The Missions May Vary, but Spirit Is the Same

Play football, Steve Wisniewski says. Play the playoff game at Buffalo today. Play the Super Bowl game at Tampa next week, without postponement because of the war. When consulting with his heart, with his mind, with his conscience, this is the way Steve Wisniewski always sees it. Because this is the way Vince Wisniewski would want it.

Steve sits by, anxiously, powerlessly, longing to know where and how Vince is. What the Raiders’ 23-year-old, Pro Bowl offensive guard does know for sure is that his older brother, 34, is an Air Force major, a squadron leader, the pilot of an F-16 and almost certainly one of the first Americans who flew a mission armed with a payload of missiles, pointed toward Iraq.

What Steve still hadn’t learned, upon leaving for Buffalo, was whether Vince had returned to base safely.

So, he plays football to keep his thoughts otherwise occupied.

He plays football because that is his occupational hazard, the same way flying jets is his brother’s occupational hazard.

He plays football for any number of reasons today, some of which he can only vainly attempt to explain.

“I wouldn’t want to be disrespectful,” Wisniewski said Thursday at the Raider training camp in El Segundo. “I’m aware that it is not my place to say whether we should bother playing the Buffalo game, the Super Bowl, the Pro Bowl, you name it. I don’t want to show any lack of respect for what’s taking place over there.

“From talking with my brother last week, though, I can tell you this: Those guys stayed up until 1 o’clock in the morning, just so they could watch the Raider game on TV.

“If it means that much to them, why shouldn’t it mean that much to us?

“Let’s not stop the game because of them. Let’s play it for them.”

There are various forms of motivation, for football players, for combat forces, for mankind, and one way with which Steve Wisniewski reinforces his own is with the dogmatic, Duke Wayne-ian philosophy that a person’s got to do whatever it is a person’s got to do. Vince reminded him this was precisely the sort of thing for which he had trained in a dozen years of military service. He told Steve he would man one of the first flights off the deck.

And then he hung up, telling Steve this would probably be the last time he would have access to a telephone for a while.

“I have a lot of faith in him,” Steve said. “I know he’s going to come home safely.”

In the anxious interim, he checks in as regularly as possible with his sister-in-law, Cindy, who is holding down the fort in Sumter, S.C., watching over their child. Cindy is pregnant. They watch the news on television, wait for government-authorized communiques sent by mail, dial toll-free telephone lines set up to reach out and touch immediate families.

Playing football, even so, is not the least of Steve’s concerns. Although it seems trivial in comparative significance, Steve Wisniewski weighs the objective at hand the very way modern-day military personnel would. He resolves to do whatever it is he must do, to be all that he can be.

Occasionally harking back to whatever fates routed him to Penn State University rather than to the Air Force Academy, where he had always intended to make his mark, Wisniewski goes about the continuation of one of football’s fastest rises to the top of the profession. In two short seasons, Wisniewski has rather startlingly emerged as one of the National Football League’s showcase linemen.

When the Dallas Cowboys made this two-time collegiate All-American the 29th man chosen in the 1989 draft, then made the monumental mistake of letting the Raiders have him for more picks later in the same draft, there was little way of knowing what Wisniewski would mean to the running game that has carried Los Angeles so far into the playoffs.

They knew he had a pedigree, yes. Another older brother, Leo, also excelled at Penn State, and later with the Baltimore Colts. Yet, when Wisniewski reported as the youngest player on the Raider roster, what they hoped was that he would be useful. The line needed shoring. Jim Lachey had had to be sacrificed for a quarterback. Bruce Davis was gone. Bill Lewis, too. There were needs.

Wisniewski broke in with a bang. He was all-rookie. He started 15 games at right guard. And when the estimable Max Montoya defected from the Cincinnati Bengals to come west, Wisniewski agreed to move over to left guard, out of deference and respect to his elder, even if he remained on the right side at heart.

Bruce Wilkerson got hurt. Steve Wright had to take over at tackle. Yet, the Raiders forged on. Wisniewski pulled for Marcus Allen and Bo Jackson, protected Jay Schroeder, went nose to nose with nose tackles big, strong and ugly. He went from all-rookie to all-pro. He was the only Raider to make Sports Illustrated’s all-NFL first team. There were strong indications Wisniewski had bloomed into one of the two or three best guards in the league.

He is tall, 6-4, and commanding. Would have made a hell of a major for some outfit, and a snug fit for some cockpit.

“You can’t really be too tall for the service--just too wide,” Wisniewski joked, patting his 280 pounds.

The Raiders have watched him grow, in more ways than one. He is in the weight room religiously, even on Tuesdays, their day off. With Montoya on the other side and center Don Mosebar between them, the Raiders are, as baseball teams like to say, as strong up the middle as anybody. They will need to be, what with Bruce Smith, Leon Seals, Jeff Wright and other such Buffalo Bills glaring into their face masks today.

It won’t be easy.

It never is.

“Just play the game, just do your best,” Wisniewski said. “That’s all you can do whenever somebody gives you a job to do. Do it.”

Speaking for himself. Speaking for his brother. Speaking to his brother.

“Just do it. Do your job. Then come home when you’re done.”