Different is O’Neal’s 1st Name : Chargers: Attention makes Leslie O’Neal go. He gets his share of it.

SAN DIEGO — Four years ago this week Leslie O’Neal was on his back in the Hoosier Dome, clutching the wreckage of what had been a healthy knee.

He was playing in the first quarter of his 13th professional football game, and as difficult as it was supposed to be for a rookie, Leslie O’Neal already had compiled 12 1/2 career sacks.

Four years ago this week there was greatness in the making. Now there’s a what might have been had he not been hurt.

“Who knows what Ted Williams would have been had he not been called back to the service?” asked Ron Lynn, Chargers defensive coordinator. “Down the road, this Leslie O’Neal thing might be, ‘Gee, just think how good he might have been’ as they go ahead and induct him into the Hall of Fame.”

It would be foolhardy, of course, to suggest that Leslie O’Neal wanted to be hurt, wanted to undergo seven surgical procedures and 22 months of rehabilitation.

But disaster, and its accompanying comeback against all odds, becomes O’Neal. It adds to his identity. Makes him different, and different is what Leslie O’Neal is all about.

He wears $195 fire-engine red shoes--to the locker room. “They get attention, and they match the outfit,” he said, and although he said it’s not calculated, he could probably go all season long and never wear the same clothes to work twice.

He arrived at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium for his first regular-season game in a $60,000 maroon Mercedes. “It’s not maroon,” he said, “It’s Cabernet.”

He likes it when teammate Burt Grossman makes fun of him for carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase “with nothing in it . . . except maybe his own football cards.” Said O’Neal, “When he says stuff like that, he gets me in the public eye.”

He pays Lloyd’s of London $15,000 a year for a $1 million insurance policy against a career-ending injury, and how many NFL linebackers receive a weekly manicure?

“He’s been different from the day he first got here; he wouldn’t sign his contract until he shook hands with the owner,” Lynn said. “And then he made a controversial decision to have surgery on the knee with a different doctor.

“I’ve never met someone in this game who takes his own course to the extent he does, but then I’ve only been in this game about 25 years. Ask Lee Williams about him. When O’Neal went to the Pro Bowl, he wanted to coach the defense because they weren’t doing it right.”

O’Neal was selected to play in his first Pro Bowl last year as a backup, and while standing on the sideline, demanded the attention of all-star performers Howie Long, Bruce Smith and Michael Dean Perry.

“He took Gatorade cups and designed a defense to stop the NFC from being effective. Right on the sideline,” defensive tackle Williams said. “I see this, and I’m thinking, ‘O’Neal can’t be doing this.’ But he is, and so I was trying to tell Bruce, Howie and the guys what type of individual Leslie is, because you know Leslie . . .

“I mean, he set up an offense on this table with green cups, and then uses red cups as the defense to counter what they’re doing. Howie’s there watching, and so is Bruce, and I was amazed. I’m not sure Bud Carson and the rest of his staff agreed, but you know what? In a matter of 30 seconds, he convinced us it would work.”

The O’Neal way. As he will tell you--the only way.

“It goes back to college,” O’Neal explained. “It’s my second year at Oklahoma State and we’re getting ready to play Nebraska, and this is when they are loaded with great players.

“So the coaches go and get this guy out of the student body that weighes about 310 pounds and they tell me I got to pound on this guy to get me ready for Nebraska. I figure that makes no sense, and I say so. And I won’t do it, so the coach, George Walstad, gets mad at me.

“He makes me run the stairs up to the top of the stadium, but as I’m running, I’m telling myself I’m right about this. I weigh 214 pounds and I’m going to get killed if I do it their way, so when I get to the top of the stadium, I just sit down.

“I sat up there the whole practice, pads and everything. When I came down they couldn’t really do anything to me because I was a starter and I was out there making plays.

“We get in the game and it’s nationally televised, and I think I had 21 tackles, three sacks and a couple of fumble recoveries. From that point on, I decided if I can get people to just leave me alone and let me do it my own way, I’ll be better off. Just let me be in my own world.”

There is no doubt Leslie O’Neal is in his own world. It’s a world where he makes all the tackles, gets all the sacks, has all the answers and speaks only of himself.

