Brown Healthy, but Statistics Aren’t : Raiders: Coming off reconstructive knee surgery, the former Heisman Trophy winner accepts a reduced role on offense, special teams.

Tim Brown, the 1987 Heisman Trophy winner, has two more catches than tight end Mike Dyal, five to three. This is not a knock on Dyal, except that he’s been on injured reserve five weeks with a hamstring pull.

Brown, who slithers and slides with a ball like few before him, must now juke questions about his reduced role in the Raider offense.

Brown, who broke Gale Sayers’ NFL single-season rookie record for total yardage in 1988, shares with Sayers the rehabilitation of a football knee injury so severe that Brown has viewed the replay tape of the hit only once, a few hours after it happened.

Brown, once the country’s most electrifying kick returner, doesn’t return kickoffs anymore.

Brown, who was expected to turn games around with his singular talent, did just that in the Raiders’ only loss this season when he fumbled a punt that led to a Buffalo Bills’ touchdown and dropped an important third-down pass.

The harder Brown tries, the harder it gets. Whatever happened to Tim Brown?

“I’ve had a couple of big mistakes,” he said. “The coaches felt like I was rushing, trying to make things happen, which was true. Because I definitely wanted to show people that I was back.”

When you’ve been a showstopper your whole life, as Brown has been, it’s not easy working your way back to the top through the chorus line. Brown missed 15 games last season after blowing out his left knee on a kickoff return in the opener against the San Diego Chargers. It was 14 more games than he’d missed since the seventh grade. He tore the medial collateral and posterior cruciate ligaments in the knee, a rare double-rip that sent football surgeons running for medical books.

The medial collateral ligament allows the knee to maneuver laterally, which is about 98% of Brown’s game.

“I’m a moves man,” the former Notre Dame star said. “I can play the game at 4.5-second speed (for 40 yards), but I can’t play it without agility.”

You can draw obvious conclusions relating to Brown’s knee injury and his dropoff in production. But Brown contends that the knee is fine, almost 100%. He assures anyone who asks that he would not have returned to the field as half a player.

“The minute I thought I wasn’t effective on the football field, I’d have given it up,” he said.

Brown has lost some speed, he admits, but he’s not sure how much, or how much it matters. In the last month, his stride has lengthened considerably.

“I haven’t timed myself,” he said. “I don’t really want to, not during the middle of the season. Because if you’re not where you were, then it becomes a mind game. I’m sure in the off-season I’ll have some tests done.”

Brown, in fact, said people will never understand how hard he worked to get back--the grueling rehabilitation sessions with trainer H. Rod Martin, the long stretches of doubt, the isolation from teammates.

The knee is fine, though. To get it there, Brown left a piece of himself in the training room. Breaking down scar tissue is no picnic.

“It’s hell,” Brown explained. “They put you on your stomach and they just bend your knee back . . . “ Brown, describing the agony, uttered something that sounded liked walnuts cracking.

“You’re crying, screaming, yelling,” he said. “You’re going through the wall. I’ve got a handprint on the wall where I kept bumping my hand. But that’s the only way to do it. It’s that bad. It’s a lot tougher than people realize.”

Brown wouldn’t know the truth about his knee until training camp last summer. The feelings he held inside as he took the field were understandable.

“I worked my butt off,” he said. “I cried, I did all these things. Please don’t make me come back and not be able to play.”

Brown had his doubts until a punt return against the Chicago Bears in an exhibition game.

“It just so happened that I made about eight guys miss on that return,” he said. “I was making everybody miss.”

Brown, though, had another problem. While he was out, Mervyn Fernandez took his spot and has emerged as one of the best clutch receivers in football. This season, Fernandez and Willie Gault have teamed to form one of the top one-two punches in the league, combining for 54 catches for 985 yards.

“I know what’s going on,” Brown said, explaining his plight. “Mervyn Fernandez and Willie Gault are playing great football right now.”

As it stands, Brown gets on the field only as the third receiver in passing situations.

“We’re not a three- and four-wide receiver team,” Coach Art Shell said. “He’d be great in the run-and-shoot.”

So, Tim Brown has five catches in seven games. He said he suffers less from a weakened knee and more from impatience. He’s trying to make every opportunity count, so sometimes he charts a 50-yard scoring run in his mind and then forgets to catch the pass.

Brown said he isn’t about to make excuses or waves.

“I think if we weren’t winning, and I wasn’t playing, it would be very difficult,” he said. “I definitely wouldn’t cause problems by going through the media, but I would definitely be a little bit more vocal talking to Art, letting him know what’s going on. Even now I’d like to know. You ask coaches, ‘What’s going on?’ and they say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. The big guy doesn’t want you to play, so you don’t play.’ . . . What am I going to do? I’m definitely not going to rebel against big Art.”

Brown has plenty of reasons to hold steady. Gault and Fernandez are both in their 30s, so Brown is very much the team’s receiver of the future.

“My whole thing is that I just want to feel like I’m a part of it,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. If we go to the Super Bowl, 10 years from now I’m going to tell my kids that I was the MVP.”

Brown said you haven’t heard the last of him. “I don’t think that a lot of people realize that going into the eighth game of my rookie season, I only had seven catches,” he said. “I finished the year with 43.”