O’Neal Lets His Play Do Talking--Till Now : Chargers: Defensive end says he should be judged by his performance.

Leslie O’Neal chose to be silent for much of this season, and at the same time he quietly has climbed to the top in the AFC with 13 1/2 sacks.

O’Neal has played in 83 games for the Chargers, and although the opposition often puts two blockers in his path, he has compiled 65 sacks. Three more, and he becomes the team’s all-time leader.

Too often, however, what O’Neal has to say overpowers what he has done.

“I don’t care what anyone says about me as long as they can respect how I play,” O’Neal said. “But there was all this stuff about me in the preseason football magazines this year and my mother reads that stuff all the time, and so my parents began to worry about me.

“I’m a grown person and I can take care of myself and I could care less what’s written, but it affected them, and with everything they had to deal with, they didn’t need any more worries.

“My dad lost one leg to diabetes during the summer, and lost the other leg earlier this season. I mean he’s still dealing with it. . . . My aunt, who helped raise me when my mom and dad were working, also lost both of her legs this year to diabetes. It’s been a hard year for everyone, and they didn’t need any more problems.”

And so O’Neal declined to make headlines, a stifling departure from his perch as the player most likely to rankle the Chargers.

“Look at Charles Haley,” O’Neal said. “Everybody said he’s a bad guy, but he went to a team (Dallas) that said we don’t care what they say about you, you’re the kind of person we need. We need your playing abilities on the field. That’s how I want people to look at me, whether it’s here in San Diego or somewhere else.”

“Someone here told me about three or four years ago: ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you too good to kiss ass?’ Why do I need to do that? I’m good at what I do. Isn’t that enough?”

The muzzle’s off, and the headline workers are on the job again.

“I like publicity,” he said. “It’s gratification or acknowledgement of services rendered on top of pay.”

O’Neal, however, has always operated under the notion that his name is last on the list of those to be recognized for a job well done. It has driven him to excel, and it has driven him crazy.

“Worst feeling in the world; I still remember it,” he said. “I made the Pro Bowl for the first time and Al Saunders announced it in a meeting. He said Lee Williams, Anthony Miller and I made it, and in the same sentence he said, ‘Well, Billy Ray Smith didn’t make it.’

“Is that an accomplishment for me, or are you more upset that somebody else didn’t make it? That has always stuck in my mind. What would have happened if Billy Ray Smith had made it, and I didn’t? Would they have said it was a travesty Leslie O’Neal didn’t make it?

“Through that whole span of time it was like those are good honors, but it’s really a team deal. Now all of a sudden you read about Pro Bowler Junior Seau and Pro Bowler Gill Byrd. Now people have greater interest in that than they did in the past. So I think: Is it OK for me to make it or not? OK, it’s not a big deal with me, but with other guys it is?”

Everybody in the world has it in for O’Neal, and that’s the way it has to be with him. He believes the mailman delivers bills to his house and nobody else’s.

“When I get (recognition),” he said, “I’ll be able to turn my back on a lot of people and say, ‘You didn’t do it for me, I did it for myself.’ ”

Smith got more attention. Burt Grossman made the cover of Sports Illustrated. Now Seau stands in the spotlight.

Real or imagined, it motivates.

“I think there is an effort to get him (Seau) a lot of publicity, and I can handle that. The whole team is getting more publicity, and if I play well, then maybe people will say he’s leading the league in sacks, and, oh wow, maybe it’s not (Seau’s) team. I don’t have any qualms about people getting publicity; I’ll get my piece of the pie.”

There might be no one in the Charger locker room who longs for a date on Monday Night Football more than O’Neal. He wants to be one of the best players in the game, “and one of the highest paid.”

Two more victories, coupled with a Denver loss, and the Chargers earn a playoff berth and their players get playoff notoriety.

“There is a certain amount of excitement with the chance at making the playoffs,” he said. “A certain amount of ‘finally,’ a certain amount of damn, what took so long and a certain amount of don’t get stupid it hasn’t happened yet we could end up 8-8 and out of the playoffs.”

Or, they could end up in the Super Bowl.

“Scenario: We go to the Super Bowl this year,” he said. “I have a good game, people start to look back and see a guy that came back from an injury, switched positions, went through coaching, management changes and a horrible defensive scheme and here he is seven years later. A survivor.”

To hear O’Neal talk, of course, it has always been tough for him. Forget for a moment he was a first-round pick and presently the highest-paid player on the team. More often than not, it’s: Why me? Why me? Why me?