“He’s aloof, but I think he likes it that way,” linebacker Gary Plummer said. “He considers himself a notch above everyone, but it’s not an arrogance where it’s going to tick you off.

“I think it means a great deal to him being recognized, the All-Pro status. It even comes to a point if a guy gets a sack, he’s ticked off because it wasn’t him. He wants to make every play on every down. I think he thinks he’s capable of doing that.”

Maybe he is. He has started 42 professional football games and has 36 sacks. He is the team’s No. 2 tackler behind Plummer this season, just as he finished a year ago.

“I haven’t come across a more complete player in my life,” Williams said.

Williams has been elected to play in the Pro Bowl the past two seasons. He has piled up more sacks in the past five years than any AFC player. He’s considered to be one of the team’s finest athletes, if not the finest.

“If I were to be realistic, considering what he’s accomplished to this point and what I had accomplished in as many games, he would be the more effective player,” Williams said. “Not to take anything away from myself, but in my estimation, he will be the better player.

“Had he not had that setback (knee injury) he would be the guy all others would be measured by. I’m talking L.T. (Lawrence Taylor), Reggie White, he would have been in that class of player. And I’m not sure that he isn’t at this point. We’re talking greatness here.”

The power of performance. It allows Leslie O’Neal to be different, to be outspoken. To get away with it.

“I can say whatever I want as long as I’m making plays,” he said. “I know a lot of guys down in the locker room don’t like me. Some people take my so-called arrogance the wrong way, but that’s the way it is.

“I think the bottom line with what we’re trying to do in this organization is to not really have people stand out,” he said. “They don’t want stars, but it’s going to happen because the good players are going to separate themselves from the rest.

“I want the attention. The attention brings a lot of prestige. It measures how successful you are, and it brings you more money.”

There is nothing phony or premeditated in his pitch for the spotlight. It is who he is, and what he does to let people know who he is.

“He’s determined to be successful,” Williams said. “He likes it. He gets a rush out of it. He wants to be the guy everybody talks about, and I think that’s what will make him so good. Don’t get me wrong, the team is important to him, but he also thrives on the individual accolades that come with being a great player.”

The quest for success, however, makes O’Neal a target. There are whispers that he is too outspoken, too big for his own shoulder pads.

“I know. I heard so much negative stuff about me because I chose not to come over here during the off-season,” O’Neal said. “I wasn’t signed, and I figured if they really wanted me to be part of this team, I would have been signed long before that happened. So I went golfing.

“If they want to be upset with me and don’t like me personally, they can send me somewhere else, and then I’ll go somewhere else and make the plays,” he said. “And that will make them look bad, so they won’t do that.”

Two weeks ago an outspoken O’Neal was incensed. His team had been defeated 27-10 by Kansas City, but it was not so much the loss, he said, but the way the team lost.

Although cautioned by several teammates to keep his peace, O’Neal could not. He didn’t think the coaches were making the proper adjustments, using the right people, and said so.

“They said, ‘We hear you, and now leave us alone?’ ” O’Neal said.

“Hey, it’s the same plays that killed us against Pittsburgh. The Raiders ran it and got us, Seattle did it, and we’re going to see those couple of plays the rest of the year. They’re going to run the inside trap, run like a read play with boot action off it, dump the ball off to the tight end and he’s going to run a quick arrow, and they’re going to run the jab.”

The coaches hear this stuff and offer a knowing smile. They go to work every day with the understanding that they will receive unsolicited insight from Leslie O’Neal. Sometimes they listen.

“He’s really knowledgeable about the front part of the game,” Lynn said. “In his mind, he pretty much has everything that goes on in the world figured out.”

If there has been a more precocious rookie defensive end to play this game, he would have been well-known as the first rookie player-coach.

“There are times in meeting rooms when he drives me nuts,” defensive line coach Gunther Cunningham said. “But then he looks at you, and says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll make the plays.’ And it’s like I say, ‘You better.’

“You know, players respect good players. He feels as long as he plays well, his outspoken manner will be forgiven and forgotten.”

It’s not rabble rousing. And there is nothing negative about the attitude or the delivery. It’s just that Leslie O’Neal will not go quietly into the huddle.

