Mims Gets Right Down to Business

It has been axiomatic down through the years with the Chargers, and seemingly all of the National Football League, that getting first-round draft choices to training camp is about as easy as playing Pebble Beach in a hurricane.

Draft a player No. 1 and he comes to town and meets the press and poses in his new jersey and smiles and . . .

. . . disappears.

Poof.

You find his telephone is disconnected and mail comes back with no forwarding address. You begin to wonder if the draftee was a person or an apparition, maybe someone the club hired from Central Casting for a cameo appearance. He could not have disappeared so completely if he had changed his identity and gone into one of those witness protection programs.

This is known as playing hard to get . . . or hard to sign.

One person in the world, it seems, can make contact with these elusive characters. The Agent. He is the eyes, ears, mouth and, most importantly perhaps, the financial conscience of these most highly regarded players.

The Agent has this paranoia about eagerness. The Agent was probably a guy who was trying to find a date to the prom at about time the band was announcing the last dance. The Agent plays on general managers’ nerves, contractual “chicken” if you will.

Something strange has happened hereabouts.

Chris Mims, the Chargers’ No. 1 pick this year, is already signed, sealed and going to work Monday through Friday at the stadium. What’s more, he has been signed since June 5.

Indeed, that’s about three months earlier than the Chargers have come to expect to see their No. 1 pick. They usually don’t have to even bother assigning him a room in their training camp dormitories at UC San Diego. They usually come to wonder why they have bothered assigning him a uniform number.

Yet, Mr. Mims, a defensive end from the University of Tennessee, is busily going about his business of approaching this professional football stuff as the business it is.

“It is a business,” he said. “You can get fired at it. You can be here today and gone tomorrow. You have to treat it as a job.”

That was his attitude before he was drafted. That was what he told Harold Daniels, his representative. Play football, not games.

“I wanted to sign and get things together,” he said. “I didn’t want to get way behind. I wanted to get signed and get it behind me before training camp. I didn’t want to miss any learning experience.”

Of course, he did not walk in, sign a blank contract and let the Chargers fill in whatever numbers they deemed appropriate.

“Everything I was looking for was there,” he said, “so I signed.”

I don’t know exactly what things he had in mind for that contract, but one “7” and five zeros to the left of the decimal point would seem to suffice as comfortable annual compensation. This, for four years, is big business.

With this thought in mind, Mims is seriously approaching the transition from the Southeastern Conference to the AFC West.

In assessing films of his new peers, Mims has astutely come to a couple of conclusions: “Even the small guys are strong . . . Even the real big guys are fast.”

These are lessons which will get a fella’s attention. At 6-feet-5 and 265 pounds, Mims is smaller than a lot of people and he better be fast enough to beat them. At the same time, he better be strong enough to beat the smaller guys who are faster.

This is not an easy life to be approaching as a rookie.

“It might be unpleasant,” he said, “and it might be rough, but I’m going to approach it one day at a time. I’m pushing myself. I’m not anxious for training camp to start because I want to have time to get myself really ready for it.”

Unlike recent No. 1 choices, Mims has taken up residence where preparation can best be accomplished. He is conditioning under the tutelage of the Charger trainers, lifting weights and running the treadmill. He has a playbook in hand. He has films to study. It’s nice to have a “destination” in mind, but it’s easier to get there with a map.

This is one No. 1 pick who will be settled both in the locker room and in the community by the time training camp starts. Most of his predecessors needed maps just to get to the stadium--and then the locker room--for the home opener.

“I’ve been shopping, going to the beach, going to movies, going to restaurants,” Mims said. “Someone on the team’s got to teach me how to play golf.”

The way this guy is getting around, he’s going to be president of the Chamber of Commerce before he reports to his first training camp.