Hands Betray Ellard : Pro football: He could catch the ball, but he couldn’t keep it, fumbling three times in Green Bay.

You can pardon him, please, but Henry Ellard does not particularly savor rewinding his mind back to Lambeau Field five days ago.

Fumbles can humble, and the memories of them do not improve with the passing of time.

Having signed a three-year deal worth about $2.8 million four days earlier, Ellard caught six of Jim Everett’s passes in Sunday’s season opener but fumbled half of those receptions in a second-half dropfest.

The Green Bay Packers recovered two of the fumbles, the last one resulting in the touchdown that put the game out of the Rams’ reach in a 36-24 setback.

Heading into Sunday’s game at Tampa, it is forgive-and-forget time in Ramland. Ellard is doing the forgetting, his teammates the forgiving.

“I don’t think about it anymore,” Ellard said of his slippery Sunday. “It’s just a fluke thing that happened. It’s pretty much done and over with. So I don’t give it a second thought at all.

“You don’t think about it because I don’t do it very often. So, ‘OK, yeah, it happened. Don’t give it a second thought.’ ”

Packer game? What Packer game?

Ellard, of course, is a proven player, a two-time Pro Bowl receiver who caught 156 passes for 18 touchdowns in the last two seasons. He has not had very many games in his eight-year career to compare with his last.

“To fumble the ball three times in a game . . . I don’t know if I’ve fumbled three times in my career, let alone three times in one game,” Ellard said. “That’s definitely about as bad a game as I could’ve had.”

Ellard still caught those six passes for 106 yards--the third-best yardage total in the NFC last week--so clearly he was getting open and catching the ball when it was thrown to him. He just wasn’t hanging onto it.

Sunday was his day to experience the pain of letting his team down, and his teammates seem to know that Ellard, given the laws of average and his pride, is not likely to fumble again soon. Especially this week.

“Oh yeah, I think he’s probably looking forward to it for redemption,” said Flipper Anderson, Ellard’s running mate. “Just to show people that fumbling’s just something that you really don’t do.

“It was just one of those snowball effects. It just happened that game, and we’re not going to go into this game worrying about fumbling at all.”

And the guy who threw those balls Ellard fumbled says he isn’t about to stop pumping them to Ellard as long as he is open. Maybe even if he’s not.

After all Ellard has done, why stop after a one-game nightmare?

“We kept doing it, didn’t we?” Everett said. “We kept bringing the ball right back to him.”

“Henry brings an explosive asset to this ballclub, and it was just a one-time blowup. It was a freak-of-nature type of deal.

“I don’t think it ruined anybody’s confidence in him, and I’ll throw it to him this week, and hopefully the outcome will be different.”

Ellard barely played during the Rams’ four exhibitions because of a sore hamstring.

“It was just one of those days,” Ellard said. “You hope it wouldn’t happen, but it just did. That’s all. If anything, it’s lack of contact in the preseason.”

And he says fans who have watched him over the last two seasons know that he doesn’t have to prove that he is not going to fumble every time he touches the ball.

“They know it’s not going to happen like it did,” Ellard said. “It’s one of those games where it happens. I’m not even concerned because I know it’s not going to happen.

“I just want to play like I’ve been playing, and then it’s just a matter of holding onto the ball when the contact comes.

“If I was dropping the balls, it’d have been different. But I was catching them, then fumbling. It wasn’t like I was carrying it with one hand or anything--it was just good tackling, swiping at the ball and knocking it loose.”

Anderson, who caught five passes for 128 yards and a touchdown (and no fumbles), says he can understand exactly what Ellard went through Sunday--and knows that there are no real explanations for it.

All a receiver can do, he says, is move on and make sure the next catch is not the next fumble.

“You kind of feel for him, but I’m not really concerned about it,” Anderson said. “Catching the ball and tucking it away is really not something that you work on. It just kind of comes as second nature.

“You catch the ball, put it away. If you look at our films the past two years, we rarely fumble at all, if at all. It’s just one of those things. Probably won’t see us fumble any more the rest of the year--knock on wood.”