.

Los Angeles Rams defenders, with tongues hanging like dogs, chased helplessly through the swelter and smog of Anaheim Stadium but never could quite sink their teeth into the 49ers’ Roger Rabbit.

After the game, Mark Jerue of the Rams was so dehydrated that team doctors had to pack him in ice as Jerue’s heart rate raced dangerously toward 200 beats a minute. Jerue’s skin literally boiled--in the manner that a crankcase would without oil--leaving blisters on his face and body. Shawn Miller needed an intravenous injection to revive him. Linebacker Carl Ekern wobbled slowly toward the shower, looking like a man recently rescued from a death march.

Craig showered and shaved and left Anaheim with a career-high 190 yards, 46 of those on one incredible rampage through the Ram secondary.

“It’s 100 degrees, and you know guys are fatigued,” Craig said last week. “Your body is saying, ‘I can’t run anymore,’ you’re sluggish. That’s the mental part. That’s when you revert back and say, ‘I trained so hard in the off-season, I ran those hills, there’s no way I should be tired.’ That’s what carries you on.

“When the game gets longer, I get stronger, and I feel it. It was hot for our game in Phoenix (Nov. 6), and (receiver) Roy Green came up to me and said, ‘Slow down, everybody else is tired!’ I really liked that.”

When Craig says he craves success and perfection more than most, and you brush it off as more Super Bowl lip service, he need only take you figuratively to the hills south of San Francisco, where he trains on an 8-mile horse trail that rises from sea level to 2,000 feet.

As a youth in Davenport, Iowa, Craig had watched with some interest the grueling regimen of Walter Payton, the former Chicago Bears tailback who would churn up mountainsides for the benefit of no one except himself. No lights, or cameras, or crowds. Just Payton and pain.

“I take so much pounding out there, you have to surpass the physical aspect,” Craig said. “You have to use mental concentration. And that’s off-season training. Walter Payton is the prime example of that. I pattern myself after him, and I talk to him quite a bit about how to be mentally prepared every time I step out onto the field.”

Craig, naturally, added his own ghoulish twists, just to set his workout apart.

“It’s totally different from Payton’s,” he said. “This is like an endurance, like a marathon. I see a lot of marathon runners run these hills. It kind of elevates up like 2 or 3 thousand feet. It’s definitely a torture.”

For Payton and Craig, the games of November and December are won in the hills during March and April. Several 49er teammates have started training sessions with Craig, but few have ever finished. Players don’t even lie about it.

“No,” fullback Tom Rathman said flatly when asked if he could stay with Craig.

Craig thinks he has it all figured out.

“If you want to be the best, you have to work to be the best,” he said. “You have to push your body to the limit, until you know who you are as an athlete.

“What’s the limit? It’s hard. You just have to run until you can’t run anymore, where you say, ‘OK, that’s enough.’

“I’ve had guys train with me that can’t finish, but some guys have been consistent with me: (cornerback) Eric Wright, (linebacker) Keena Turner. I think we got Jerry Rice on the hill one time and he couldn’t deal with it. And Tom Rathman, and he couldn’t deal with it.”

See?

Ickey Woods is a fine running back, a rookie with power moves and a catchy little dance step. But Roger Craig was, in the minds of most, the National Football League’s most valuable player in 1988, when he rushed for 1,502 yards and led the NFC in total yards with 2,036.

Eric Dickerson is faster, Herschel Walker is stronger, Gary Anderson is quicker. But as a total package, Craig might well be the best. Craig, who in 1985 became the only NFL back to gain 1,000 yards rushing and receiving in the same season, also set a running back reception record with 92 catches that year.

“He is the consummate running back in football, Roger is,” 49er Coach Bill Walsh said.

Roger is. He separated a hip in the third game of the 1986 season against the Miami Dolphins, yet missed only 1 game.

“I was hurt bad enough where I could have sat out that season,” said Craig, who rushed for 830 yards that season. “It was frustrating to me, because I wasn’t running like I normally run. I couldn’t lift my knees up.

“There were all these quotes in the paper saying that I had lost a step. That hurt, because I didn’t want to reveal I was hurt. I just took all the criticism, I fought through it, and I think it made me a stronger person.”

Of course, no one knows what really drives Craig with his obsessions, though he has spent his life climbing out of the shadows of others. He spent most of his career at Nebraska backing up Mike Rozier, a Heisman Trophy winner.

And Craig was hardly the most coveted runner to emerge from the 1983 draft. Five others were taken before he was--Dickerson, Curt Warner, Michael Haddix, James Jones and Gary Anderson.

League experts thought that 48 players were better, and Craig lasted clear to the end of Round 2.

In San Francisco, he was asked to move to fullback until Wendell Tyler retired. Craig said yes, a concession you might not have expected from, say, Dickerson.

The league hardly knew Craig was playing out of position, though. He led the 49ers in total yardage as a rookie and burst into the national spotlight after scoring 3 touchdowns in Super Bowl XIX.

“No one really knew who I was,” Craig said. “That’s where I got all my publicity, as far as being in the shadows of Wendell Tyler, and Mike Rozier in college. I think it really put me in the right frame of mind.”

Inside, though, Craig was longing to return to tailback, and he openly lobbied in 1986 when Walsh was thinking of drafting a fullback named Rathman from Craig’s alma mater, Nebraska.

“I told Bill he was a hard worker and a devastating blocker,” Craig said. “And that he could definitely help our system out. And that I would love to go back to halfback someday. And here we are. I think it’s very seldom you see two guys from the same college starting in the same backfield.”

Rathman and Craig have become quite a team.

“He really loves blocking linebackers, no lie,” Craig said. “He hurts some of our linebackers in practice. We have to say, ‘Slow down, Tom.’ . . . I love being his running mate.”

For that thrill, Craig becomes Roger Ramjet on Sundays and hands his body over to science during the week. Jennie Winters, Craig’s masseuse, kneads his muscles during her thrice-weekly visits to his home in San Carlos. Her technique might be described as “bad to the bone,” pressing painfully into Craig’s muscle fiber.

At least twice weekly, chiropractor Athens treats Craig’s skeleton as if it were Gumby, twisting and popping his torso until hip bones are reconnected with back bones.

Craig got his chiropractic ideas from his mother, who has used the technique for 20 years to help relieve an asthmatic condition. And Davenport, Iowa, Craig’s hometown, just happens to be one of the world’s hotbeds for chiropractors.

Craig endures so much pain during the week that Sunday’s game, much like his back, becomes a snap. “You have to push your body to the limit, where you can hardly stand up,” Craig said. “Every day you have to go farther. When you build that character in yourself, when you play the games, you just have fun. I already went through all the pain.”

Pain becomes a matter of degrees, like hitting yourself in the foot with a hammer to take your mind off a toothache or, maybe, an Ickey Shuffle.