COMMENTARY : Thinking Man’s Player Is Missed

Carl Ekern looked more like a straight line than a linebacker. How he survived 13 seasons in the National Football League with his body remains a mystery.

Ekern was a walking sandwich board against steroid use. He wasn’t fast, strong or quick. You worried when Ekern stuck his face into the line of scrimmage to make a tackle. Most times he made it, though. In 1988, his last season with the Rams, Ekern, then 34, led the team in tackles with 93. Four times in his career he made more than 100 in a season.

Ekern succeeded with brain, not brawn. The team listed him at 6-feet-3 and 228 pounds in the program. That was in full uniform, soaking wet.

In a game against San Francisco two years ago, Ekern lost 15 pounds of perspiration on a humid day in Anaheim. In the locker room afterward, the doctors hooked him up to an intravenous machine.

When Ekern was named to his only Pro Bowl in 1986, most considered it a lifetime achievement award for survival.

Ekern was the team’s captain and coach on the field. In his time, he would log as much film time in a dark room as Woody Allen.

Ekern was a coach’s dream: smart, selfless, giving. He never understood why anyone wanted to interview him.

In his mind, he was a dock worker. Each day, he put on his hard hat and went to work.

He never was caught up in the trappings of his sport. He drove a beaten-up, orange Volkswagen bug to Rams Park, always crammed with various debris and wrappers.

Never secure with his future, Ekern played the last year of his career for a guaranteed $200,000, rather than risk losing a larger, non-guaranteed salary if he was released.

No one was more devastated by Ekern’s death Wednesday morning than Ram defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur, who held Ekern up to a different light.

“He was probably one of my favorite people in the world,” Shurmur said. ‘I don’t know of a guy who gave any more of himself to the game and to the job when he was playing. He took very little and gave a hell of a lot. There hasn’t been a guy in the history of the game that prepared to play the game any better than he did.”

Shurmur always said Ekern was the smartest player he ever coached. Had Shurmur received the head coaching job at Phoenix this year--he was a finalist--Ekern would have joined his coaching staff.

When the Rams drafted linebacker Larry Kelm in the fourth round in 1987, Shurmur saw an heir apparent to Ekern.

Shurmur ordered Kelm to follow Ekern around camp to, in a football sense, absorb him. Kelm did and has since taken over Ekern’s position as defensive signal-caller.

“He always had time to spend with me,” Kelm said. “We spent a lot of time watching film together after practice; 6, 7, at night. He basically groomed me. I always enjoyed watching him work, because he had such a tremendous work ethic. He worked as hard as anyone around.”

Coaches are calling Kelm the new Carl Ekern. “For me to be compared to him is great,” Kelm said. “He really applied himself, he was always working to be the best he could. Sometimes a big heart will overcome what you don’t have in other areas.”

Ekern, a volunteer coach with the Rams last season, recently accepted a position coaching juvenile delinquents in football at a youth camp in Nevada. Wednesday was to be his first day on the job.

Earlier this week, Ekern dropped by the Rams’ training facilities at UC Irvine to see old friends and pick up some training tips from the team’s strength coordinator, Garrett Giemont.

Ekern sat in on a Rams’ team meeting Tuesday night before beginning a long desert drive from which he would not return.

“I talked to him last night,” veteran center Doug Smith said. “He just started doing some work with juvenile delinquents to get them out of the problem lifestyle. I wished him well with it, and those were the last words I said to him.”

Carl Ekern was not a saint. He was working on his second marriage. He also enjoyed his share of beer, which makes one pause until the Kern County Coroner’s toxicology reports have been completed, although there is no indication that the accident is alcohol-related.

But on a football field, Ekern squeezed more from less than seemed imaginable. To him, football was as much a science as a contact sport. There’s no telling how much of that knowledge he might have passed on to others.

In one quick moment, he is gone. Those who knew him had difficulty coming to grips with that.

“It’s almost like you don’t want to believe it,” said linebacker Mel Owens, who played eight seasons with Ekern. “He was out here yesterday, you saw him, talked to him. It can’t be. I just saw him yesterday. He was a great man, a great leader, a person who would always help you. It’s almost unbelievable, like it’s not really true.”