Police Athletic Association : Chargers: Punt returner Phil McConkey has a special bond with his new boss, Dan Henning.

How interesting that Dan Henning, a man desperate for clues about his failing football team, hired Phil McConkey last week to return punts.

Henning is the son of a former New York detective. McConkey is also the son of a former New York detective.

Henning’s father worked homicide and knew the Manhattan theater district like the back of his hand. McConkey’s father worked vice in upstate Buffalo for 20 years.

Buffalo Vice. That’s the squad they didn’t name the TV show after.

“He’d leave at 9:30 at night and come home at 5 in the morning,” McConkey remembers. “It was rough on my mother. Real rough.”

Said Henning this week: “When your dad is in that business and sees what happens every day, he has a real reality about him. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen or done. He’s dealing with people shot, knifed or pulled out of the river with weights on their ankles.”

Henning is dealing with a football team that has been shooting itself in the foot all year. The Chargers have won four games, lost eight and often played like fugitives.

It was almost with relief between last week’s loss at Indianapolis and preparations for Sunday’s home game against the Jets that he got a brief chance to talk about something other than football when he learned about his common bond with McConkey.

McConkey, who returned eight punts against the Colts to tie a club record in his first game as a Charger, was just as eager to talk law and order when he found out about his new coach’s father.

Despite his surname, McConkey is three-fourths Italian. He grew up on the streets of Buffalo, and his curiousity took him to places on both sides of the tracks. Sports occupied most of his time. But he wasn’t afraid of a little mischief.

Much later, he would come to understand that he wasn’t afraid of anything except motion sickness, which ended his career as a Navy pilot. And that was too bad. Word around the Mediterranean fleet was that McConkey could “hover”--hold an H-46 helicopter almost dead still above a flat-top before landing it on a dime--as well as anybody. These H-46s, called “Sea Knights,” were used to transport troops in Vietnam. But we’re getting ahead of the story, which started out being about detectives and fathers.

McConkey’s father was never prouder than when his son received his appointment to the Naval Academy. Joseph McConkey had worked during his off hours as a security guard so he could pay the $1,000-a year-tuition for Phil at Buffalo’s Canisius High School. He even took on a third job as a roofer.

One day in 1978, his son would become the most valuable player in the very first Holiday Bowl. He caught a 65-yard touchdown pass in the fourth quarter to help bring the Midshipmen from behind to beat a Brigham Young team that had Jim McMahon on the bench.

Then Joseph McConkey’s son, all 5-feet-10 and 160 pounds of him, would score a touchdown in Super Bowl XXI, a 39-20 Giant victory. He also caught a 44-yard flea-flicker that set up another touchdown and returned a punt 25 yards to set up a field goal.

You winced when opposing players hit McConkey (though he had had plenty of practice playing touch football in Buffalo. “Running full speed into a parked 1972 Buick while looking back for the ball is about as tough a hit as you’re going to take,” he said).

Then you shook your head when he popped back up like cork bobbing to the surface. And you smiled when he waved his hands over his head, exhorting New Yorkers, Jerseyites and all the other animals in the Meadowlands’ zoo to a fever pitch.

“If there was ever anybody who could electrify our crowds it was Phil,” remembers Charger defensive back Elvis Patterson, a teammate of McConkey’s on the 1986 world champion Giants. “There’s just a feeling in the way he handles himself.”

On and off the field.

When McConkey found himself guesting on “Ask Dr. Ruth” he didn’t miss a beat when the pop sex consultant asked him point blank: “Which is better, an orgasm or a touchdown?”

“Everything,” McConkey told Dr. Westheimer, winningly, “is better when you win.”

The New York media loved McConkey. By the time the 1987 season rolled around, he was the only Giant who lived in Manhattan. He sublet an apartment once occupied by dancer Alexander Godunov and actress Jacqueline Bisset. McConkey got his jollies telling teammates he slept in Jackie Bisset’s bed.

He had come a long way from the self-described “skinny, pimple-faced 18-year-old kid” the longhairs spat upon in public when he showed up in downtown Annapolis.

It was 1975, and the country was not too far removed from Vietnam. “With the regulation haircut, I stuck out like a sore thumb,” McConkey said. “I had never been out of Buffalo, and here I was being called a war-monger.

“I wanted to kick their ass. The street instincts were coming to the surface. But I maintained my personal discipline. I knew somewhere down the line, they’d get theirs.”