“I’m a pain in the butt,” O’Neal said. “But I’m in a position to speak out. Why would Billy Ray Smith take a chance of blowing the reputation he has here. I mean here’s a guy sitting on top of the world. More than likely, when he retires he’ll have Larry Sacknoff’s spot (at Channel 10), so why would he take a chance of jumping on the coaches?

“No one else can really say anything around here. You got so many young guys and they don’t want to blow an opportunity, and then you got the older players who don’t want to make a fuss in their last couple of years,” he said. “A lot of guys can’t live on the edge like I can.”

A lot of guys never have lived, never will live as O’Neal had to live during those 22 months of rehabilitation. His injury was the worst of injuries, and it happened because a teammate jumped offsides. It happened because another teammate failed to make the proper defensive call.

When it happened, O’Neal chose to have his knee surgically repaired by the U.S. Ski Team physician, Dr. Richard Steadman. He had bypassed the organization. “There were some people here who thought I was doing it to screw the organization,” O’Neal said. “I mean after you’ve been threatened to be cut or have your pay reduced, you think about where you stand.

“At the time I thought like I might rather go somewhere else. I had rookie videotape to show how I could play, and I was only making $200,000, so other teams could have a guy who wasn’t a rookie. Other teams were interested, and I was interested.”

That was a little more than two years ago. And to watch O’Neal drag his leg behind at the time, was to understand how the Chargers felt. They had been told by a rookie that he was going elsewhere for medical treatment, and now more than a year later, he still wasn’t playing. Might never play again.

“Seeing him hobble around here for a year and looking at that knee, I didn’t think he’d come back,” Plummer said. “I just didn’t think it was physiologically possible.”

When he tried to test his knee in hand-to-hand combat with an overweight and overmatched James FitzPatrick it was no contest--FitzPatrick reigned triumphant.

“It was as low as I could get,” O’Neal said.

So low, that when given videotape of his practice session with FitzPatrick, he threw it at Cunningham.

“He just threw it at me, and I saw on his face that he was wavering: ‘Am I going to make it back?’ ” Cunningham recalled. “We sat in there for three hours and watched the Raider film from his rookie year, and from that day on, it got better. He could see he still had it; it was just a matter of getting stronger, getting back to the mental part of it all.”

He’s back, all right. He no longer is the defensive lineman he was as a rookie, but as an outside linebacker, he spends almost all of his time on the defensive line.

“It’s his anticipation,” Plummer said. “He has the ability to know what they’re going to do before they do it, and that sure makes it easier to play.”

When his peers watch him work, “It’s vintage videotape,” Williams said. “It may be his determination. It doesn’t appear his moves are any more different than anyone else, but for whatever reason, he’s more successful.”

Had he not been hurt . . . “I think about it,” O’Neal said. “But the thing is, if I hadn’t been hurt, we would have drafted someone else besides Burt Grossman, and the team would have progressed more.

“The only reason they drafted Burt was because they didn’t know if I could come back. But now they’ve ended up with an abundance of players at the same position, and someone ultimately has to be out of position, and that’s Lee Williams. He’s the best defensive lineman we have, and people don’t understand the sacrifice he’s making.”

O’Neal does, and nothing against Grossman, it’s business.

“It’s what would have been had I not gotten hurt,” O’Neal said.

His knee is fine now, he said; no pain, no swelling, so no ice. The doomsayers said he wouldn’t be back, wouldn’t be the same player, but he did it his way. Always his way.

“Growing up, I heard stories from my dad about how independent he was, and I’ve always wanted to be that way,” he said. “Let me know what my job is, let me figure out a way to do it, and leave me alone. I’ll get it done.”

O’Neal does not participate in the team’s weightlifting program. He does not follow the team’s off-season conditioning plan. He does what he pleases.

“He sneaks around to lift weights,” Cunningham said. “I think he works a lot harder than people think. He likes to have that aura about him: I just do it.”

Whatever he’s doing, it works. And for all his eccentricities, there is still the undeniable payoff in tackles and sacks.

“He’s different,” said Grossman, a man who knows whereof he speaks.