Off the Team : People: Rosey Grier makes $40,000 to $60,000 as a part-time community liaison in San Diego. As the county budget tightened, critics cried foul.

With hands like butcher-shop beef shanks, the man once considered among the most feared players in professional football grips both ends of the veneered conference table the way he used to squeeze opposing quarterbacks.

But Roosevelt Grier’s words come with confessional quietness, a soft-spoken burst of wounded pride.

“I don’t know why it’s wrong for Rosey Grier to earn a living while everyone else is making theirs,” he says. “I’m not a wealthy man. Sure, I’m a well-known man. But I’ve got to put beans on the table like everybody else.”

Sometime in October, San Diego County officials will turn the tables on the retired 300-pound football tackle who once haunted NFL quarterbacks.

They’re going to sack Rosey Grier.

Citing both budget constraints and internal complaints about Grier’s $42.50 hourly salary for his part-time community liaison and trouble-shooting job, officials will give walking papers to the 60-year-old former Los Angeles Ram, pop singer, actor and social activist.

“Sure, Rosey Grier is a household word who has opened a lot of doors around here,” county spokesman Bob Lerner says. “But times are tough. We’ve got social workers overworked to the point of exhaustion, probation officers with case loads that have doubled and tripled.”

Officials say that Grier--a special assistant at the county administrative office--was among scores of county workers recently released by Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen in a move that will save more than $1.1 million.

“To put it simply, when push came to shove, there was a point where you needed to cut the cord,” Lerner says. “And having Rosey Grier on our payroll was a luxury we just simply could not continue.”

Insiders say, however, that Grier’s firing carried political overtones.

County Supervisor John MacDonald had received calls and letters complaining about Grier’s salary. He earned $40,000 to $65,000 a year working in various social programs.

“There were labor groups, workers and citizens, most of whom felt that $50,000 was quite a bit of money for a part-time job,” says Nancy Allen, a MacDonald aide. “So we turned the complaints over to county administration. And, in this case, I guess the squeaky wheel got the grease.”

Adds another county worker: “We realized we could go out and get volunteers to do the things for which he was charging us an arm and a leg.”

Grier, who since 1990 has worked an average of 25 hours a week meeting with everyone from gang members to local politicians, acknowledges that news of the planned firing has hit him hard, much like his sudden trade to the Rams from the New York Giants in 1963.

“It broke my heart to get traded from the Giants--and that’s how something like this feels,” says Grier, who wears an embroidered rose on his denim jeans and whose trademark goatee is now flecked with gray. “But I survived that trade OK and I’ll survive this. I’m a creative person. . . . I know how to put things together to make things happen. And that’s what I’m going to do now.”

Grier, an ordained Christian minister, plans to move to Kansas City, Mo., where he says he will continue his crusade for the disadvantaged with a consortium of Midwestern churches and businesses.

And he has two books due out next year, one about successful minority entrepreneurs and the other--his first novel--about family life in the ghetto.

His game plan, he says, will still include activities in Southern California, where he’ll live part time in Los Angeles and San Diego.

*

Grier’s San Diego job has been one more way that he has used his celebrity status to open doors in disadvantaged communities--cutting through red tape for people with few resources, galvanizing youth to aim for success.

He could be on the telephone one day with a local mechanic to ensure that an elderly woman’s car was properly repaired. He huddled with judges and attorneys about their roles in the juvenile justice system. He rallied funding and support from local business owners for public projects and commanded the ear of politicians statewide.

Even the Oval Office was his turf.

“Everyone respected the fact that Rosey could telephone the President of the United States and his call would get through the red tape,” Lerner says. “How many other people in local government could dial the White House and talk to the man in charge?

“When President Bush came to town last year, Rosey made a call to his camp, and within an hour he had a one-on-one meeting in that long black stretch limousine. I don’t think we’ll ever have that kind of access again.”

