Gary Could Find Success at Fingertips

Cleveland Gary, vividly recalling the first time he handled a football in an NFL game: “It was against Atlanta. I went 18 yards on my first run and went into the end zone for a touchdown. But they marked the ball at the one, even though I definitely crossed over the line. So, I should have scored on my first pro play, but I didn’t.”

It is a good story, were it only true.

The record shows that the first time he carried for the Rams after reporting later to active duty than expected, Gary, a tough customer bearing the names of two tough towns, actually made a five-yard advance against the San Francisco 49ers near the end of the first quarter, tucking in the football nicely and protecting it dearly. That 18-yarder against Atlanta did not occur until a week later, in case Gary cares to get a firmer grasp on the facts.

Gary is a young ram-charger of a running back, blessed with wrought-iron legs but cursed with buttered fingers. He already has made many good runs with the football and will make a good many more, with luck beginning today when 11 Phoenix Cardinals attempt to impede his progress in the Rams’ season opener. Despite bothersome injuries, Gary is due back in the starting lineup at tailback, as he was for John Robinson a year ago before the footballs and weeks began slipping away.

If there is a man in camp who can make or break the 1991-model Rams, it is this one. So much depends on whether he bears scars, physical or psychological. Gary says no, that he is fit to play, eager to go, fed up with all the gab, fired up about re-establishing himself with the football establishment, with his opponents, with his public, with the world at large. Willingness to forgive and forget will depend on his success.

“There’s so much talk,” Gary says courteously and cautiously, sighing and smiling. “Talk, talk, talk. ‘How you going to do this season?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I think you’re going to be one of the top backs in the league this season.’ ‘OK, thanks.’ ‘How do you feel about all those fumbles last season?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I’m all talked out and the season hasn’t even started yet.”

In his heart of hearts, Gary hopes everyone sees last season’s fumble-rama for what it was, a fluke, a chain reaction, a run of rotten luck during which he carried the anxiety of fumbling along with him whenever he carried the ball itself.

He brought no reputation as a juggler with him from the University of Miami, nimbly catching more passes than any back--or, in fact, anybody--ever had for that football-mad school in any one season. And as a baseball player in the organization of the Montreal Expos, pursuing a double life along the lines of those lived by fellow Southeastern collegians Bo Jackson or Prime Time Sanders, never had the versatile Gary been regarded as anything but sure-handed.

So, he hopes that the average Ram fan understands. That football players fumble, yes. That he, himself, will fumble again, yes. That it isn’t necessarily endemic to his nature. That merely because someone fumbled once does not imply that it is in his character to do so, that it means nothing, that there is no sense in branding a guy, as, say, Wendell Tyler once was, as unfit or untrustworthy beyond the two-minute warning, simply because his team cannot, at this all-or-nothing juncture, afford a foul-up.

There was a time when everyone around Gary had as much confidence in him as he did, this man who remembers--also vividly--coming to pro football from Miami armed with the knowledge that no college could have prepared him better.

“Anxiety is part of a rookie’s life, but it wasn’t so much part of mine because of Miami,” Gary recalls, catching his breath after practice a couple of days before beginning his third Ram season.

“There were so many guys from our team who were going off to the NFL and making names for themselves, and some of them were the same guys I’d practiced against day after day.”

He smiles.

“And most of them,” Gary says, “I kicked their butts.”

For the pro team that had thrived on the running of Eric Dickerson and Charles White and others, for a coach who had never gone without a 1,000-yard rusher on a college campus or in an NFL camp, Gary was given the assignment of carrying the Ram running game and balancing the passing act of Jim Everett and his excellent receivers. Gary seemed ideally suited to the task and rattled off 808 yards and 14 touchdowns, to be sure.

Trouble is, those dozen fumbles, seven of which the Rams lost, undercut all his positive efforts. The naturally sympathetic side of Robinson implored him to show faith in Gary, to continue using him, to defend him, to avoid permanently wrecking his confidence. The realist in Robinson told him that this simply wasn’t working, that Gary had to go take a seat, for the good of the team, maybe even for his own peace of mind.

Today, Robinson reassures everyone, himself included, that the real Cleveland Gary has returned, that “he’s going to be in the top 10 (rushers). I see him as a 1,000-yarder.”

Does Gary? He doesn’t know. A top-10 back? OK, thanks. More fumbles? He doesn’t know. Talk, talk, talk.

“How about we just give me the ball,” he says, “then see what I do with it?”