As an NFL Player, Bosworth Was All Mouth and No Heart

The standard lead angle for a story on the decorated football star forced to leave the game due to injury usually starts with something like, “Billy Bob, we hardly knew ya. . . .”

Not this time.

Now that he is officially an ex-employee of the local professional football outlet, it seems appropriate to recognize that Brian Bosworth was pretty much what a lot of us suspected he might be all along.

A significant segment of football observers in this part of the country and elsewhere had a hunch as to what Bosworth was all about before he rolled into the Pacific Northwest on Aug. 14, 1987. Thirty-five months later, those presumptions have been realized.

As a football player--an impact player, as they like to call them in the business--Bosworth was many things. Terms like illusion, sham, and bust come to mind. The football glories they’ll relate about Brian Bosworth one day will all be confined to the mayhem he perpetrated on collegiate fields for Oklahoma against the Kansas States, Tulsas and Drakes of the world.

When it came to playing with the big boys, Bosworth was the 90-pound runt who got sand kicked in his face at Muscle Beach.

The official last line in his Seahawks career will be tied to a physical he couldn’t pass this week, which allowed the team to set him free and send him to his life’s work, which Bosworth fervently hopes will involve lots of money, movie-star treatment and no more competition on the football field. A lot of us, though, will suspect the reason for the end of his playing days had a little to do with his two bad shoulders and a lot to do with a football heart the size of a cherry pit.

You have to ask whether Bosworth was anything more than another marketable, outspoken, white collegiate steroid abuser who sold the NFL a bill of goods from the get-go.

He admitted to using steroids while at Oklahoma, which was enough to get him suspended from a bowl game. His defense at the time was that the steroids were prescribed by a doctor and he took them only for a short while to help in the rehabilitation process of an earlier injury. The testing methods were suspect and would have never held up in court, he said later.

But the innocent-victim defense was weakened by the span of nearly nine months from his alleged last use of the steroids until the time they were detected by a urinalysis.

Physically, Bosworth was billed as the ultimate linebacker, a 245-pound monster who ran like the wind and hit like a hurricane. The funny thing was, in Seattle, with no steroids, Bosworth wasn’t nearly so big, and when you looked close you noticed the little hands and the size 9 1/2 shoes, not characteristics common to big football players.

In some ways, Bosworth is a metaphor for the best and the worst America has to offer. Where else could a player in an otherwise obscure position create such a demand for his services? Where else could a player with his adolescent whinings be made a millionaire several times over? He used the system, he abused the system, and he’s not finished exploiting the depths of his marketing potential.

The news out of the Gulf Coast last weekend where Bosworth has been filming his first action-adventure movie is that a labor dispute has halted work on “The Brotherhood.” The director had been fired and replaced by someone who has worked on such classics as television’s “The A-Team” and the movie “Action Jackson.”

It is fairly clear that Brian Bosworth the actor is aiming for a spot in that genre of leading roles that includes Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Olivier, Gable, Nicholson and others can rest easy.

You come to the point where you are more than happy to say goodby to Brian Bosworth and his locker-room preening, his vacuous unfulfilled threats to opponents, his petulant attitude toward the press and his indefatigable efforts to promote himself at the expense of his teammates.

But there’s a sadness in this goodby, because there can be no real joy in watching a man fail in a legitimate endeavor, even an obnoxious man.

There’s not much doubt that Brian Bosworth failed to live up to his own expectations and those of the Seahawks. His most memorable plays were two that involved being completely overmatched by Bo Jackson. In one play in the Kingdome, Jackson turned the corner and ran away from Bosworth down the sidelines. In another, Jackson collided with Bosworth near the goal line and drove him like a cheap jalopy deep into the end zone. The only other lasting memory is of Bosworth taunting John Elway, using his mouth, which was what got him there in the first place.

The unfortunate part of it all is that there is a human part of Bosworth, a vulnerable, caring part inside that he kept walled off from the world. A few months ago, Bosworth befriended a terminally ill cancer patient from Northern California who idolized him.

Bosworth put the youngster up in his apartment for a weekend, rode him around the beach on his motorcycle, and, according to the boy’s mother, developed a genuine heart-to-heart connection that added joyous, inspired months to her son’s life.

Bosworth worked hard to hide that part of him from the public so that it wouldn’t clash with the cheap, cartoon-character image he spent years developing.

In that respect, while we knew all too well the guy he wanted us to know, we really didn’t know the guy after all.

And we probably never will.