COMMENTARY : Lyle Alzado Delivering Forceful Message

Once more, Lyle Alzado is the protagonist in a compelling tale. And the man appreciates a good story as much as any professional athlete in recent times. His flair for the dramatic has not been diminished by the disease that threatens his life.

In fact, the inoperable brain cancer to which the former defensive end called attention on a network television show last week fits the larger-than-life persona Alzado built as resolutely as the body that earned him All-Pro status in the National Football League. By linking the cancer to steroid abuse both in an interview on “First Person with Maria Shriver” and in a story appearing under his byline in the current issue of Sports Illustrated, he has enlisted himself a spokesman for a significant cause. The fact that so many medical experts believe there is no correlation between the drug and brain cancer does not reduce the effect of his words or his current appearance.

“What’s happening in this country is an epidemic,” said Mark Lyons, a former high school teammate on Long Island who was the best man at Alzado’s wedding in March. “You need someone with the personality of Lyle to get the message across. His attitude now is that if he can prevent high school and college players from getting involved (with steroids), maybe he can turn the tide.”

Certainly, it would give meaning to his current condition, which he has identified as “the fight of my life.” Fighting is nothing new to Alzado, both on and off the football field, where his propensity for employing the protective headgear of opponents against them inspired an NFL rule that mandated “automatic disqualification of a player who uses a helmet he is not wearing as a weapon.” The man contemplated becoming a professional boxer while at Lawrence High School, and he did fight an eight-round exhibition against Muhammad Ali in 1979, during his tenure with the Denver Broncos. But the fights to which Alzado most often alluded occurred in the streets.

He spoke of them so openly and vividly that he was a newsman’s delight. In his first trip to the Super Bowl, at New Orleans in January, 1978, he quickly became a media darling by describing the gang wars, car thefts and occasional stabbings in his background. Each day the crowd around his table grew and so did the stories. By the end of the week, reporters who knew nothing about New York geography were associating Lawrence, in Long Island’s fashionable Five Towns, with Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx.

Actually, Alzado hailed from the poorer Inwood section. But so did Sal Ciampi, his high school role model who returned from a fine career at Purdue to assist with the Lawrence football program. “I know his mother was on welfare and he wanted nothing to do with his father,” Ciampi said from East Islip High School, where he is the head coach. “We used to send him clothes when he was at Yankton (S.D.) College because he had nothing. But as the stabbings and that stuff, I never witnessed anything like that. I said to Rich Mollo (the current Lawrence coach), ‘Did we miss something?”’

Lyons, a former high school coach in Connecticut whom Alzado publicly identified as his best friend on many occasions, said the man was involved in “a lot of fights. He was right on the borderline of becoming a bad person.” Some of Alzado’s claims, Lyons said, were examples of “slight exaggerations. He had an image he was portraying. But there is not a man I met on this earth tougher than him.”

Certainly, the picture he presented to the public, whether in uniform or in the formative stages of an acting career, was of a macho, indestructible force. That’s the Alzado on the poster that hangs in East Islip’s weight room, along with that of Boomer Esiason, the alumnus who quarterbacks the Cincinnati Bengals. It was far from the frail figure, his head bound by a scarf, that showed up in living rooms Saturday night.

“Lyle was here 15 days after he won Super Bowl (XVIII) with the Raiders,” Ciampi recalled. “He picked up my son and carried him around. My son remembers him as Uncle Lyle.” Although the coach didn’t see Alzado on the NBC show, Sal Jr., now 14, did. “He just broke down,” Ciampi said.

And yet, Lyons reported, the Alzado who appeared on television looked much better than the man he visited in Los Angeles two months ago. “He was just terrible then,” Lyons said. “He was near death.”

According to Lyons, Alzado “wasn’t right” at his wedding in March. He fell down the following day and attributed it to an inner ear infection. But when his condition worsened, he was admitted to a hospital where a biopsy disclosed the cancer. Lyons said he talked to Alzado on Tuesday and the man said the prognosis was good, that the cancer had been eradicated by radiation. Lyons fervently hopes for the best. “He’s a wonderful person,” Lyons said.

Ciampi thought about his long friendship with Alzado and the frequent arguments he has made against steroids to the students under his care. Whether or not the man’s cancer was directly attributable to steroids, he prays Alzado’s admission will have a positive effect. “If anything’s going to scare you,” the coach said, “that (current) picture should.”

Not even Alzado could have envisioned a more unsettling development in what has become a twisted plot.