At the Naval Academy, McConkey set more than a dozen school football records for receiving and returning. He also won the academy’s prestigious Thompson Trophy for special achievement.

But nobody drafted him. He was too small. And he had a five-year hitch to serve with the Navy. He figured his football days were over. He didn’t figure on the motion sickness, a problem Navy doctors couldn’t explain.

“Maybe your inner-ear mechanism works too well--that you’re too sensitive to motion,” McConkey told the New York Times. “It may relate to athletic success in some way. I’d be curious to see if pro players have a high percentage of motion sickness.”

In any event, McConkey was discharged as a lieutenant in May 1984. He had been out of football five years. He was a 27-year-old, 160-pound rookie with a well of enthusiasm. The Giants coaches saw him in a free-agent camp and liked him.

Even when they cut him right before their Super Bowl season of 1986, they did so reluctantly. The Packers claimed him, and he sat on their bench for four games. When Giant wide receiver Lionel Manuel hurt his knee, Coach Bill Parcells immediately sent a draft choice to the Packers to get McConkey back. McConkey responded with 1,003 all-purpose yards, 279 coming on 16 pass catches, 253 on 32 punt returns and 471 on 24 kickoff returns. Leading up the the Super Bowl, he caught a touchdown pass in a playoff game against the 49ers.

He continued to return punts for the Giants in 1987 and 1988. But Parcells had to release him when a young draft choice, fifth-rounder Dave Meggett, showed too much promise.

McConkey played six games with the Phoenix Cardinals, who released him last week. The Chargers, dying on special teams all year long, grabbed him in a New York second.

“I had no idea he was 32 years old,” Henning said after the Chargers worked out McConkey before signing him. “He was like a little kid. I’d completely forgotten about him being in the Navy.”

Once McConkey ran an eye-popping 4.51 40-yard dash on grass, it wouldn’t have mattered to them if he had spent 10 years with Gary Cooper in the French Foreign Legion. This was going to be their guy.

“There’s respect throughout the league on this guy,” Patterson said. “He’s a proven player.”

And smart. When he was 14, McConkey and a bunch of his friends were hanging out at a local Buffalo shopping center. As they piled into an elevator, they mostly ignored the two men already on board.

Except McConkey couldn’t take his eyes off the guy with beard and the beat-up old clothes. He looked at him again and realized it was his father. Then he realized the guy in front of him was a suspect being tailed. McConkey didn’t say a word.

McConkey’s reward: Several days later, his father took him to a baseball game.

Henning recalled the time as a boy when he got into trouble on a subway “nowhere near where I lived.” After a dressing-down by a transit cop, Henning figured the incident was over. Two weeks later, he heard about the incident from his father.

McConkey says he swears his father was paying off his friends to keep an eye on him. “I’d come home at the end of the day, and he would know every move I had made,” McConkey said. But he stayed away from the bad stuff. Or as he puts it: “I avoided the big fall.”

Now he’s playing out the string on a team that is going nowhere, slowly. He’s happy to be playing. But McConkey is already planning for life after football. He has part interest in a restaurant and a shopping center. And he has a patent pending on an electrical device “that could revolutionize the way time is kept in sports.”

The prototype is expected to be unveiled this spring. That’s all he will say. Pending patents are sensitive subjects. Circumspection is mandatory. His father, the detective, would understand.

Charger Notes

Rookie quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver finally got the word from the Chargers’ Coach Dan Henning. “He told me, ‘You’re starting until you stink it up in practice.’ ” Tolliver said Thursday. “He said, ‘If you stink it up, you’re not starting.’ ” If Tolliver does not “stink it up” he will start against the Jets at home Sunday. Henning, when asked to describe Tolliver’s performance at practice Thursday, said: “Fair.” . . . The NFL has named Charger wide receiver Anthony Miller its AFC offensive player of the month for November. During the month, Miller caught 22 passes for 342 yards and four touchdowns and returned eight kickoffs for 244 yards and one touchdown. Miller is third in the AFC in receiving yards with 884. He has scored five of the Chargers’ last six touchdowns. . . . Running back Marion Butts, who is on the injured list with a bad knee (questionable), practiced and appears to be healing faster than the Chargers originally thought. That could mean they won’t have to activate running back Victor Floyd for Sunday’s game. . . . Running back Dana Brinson cleared waivers Thursday but didn’t sign on with the Chargers’ developmental squad. He was supposed to meet with Henning Thursday morning but didn’t show. “Maybe he’s having conversations with somebody else,” Henning said.