RAM NOTEBOOK / JOHN WEYLER : Everyone Feels Better Now That Flipper’s Not in Pain

Watching Flipper Anderson being wheeled out of the locker room on a stretcher, Coach John Robinson had to wonder if the Rams had lost their game-breaking wide receiver for the year . . . or longer.

Anderson, who suffered a back injury Sept. 22 during the third quarter of a game against San Francisco, was in such agony he couldn’t think about anything but the present.

“I just wanted them to take away the pain,” Anderson said.

Anderson is no longer in pain, though, and he is back as the Rams’ best opportunity to put the big hurt on a defense. In his return last week against New Orleans, he made the most of a few opportunities, catching four passes for 91 yards and a touchdown.

“I don’t feel any pain in the back anymore,” Anderson said. “I wasn’t even sore after the game. I wasn’t scared before the game, but I was curious what (the first hit) was going to feel like. It didn’t hurt and it was cool after that.”

Anderson suffered a fractured vertebra. He calls it “just a bone break.” For a player who had never missed a game because of injury since he started playing organized football, however, a debilitating lower-back injury had to send shock waves through his psyche.

A month after the injury, Anderson was very sore as he stood on the sideline and watched the Ram-Raider game. It hurt to stand. Still, he never doubted that he would fully recover.

“The doctors gave me the full diagnosis,” he said. “They said it happens to parachute jumpers a lot. And they said (Tony) Dorsett came back from it.”

Anderson came back in a flash.

“Didn’t he look fast?” Robinson asked. “I think it says something about fresh legs that none of us really know about.”

Anderson, who will start Sunday against Kansas City, said his legs do feel stronger and he even seems to have more energy. He says he no longer thinks about his back, which according to Robinson, says a lot about Anderson.

“There are different kinds of toughness,” Robinson said. “It’s one thing if there’s a guy coming at you that you can attack, but this is that I-do-this-and-then-some-body-hits-me-and-I-can’t-think-about-it toughness.”

Running and catching footballs have always come easily for Anderson. Offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese says he is “never surprised anymore by the plays Flipper makes.” But watching his teammates play on television was a strange and uncomfortable experience for Anderson.

“It was funny,” he said, “and it was frustrating and nerve-racking You never miss what you can do best until you can’t do it. Then you really appreciate it.”

One-Two Punch: Kansas City’s Barry Word rushed for 1,015 yards last season. These days, he rarely makes an appearance. He has become the last word in the Chiefs’ plan because of the emergence of rookie Harvey Williams, their No. 1 draft pick.

In the past four games, Williams has rushed for 277 yards in 57 carries. Word has 14 carries for 39 yards.

“I wouldn’t say Harvey has performed better than we expected, but maybe sooner than we expected,” Coach Marty Schottenheimer said.

With Christian Okoye, who is second in the NFL with 761 rushing yards, regularly blasting his way into defensive secondaries and Word coming off a great year, Kansas City didn’t figure to be looking for running backs in the draft.

They weren’t looking, but they found one.

“He was clearly the best player left on the board and we had him rated decidedly higher than anybody else that was still there when we picked,” Schottenheimer said. “And, having worked with the young man at the Senior Bowl, we felt very comfortable about the individual.”

Williams is 6 feet 2 and 222 pounds, tall and thin as NFL running backs go. But he is very fast and has tremendous acceleration. The contrast between Okoye the bulldozer and Williams the greyhound has helped the Chiefs become the fifth-best rushing team in the league.

“It’s a big plus,” Schottenheimer said. “When you’re playing against a guy like Christian, or a guy like Barry, who has such great strength, you kind of sit down there on your haunches to take that big hit on. Then, all of sudden, you put Harvey in and he plays the game at a different speed than these other guys.”

Okoye, who “slumped” to an 805-yard season in 1990 after rolling up 1,480 in ‘89, is still the workhorse, averaging 19 carries. He has also become more than a runaway tank.

“His improvement has been remarkable,” Schottenheimer said. “He’s obviously made a breakthrough in terms of his reads and his cuts and his understanding of blocking schemes.

“In the past, quite frankly, if the read didn’t show up exactly the way we had anticipated it would, and often times they don’t, there was some uncertainty in his mind. But that’s pretty much vanished. There’s no hesitation now.”

Under Fire: Robinson says he pays very little attention to criticism from fans and members of the media who say he should be fired. After all those years at USC, when he received a couple of hundred critical letters every week despite the fact the Trojans won so often, he has become callous.

“One guy wrote about me about once every three weeks and said, ‘Next week, I’ll kill you.’ ” Robinson said. “The postal service got involved. We won, 38-7, and this guy says, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’

“I don’t think you can expose yourself to criticism. You have to understand that someone who’s critical of what you do doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If a competent critic evaluates what you do and says, ‘You’re making these errors,’ you look at it. But if it’s somebody who’s never seen you practice, why would you care? Why would you give credibility to that?”

Robinson admits he became “a bit of a zombie” by the end of last season when the Rams closed out a 5-11 season with four consecutive defeats. He says every loss takes its toll, but has remained upbeat during a 3-6 start this season because he believes the team is fighting its way up, instead of sliding down.

“I’m having a good year (emotionally), I’m just not winning,” he said. “I’ve gone through stages of burnout. I thought I was that way at SC some, but you talk yourself in and out of those things.

“I think you have to try and deal with the issue at hand, and, for us right now, it’s building the team back to a winning place. That’s what’s at hand and I’m very capable of that. I’m good at that.”

Despite front-office rumblings--especially at the end of last season--Robinson is confident that the Ram organization believes he can return the team to playoff caliber. And he insists his relationship with Executive Vice President John Shaw is better than ever.

“We are working at the highest level ever,” Robinson said. “We’re very much together, in terms of saying this is what we need to try and do. I feel very strongly about it.

“Does losing now erode some of those things? We’ll see, but this is the best we’ve been in this organization in terms of single-mindedness. I think if we stay that way, we’ll fight our way back up. And if we don’t, we’ll change and start again, whether that involves me or somebody else.”