Grier attended school assemblies and community center groundbreakings. He threw parties for elderly shut-ins and once offered 100 free tickets and transportation to local senior citizens who wanted to hear Nelson Mandela speak in Los Angeles.

And he rapped with gang members on inner-city corners and in neighborhood alleys.

“I liked talking to kids,” he says. “I’d stop them on the street, find out where they were in life, where they were going, what their feelings were.”

In East San Diego, a gang complained to Grier that their backs were against the wall.

“What do you want us to do?” they asked. “They’ve taken the water out of the local pool. They’ve taken the nets away from the basketball court. People won’t hire us, even if there were jobs. And yet you don’t want us on the street. So where do we go?”

Grier says he thought hard on that one:

“I told them they were right. We ought to have an answer for them. And they should have the nets and the water in the pool. But they should also have respect for their community and their country.”

*

The anger of the inner city has taken its toll. Grier’s big hands move rapidly when he says that the billions of dollars spent annually in America’s black communities remain there for an average of only seven hours.

The reason, he says, is that most businesses are run by white, absentee owners who at closing time each day siphon the money out of the neighborhood where it belongs. Grier says the solution is more local black ownership.

But more must be done for the youngest ghetto generation, he says. In past years, Grier has managed two inner-city activist groups--Are You Committed? and Giant Step--and in San Diego has worked to establish a job-training corps for disadvantaged youths.

But perhaps most crucial to the survival of the inner city is the need to give black felons a second chance, he says:

“These people are a big part of the work force in the black community and yet nobody wants to give them a second chance. Nobody. Unless, of course, you count the local pusher. He’s all too willing to give that man a baggie and tell him to go out and make some cash.”

When he meets with gang members, Grier never asks about their crimes.

“It’s none of my business,” he says. “I ask them ‘Where do we go from here?’ ”

Brian Weaver knows all about what Rosey Grier can do.

Weaver, convicted of gang-related crimes in Los Angeles, spent 42 months in prison and had little hope for a job when he got out. Then he saw Grier on television.

Rosey put him to work helping choose ex-gang members for a jobs program.

“He just accepted me,” says Weaver, the 33-year-old father of two. “He talked to me and encouraged me. And he put me in a position of responsibility, something nobody had ever done in the past.”

After working with Grier’s activist group, Weaver moved on to sell real estate and now wants to produce programs for Christian television.

Grier, he says, changed his life:

“Rosey always used to tell me that I was special, that I was unique, that there was nobody else like me. He said my life had a purpose. Me, an ex-con. I never thought my life mattered.”

*

Grier says part of his ability to forgive comes from how he has managed his anger toward Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

Says Grier: “He shot the man I loved.”

Grier served as an aide to the presidential hopeful when he was gunned down outside the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Grier grabbed Sirhan’s leg and gun hand after the shots.

As the shooter struggled, Grier held his elbow against Sirhan’s nose. “I could have killed him right there,” he recalls. Instead, Grier protected him from the angry crowd.

Now Grier says he would not testify either for or against Sirhan’s parole, and he has forgiven him:

“If what I’m trying to do is real, making sure people can live together, then people like him must also be welcome in the world we create.”

The shooting also has shaped him into a nonviolent man.

Grier has rewritten movie and television parts rather than agree to fire a gun. He took up needlepoint and wrote a book about it, and later performed the song “It’s All Right to Cry,” a children’s tune about expressing emotions.

He says that these days he’s too wrapped up in his social concerns to spend much time weeping, and his needles are a little rusty.

He’s even changed his politics.

Grier became a Republican after Democrats refused to back his pet project to legalize prayer in public schools. And he’s become a George Bush follower and a defender of Dan Quayle.

Rosey Grier’s ready to tell the world what he believes. That includes criticism of minority athletes who he says have become too selfish and need to give more sweat and money back to their communities.

And, most importantly, that somebody needs to step forward and save America’s inner cities.

So, it might as well be him.