Unnecessary Roughness? : Raiders’ Reed Still Is Upset About Treatment From Rams

Raider defensive tackle Doug Reed had been sitting with a reporter for a while after a morning workout last week when offensive tackle Steve Wright walked by, grinned and said: “Are you still talking?”

Reed didn’t return the smile. “I’ve been holding this in for a year, man,” he replied.

Suddenly, it all came out: Feelings of anger. Feelings of rejection. Feelings of depression. All of it directed at the Rams.

Reed had been a Ram for eight seasons, starting all 16 games in 1990. Just before the 1991 deadline for protecting players from Plan B free agency, the Rams offered him a $687,500, one-year contract. Of that amount, $550,000 was the base salary and $137,500 was a bonus.

In Reed’s eyes, however, that bonus, promised a year earlier, should have been tacked onto his 1990 base salary of $400,000, making his salary that year $537,500.

Therefore, he reasoned, $550,000 represented a raise of only $12,500. Reed doesn’t count the $137,500 bonus that brought the total offer for ’91 to $687,500. His logic is that the bonus should have been his the previous year.

No thank you, Reed told the Rams. Instead, he opted to take his chances on the Plan B route.

“We pleaded with him to take the $700,000 (actually $687,500),” Ram Executive Vice President John Shaw said. “We wanted him in camp early. One of the complaints about him was that he always came in late, and he came in overweight. We figured, ‘Let’s overpay him and avoid that’ because we needed the help on the defensive line. So we made an offer above his market value.

“We told him, ‘Come in in February and work out. If you wait until April, we’re going to lose interest in you and lose the inducement to bring you in.’ ”

When Reed nixed the offer, the Rams responded by leaving him unprotected. But nobody claimed him.

Reed was not invited to minicamp in the spring of 1991. And he received no new offer from the Rams.

Finally, he demanded either an offer or his release.

The Rams responded with an offer: $150,000.

“They were going to degrade Doug Reed all the way to the bottom,” Reed said, but he ultimately told the Rams: “I’ll take it.”

“They might have thought I was going to let my pride get in the way,” Reed said. “But I decided to forget my pride. I accepted the offer. It shocked them to the point where Shaw called me and asked me what I was up to. I told him, I wasn’t up to anything.”

Shaw said he doesn’t remember such a conversation.

Reed said the Rams countered their own offer, upping the ante to $200,000.

“It didn’t matter at that point,” Reed said. “I was going to play.”

At 31, coming back to a team that had serious problems in the defensive line, Reed believed he could still be a major factor.

But he kept hearing otherwise.

“(Coach) John Robinson made some statements,” Reed recalled, “saying that I would never be a part of this football team. That was pretty harsh, and I was really hurt by that.”

Reed signed a contract but found himself relegated to a backup role.

“They said they wanted to see what I could do,” Reed said. “You would think they would know what Doug Reed could do after eight years. I played my buns off for that team during some bad seasons.”

Said Shaw: “We had switched defenses, and he wasn’t a player who fit into our scheme. We gave him a chance because we wanted to see what he had left. If he didn’t make our team, we were hoping someone else would at least see him, like him, and he could negotiate a deal with them.”

Reed started three exhibition games in 1991. He said he was made yet another offer by John Robinson for the regular season, this one for $300,000, plus a $150,000 bonus if he played half the games.

Shaw said that offer is news to him.

Reed said he turned it down.

Either way, the announcement was that Reed was cut. “By then, I didn’t want to play for them,” he said. “I felt I was being steamrolled after all the years I had been there and really worked my butt off. I was a starter at $90,000 at one point and never complained. I figured I was in shape and somebody would pick me up.”

But nobody did. Reed was out of work.

Before he left, Reed had some final words for Robinson. “I told him, ‘We’re all expendable.’

“His number was called soon after mine, and I had some sense of pleasure when he was gone.”

But no sense of security. It got tough for Reed. He had to give up a new auto maintenance business he had started. He had to sit home and watch a phone that never rang.

He called 20 teams but couldn’t find a job.

“I knew nobody cared about Doug Reed,” he said. “Not the Rams. Not anyone. No one called to ask how I was doing. I felt like the world had closed its doors on me. It’s a lonely feeling.”

But Reed kept working out. And kept hoping. And finally, he got the call he had been waiting for a week before training camp opened.

With defensive linemen Greg Townsend and Scott Davis holding out, Reed has found a home, perhaps only temporarily, across town with the Raiders.

“It’s not going to be easy to make this team,” Raider Coach Art Shell said. “But Doug has played in this league. He’s a good player. You never know.”