He Lightens Up to Play the Heavy : Raiders Want Townsend to Slim Down, Be a Monster Linebacker

Potato skins.

With melted cheese and bacon, their outsides oiled and glistening. He can taste them in his sleep.

That schooner of sour cream stands by, awaiting his pleasure. The memory wafts into his living room at 11 at night and stirs him off his couch. Marie Callender’s is closed, but Carol’s across the street is open all night.

Voila! A sleek defensive-end-slated-to-turn-linebacker, the sack champion of the American Football Conference, reports, not at his usual 247 pounds, but at 274.

This is not a transposition of numbers. This is your off-season, Greg Townsend.

The Raiders were going to turn him into their Lawrence Taylor, but he decided to go the way of William Perry.

Someone recently joked about checking his endorsement possibilities. Tom Lasorda might have sewn up Ultra Slim-Fast, but this is Southern California. Imagine the possibilities.

“Jenny Craig?” Townsend suggests, laughing.

“Have you checked liposuction?” he is asked.

“Yeah,” Townsend says. “But I heard bad things about it too.”

Few Raiders can take a joke as Townsend can, even if it’s on him. And even if there’s a price to pay.

The price here is steep, but it’s working. There has been a run on the raw cauliflower and broccoli at the training table. There’s a little hill of them in front of Townsend each night, plus another plate for some tasty perch or haddock.

“They’re going to fine me $50 a pound,” Townsend says. “Fifty dollars a pound. That’s every day that you’re overweight after Aug. 7.

“I’m trying to get down to 255 before that time if I can. I’m just doing the best I can. Twenty pounds over--that’s $1,000. That’s every day.”

Dinner rolls.

White, puffy, soft, like little clouds that melted in his mouth. He ate a hundred or so on his postseason vacation in Jamaica in February . . . and showed up at mini-camp, where he was supposed to learn a new position at which he’d be expected to utilize his quickness, at 265.

They told him to get it off, but he couldn’t.

“Dieting was harder than I expected,” he says. “I even tried Herbalife. I tried my own thing, eating fruit three days out of the week and salads every day. It’s tough. It’s tougher than you think.

“A lot of people noticed that I was a little oversized. The coaches were a little disappointed. They could tell, the way I ran the 40 and the way I looked, that I didn’t work out this (off-)season. That’s why they’re sticking it to me. Maybe if they see a big drop, they’ll cut me some slack.

“What do I miss? Potato skins. One day me and the wife went to Marie Callender’s. We split an order of potato skins. We had a sandwich and the lady came back. You know, they’re known for their pies. The lady said, ‘Do you want any pie?’ I said, ‘No, I want another order of potato skins.’

“I became hooked. I ate them every other day. If I didn’t eat it for lunch or a midday snack, I would definitely get one for late night. Carol’s stays open 24 hours and that was just across the street from my house.

“First it was dinner rolls, now potato skins. Why can’t I get hooked on celery and carrots? Brussels sprouts?”

This is not a comedy routine. Really. Until this off-season, Townsend had never been able to gain weight before, though he wanted to and tried to.

Why now?

It’s no mystery.

Before camp a year ago, he tested positive for marijuana for the second time and was suspended for a month. He later acknowledged having smoked it daily.

When he returned, the normally cheerful Townsend felt the world staring at him, and it drove him to new heights.

“I did feel a lot of pressure,” he says. “I believe, if I had just come out of the tunnel and tripped over my shoestrings, people would have said things concerning the marijuana. You don’t want people to stick things over your head, so you’re watching everything you do, everything you say. Even when you’re sitting there, getting dressed, you try and do things like, ‘Does this make sense?’

“I figured I had a lot to prove to people. You know, you don’t want people to stick things on your forehead: ‘He was better when he smoked weed’ or something like that. I tried to do better as a sober person and I’ll tell you, I really, really felt good about myself after each and every game.

“You know, I’d been smoking since ’73 and there it was in ‘88, 15 years later, snatched away.”

But changing the habits of a lifetime is an ongoing challenge, as Townsend was about to learn.

Relieved at the season’s end, with all the rules and tests and weigh-ins over, he found he was hungry all the time. At first, he just enjoyed it. When he tried to stop, he realized it wasn’t going to be easy.

After a while, he figured out that he had just switched dependencies and would have to battle anew.

“It was like taking candy from a baby, pretty much,” Townsend says. “I think what (stopping smoking) did, it gave me a new vice. Eating became a new vice.

“I used to smoke and then work out. I didn’t have anything to smoke in the off-season and I didn’t work out. I couldn’t motivate myself to work out and I was getting a little discouraged.

“I had to go somewhere where I knew I had to work out. This is the place. That’s why I’m glad I’m back. No choice. No options.

“I called the wife the other night and I told here about the new system of fines. She said, ‘Well, you conquered one hurdle last year, there’s nothing to this one.’ You semi-know that, but it’s just nice to hear it from people, sometimes.

“Both times, I’ll benefit from it. I didn’t need to smoke weed. As a man you’re supposed to put those childish things away. Same thing about losing weight. I’m going to benefit from that. Of course, the Raiders will, but I will first.”

At the end of his first week in camp, he was down to 267.

Pass the cauliflower there, will you Moose?

Raider Notes

The word on the Raiders is don’t hold your breath waiting for a Tony Mandarich deal. They would have to give up Tim Brown, but Brown says he has been told by personnel director Ron Wolf that he isn’t going anywhere. Al Davis did call Green Bay before camp opened and proposed some names, but no talks have been held since. . . . The rumor of a three-way deal with Dallas? A Raider official says the whole thing was a Cowboy pipe dream, which would give them a way to move Steve Walsh and clear their glut of rookie quarterbacks. . . . The Raiders will hold their annual family day open house Saturday morning at 10:30 at Oxnard High School. Dionne Warwick will participate in festivities, along with Raider players and coaches. . . . Also, the Raiders are putting individual tickets on sale today, two weeks earlier than usual.