A Pigeon Is Home to Roost : Raiders: Max Montoya, a longtime poker game patsy and offensive line leader of the Bengals, faces his former teammates Sunday.

Max Montoya spent 11 seasons as a Cincinnati Bengal. He loved the city, the fans, even those strange-looking tiger stripes on the helmets.

His former coach, the inimitable Sam Wyche, was worth the price of admission alone. In a given day, Wyche might serve food to the homeless, trash Cleveland fans over a stadium loudspeaker or banish female sportswriters from the locker room. You don’t get stuff like this selling aluminum siding.

Montoya loved his teammates--Boomer, Ickey, Munoz, et al. Poker games were the best.

“They knew I was a pigeon,” Montoya said. “I brought my 100 bucks and it was gone in about 30 minutes. I sat back and ate their pizza. It was an expensive pizza.”

Montoya, from La Puente, couldn’t stomach the Mexican food in Cincinnati, so he opened his own restaurant and filled the fryers with neighborhood recipes and homemade tortillas. Salsa lovers flocked. Montoya named the place, “Montoya’s.” Why mess around?

“All our customers from Cincinnati are from the Southwest,” he said. “They come in and say, ‘Oh my God, thank you for this place.’ ”

Montoya never wanted to leave Cincinnati, not even after the Bengals left him unprotected on Plan B last spring and Raider owner Al Davis jumped in with an offer of $700,000 this season for an aging, All-Pro guard.

Montoya reconsidered only when his teammates recommended counseling if he didn’t take the money and go west. The Bengals are well-known penny-pinchers, so Montoya figured: If not now, when?

“They really said that if I didn’t accept it, they’d kick me off the team,” he said.

So, at 34, Montoya came home to Los Angeles and became a Raider. When the NFL’s 1990 schedule was released, he quickly circled a Dec. 16 meeting at the Coliseum against Cincinnati.

“It’s going to be fun,” he said.

Montoya plans to stop by the Bengals’ hotel this weekend for a round of handshakes and hugs.

You may wonder how Montoya will manage to work up the required anger for Sunday’s game against some of his best friends. Montoya suggests that you watch him.

Montoya knows the Cincinnati playbook inside and out. He was a charter member of the Bengals’ no-huddle offense. He knows quarterback Boomer Esiason’s cadence, his audibles, his subtleties.

Montoya has freely offered his services to the Raider coaching staff.

What price loyalty?

“There’s no doubt I’m going to spill my guts this week,” Montoya said. “There’s a different signature on my check. There’s no doubt I’ll do whatever I have to do to help this team win.”

Because of his presence, Montoya is certain the Bengals will disguise their offensive signals. But he said there’s no way they can change everything.

“It’s a very complicated offense,” he said. “You can’t go in one week, when you’ve gone the previous 13 games one way, and try to change. You can’t remember all the changes.”

Montoya assured everyone that Sunday will be all business.

“I’m a Raider now,” he said. “When I signed that contract, I was a Raider. That’s the way it was. I was a Bengal for a long time. You still have a lot of emotions and you like a lot of people, and I miss them and everything as friends. But this is great. I’m loving every minute of it.”

Montoya was born in Montebello and attended UCLA. He said he couldn’t turn down the chance to return home and play in front of his family. He even toyed with the idea of moving back near his old neighborhood until he considered the commute to Raider camp in El Segundo.

“It would take me an hour and a half to get here,” he said.

Instead, the Montoyas--his wife and their two children--settled near the beach, although they plan to move back to Cincinnati once the season is over.

Montoya worried about the prospect of returning at first, thinking some in Cincinnati might consider his defection to the Raiders an unforgivable sin. But they’re still selling tacos back at Montoya’s, so the coast is apparently clear.

“Nobody here has even questioned the fact as to how or why he left,” Esiason said this week. “Given the opportunity and the situation, in terms of dollars, every single one of us would have done the same thing if we were in his situation. I feel like I was pretty close to Max. When he left, it was a pretty sad day for me personally, because I knew what an integral part of our offense he was. Nobody holds anything against him. When (the Raiders) are on TV, believe me, everyone’s eyes are glued to No. 65. We probably should all be glued to No. 34 (Bo Jackson), but we’d rather be watching 65.”

There have been adjustments. After 11 seasons of living in a relative fishbowl, where every move is scrutinized, Montoya is learning to enjoy the comforts of a sprawling metropolis.

“It’s easier for me,” he said. “I can go anywhere and not be recognized. That’s good and bad sometimes. It’s kind of nice to go out to a restaurant and not have people always coming up for autographs. It has its good and bad points.”

Many things are different. His last two coaches, for instance.

“Art (Shell) is a lot like a coach I had earlier in my career, Forrest Gregg,” Montoya said. “Both were ex-offensive linemen, Hall-of-Famers. Forrest was a little more vocal. Art, well, I’m just impressed with the way he leads a team.

“Sam (Wyche) is a wild man. He likes to joke and have fun, but he can go crazy now and then. It makes it interesting. You look at him and think what everybody else is thinking about him.”

Wyche doesn’t discount the loss of Montoya to his team, which is struggling at 7-6.

“He’s one of the players in the league that I think you never really quite replace,” Wyche said. “He’s too good. . . . We’d be lying to you if we didn’t say we didn’t miss Max right off the bat.”

Sunday, Montoya and the Bengals are reunited again. It isn’t what Wyche had in mind.