Palmer Tries to Halt Downward Trend

It would be a good made-for-TV movie: Star running back is runner-up in the Heisman Trophy balloting. Smashes every important school record. But all his marks are stricken from the books when the university finds out he has broken a major rule by accepting money from a notorious sports agent. Achieves a lifelong dream of being drafted by an NFL team in the first round, but the laughter fades to tears when the woman who raised him, his great-grandmother, dies later the same day.

His NFL career starts with a rush of success; stardom can’t be too far away. But when his playing time is cut, he says jokingly, out of acute frustration, that he’ll fix the coach -- get him fired by fumbling a time or two. At the start of his third season, uninjured and presumably at his physical peak, he is waived -- flat-out cut.

An assistant coach who is in on the decision to cut him is the man who recuited him out of high school and coached him for four years in college. The team that calls and offers a future has, as an assistant coach, the man he had joked about trying to get fired less than a year earlier. Less than halfway into the season, the player is traded -- for a 10th-round draft pick to the worst team in many, many years.

It would make a nice bit of TV fiction, except that it’s Paul Palmer’s life, a tangled, barely plausible sequence of events Palmer hopes to unknot very soon.

Asked recently if he realizes just how out of the ordinary all of this is, Palmer, who grew up in Potomac, Md., nodded, managed a faint smile and said: “I’m still trying to catch my breath. These have been two difficult, strange years.”

Palmer is with his third team, the 0-8 Dallas Cowboys. He occasionally gets to be the lead tailback, which is good. But he must run behind an offensive line that couldn’t even spring Herschel Walker when he was with the team.

Palmer started the season with the Detroit Lions, playing primarily on special teams. His position coach there was Frank Gansz, which would seem to defy logic since it was only 11 months ago when both were with the Kansas City Chiefs that Gansz suspended Palmer for joking to teammates that he’d put the ball on the carpet if it would help get Gansz -- the man who was cutting his playing time -- fired.

Lions Coach Wayne Fontes went to Gansz and asked what he thought of signing Palmer, who had been cut at the end of training camp by new Chiefs Coach Marty Schottenheimer and running-backs coach Bruce Arians, Palmer’s coach at Temple.

“Paul might have been surprised, but he was always one of my favorites,” Gansz said. “I know that may sound crazy in light of what happened. What he did hurt me, but I’ve always liked him and I thought he could help this team. I had to (suspend him), but I told him at the time I’m the kind of person who believes in letting bygones be bygones.”

Palmer was thankful for the second chance. Asked to clear up the events leading to his suspension last November for one game, he recalled the frustration over being “taken out on passing downs and having to share rushing downs. I had been late a couple of times for practice, and they got to the point of saying, ‘That’s it.’ Sort of just like I got fed up with not playing as much and said, ‘That’s it.’ It was mounting frustration on both sides.

“There was no intent in the remark, but yet it was a serious remark to say you’d fumble on purpose. I don’t think anybody who knows me took it seriously. But to say something like that, it’s very serious and they had to do something. I put Coach Gansz in an extremely difficult situation.”

And himself. When Palmer came back two weeks later, he fumbled the first two kickoffs he handled. “It’s the most nervous I’ve ever been in my whole athletic life,” he said. “I was shaking. Third time I went out to take the kickoff, I got booed. I was scared to death.”

Palmer thought he would get a fresh chance with Schottenheimer and Arians, but isn’t sure he did. “It didn’t appear, as camp kept going, that they had a lot of faith in me,” he said. “I had led the team in receiving much of (1988) but I found myself being taken out in passing situations.

“It seemed as if they didn’t know how to read me. They didn’t know whether or not I was a troublemaker, had a bad attitude or was a laid-back person. I thought, ‘Maybe I should do extra work to show them I can catch the ball.’ I did that, got my hands beat up bad (from catching too many passes after practice) and made the situation even worse.”

During pre-season the coaches told Palmer to run the ball with a sense of urgency. “And I was told before the final pre-season game that I was getting (to play in just) the fourth quarter. I don’t know too many starting tailbacks who get the fourth quarter of the final pre-season game. A lot of the guys I was in with ended up getting cut. Talk about running with a sense of urgency; I was running for my life.

“I went home that night, told my fiance, Virginia, ‘I just don’t have a good feeling about what’s going on.’ The next day in practice somebody said the magic words, ‘The coach wants to see you.’ And the ironic thing about it was when I got to Schottenheimer’s office, there was this giant depth chart on the wall with all the players’ names. My name was still first string. Then I go to (General Manager) Carl Peterson’s office, and my name is first string on his board too.”

So the Chiefs cut a player who through the first six weeks of the 1988 season led the team in receiving, scoring, rushing and combined yards from scrimmage. “I was about the only starting tailback in the league returning kicks. I did everything they asked me to do,” Palmer said.

(On the day Palmer was cut, Schottenheimer said he had “no doubt” Palmer was an NFL-caliber back and would play again this season. But he also said Palmer needed to run out of an I-formation, which the Chiefs do not use.)

Palmer said he knew he had acquired a “bad rap as a player with a bad attitude” but says he had never complained about playing time or anything else until the ill-timed joke.

As if his growing problems with the Chiefs weren’t enough, it had become public knowledge that Palmer accepted money -- monthly payments and a $5,000 loan -- from agent Norby Walters during his senior year at Temple. Walters and associate Lloyd Bloom were convicted of charges dealing with illegal payments to players.

Palmer was one of 43 players who acknowledged accepting money from Walters, which is regarded as one of the most serious violations of NCAA rules. While players often don’t see it that way, Temple obviously did.

The school voluntarily forfeited all six games it won during Palmer’s senior year, 1986, when he led the nation in rushing (1,866 yards) and all-purpose yards. The only players who have gained more rushing yards than Palmer in NCAA Division I history are Tony Dorsett, Charles White, Herschel Walker, Archie Griffin and George Rogers. They all won Heismans.

The yards, the touchdowns and the 16 school records he set as a senior no longer exist because Temple virtually disowned Palmer and sought to distance itself from him because he accepted the money. Just three years ago, Temple directed its sports-information department to produce 1,400 comic books celebrating “Boo” Palmer, as his friends call him. He expressed has mixed feelings about accepting the money, and Temple’s reaction.

“People constantly say, ‘If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it.’ But at the time you have only the present and the future, not the advantage of hindsight,” he said. “I would like to think, ‘Well, I wouldn’t do that again, given the choice.’ But I don’t know that.

“I made a decision, be it right or wrong. It was the one I had to make. Temple made a decision, the one it had to make. I’m not angry at Temple. I’m hurt as hell though.

“The thing is none of this is simple black and white. We all know the NCAA rules are there. And if you break the rules that are out there, you may have to pay for it. That doesn’t change the fact that a lot of us weren’t from silver-spoon families. There was no money coming from my household. My great-grandmother was in her 70s and retired. ...

“Let me tell you what I did with the money. I didn’t get a car until February, after my senior season was over. I’d stick some money in unmarked envelopes and send it to my grandmother. She didn’t know where I was getting the money from. There’s probably one big decision I made that I never consulted her on and it was signing with an agent.

“But I decided this was the best thing for me to do at that time. I could take my teammates to a party at the University of Pennsylvania. Before we’d have to bum money to get transporation to a party, bum money to get in the party, then to get back to Temple. Non-athletes could go to the parties and pay their own way because they could get work-study, which is against NCAA rules for athletes.

“We’d go to the mall, a party at Villanova, take the train to Rutgers. Everybody else could do it. You talk about athletes not being treated differently from other students. How come rules allow it that we can’t order a pizza or go to the mall if our folks don’t have much money?

“Out of 10 people, I’d say two people, at the most, would do something different than I did. Talking around here and in Kansas City, guys have agents when they’re juniors, some even sophomores. The NCAA rules have to be changed. You can’t stop guys from trying to get money.”

Palmer said he does regret skipping classes and failing to apply himself in those he did attend. It came out during the Walters-Bloom trial that Palmer had failed remedial writing, completed no classes in his major and attended no classes most of his senior year.

“I’m the first to admit I did not apply myself,” he said. “I wish I had. I put all my eggs in one basket: football. It scares me now. Suppose something had gone wrong anywhere along the line. Fortunately for me it didn’t. But it certainly could have. I know I’d tell the next guy to come along, ‘Go to class. Make sure you can conduct your life without football.’ ”

Those weren’t Palmer’s only troubles. He was shaken by his great-grandmother’s death, maybe even more than he knew at the time. “The person who I wanted to share all this with, the person I worked to accomplish all this for, was gone,” he said.

Palmer thought he was settling down before being cut. He, Virginia and daughter Moet Frances had moved into a new home in Kansas City. “I kept telling people it’s not like I wanted to get traded.”

But since he has to start anew, Dallas may be the best place for him. In the Lions’ run-and-shoot offense, there is room for a back with Palmer’s talents, but Barry Sanders also has those talents and then some. And since the Lions use primarily one back, they were thinking of using Palmer as a receiver.

In Dallas, there is no glut of talent. Not in the backfield or anwhere else. Palmer eventually may flourish in a passing offense, which gets him into the open field, where he’s most dangerous. Palmer had a 62-yard kick return for the Lions.

That Palmer has enormous talent is undeniable. Whether he can stay in the right situation long enough is the big question. In Dallas the coaches say he has gotten to practice early and stayed late. Perhaps it is not too late for his story to sort itself out and have a kinder ending.