“I fly back from the Pro Bowl to play in the Shearson Lehman golf tournament, or whatever it is called, and the next day I pick up a newspaper and there’s a big old article on Billy Joe Tolliver and how versatile he is. Maybe he is a little bit better than me as a golfer, but I just came back from the Pro Bowl, I just came back off a major injury to make the Pro Bowl, and they’re writing about him. Why couldn’t that be me?

“I don’t worry about it, but I go out and work on my golf game so someday people will say he is a good golfer. I work on my football game so people will one day say he’s also a good football player.”

The Chargers want O’Neal to join them for off-season workouts, and he refuses. The Chargers want him to spend time in their weight room, and he stays away. The Chargers want him to practice hard every day, and he won’t.

“This is a business,” he said. “I’m playing for the Chargers because they think I can help them win. Period. That’s the only reason. I know my body; they can bitch at me every Wednesday for the rest of my life and I don’t care because I study on Wednesday and I know on Thursday I’ll go out and practice and run to the ball. They get upset because I don’t run hard on Wednesday, but look at the games. Can they complain about that?”

The Chargers have become upset with O’Neal. Coach Bobby Ross met with him in the off-season, and then publicly expressed disappointment when O’Neal failed to report for voluntary workouts. The front office panned him as a malcontent.

“I read Ross’ comments. So what? It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “You can say anything you want about me from January to July. You can just about say anything you want about me from July through training camp.

“The bottom line is you got to go out and play, and go ask Bobby Ross if what I did in the off-season has affected how he feels about the way I’m playing now. People forget about that stuff in the past.

“They don’t pay you a full salary in training camp, they give you an allotment of money that says, OK, this is just a little bit of change for your time. Your salary is based on just 17 game weeks. That’s what you get paid for. You don’t get paid for practice. You get paid for those Sundays, and I’m ready.”

The Chargers encouraged their players to report to summer school this year. They had almost 50 practices, and O’Neal was a no-show for every one.

“Why do you go to summer school? You don’t make good grades, right? It’s my job to go out and know the scheme. If I can can’t do that, then I would need to go to summer school, but I didn’t have problems with the scheme. I knew it. Go ask them. Look at my grades as compared to everybody else on the team. I grade out the highest and I played more plays than anyone else last year,” he said.

“I don’t do things because I’m ornery or don’t believe in them. A lot of people say I’m bucking the organization. No. I’m doing what it takes for me to help the organization. We’ve had enough cheerleaders standing on the sideline for the Chargers. We need people that can go out there and make plays.”

He suffered a knee injury earlier this season, and rather than seek medical attention locally, he found his own doctor and missed a game he otherwise might have played in. “We won,” he said.

Instead of making an appearance on the sidelines in a show of support, he remained out of town.

“I for one don’t care who is sitting on the bench,” he said. “It’s not like they give me inspiration. It’s just another person sitting in the way or another person on a road trip taking an extra seat that I could use to stretch out and get ready to play. That’s how I think.

“If you can’t play, I understand that. You’re better off getting healthy so you can play. If you’re standing on the sideline you got your coach looking at you wondering just how hurt you are. Why can’t you play a little, and if you can play a little, why not a lot? I went through that with Al Saunders when I was hurt earlier, and I learned to stay away.”

O’Neal makes no attempt to soften the stance or smooth over the discourse, although his sensitivity makes him an easy touch for charitable causes.

Two years ago he heard about the plight of some youngsters who had been orphaned, and quietly wrote out a huge check. A woman needed funds to fight for the custody of her child, and his bankroll became her bankroll.

The acts of community service are done without fanfare by his own choosing. A reporter sought an audience earlier this season to write a story documenting one of his charitable deeds, and he declined.

“When I retire I want people to say he’s a good football player. That’s all,” he said. “I don’t want them to mix in the fact he did this charity and he did that charity, because it taints it. I’ve never wanted to be paper-made.

“I want to earn everything I get. When you start doing a lot of charities, you get this attention and you think back, was he really a good player or was he a charitable person which made him seem like a better football player? I see people using charity as a way of gaining publicity. That’s disrespectful to the people who are in the bad situation.”

O’Neal has been a dominating football player since piling up 12 1/2 sacks in his 13-game, injury-shortened rookie year. However, his off-the-field remarks have taken the luster off the All-Pro image.

Two years ago he became embroiled in a controversy with Coach Dan Henning when he suggested the organization showed favoritism in promoting certain unnamed players and that the season was already lost with three games to play.

Many people came to the conclusion that O’Neal had singled out Smith as being the player given preferential treatment by the team. O’Neal also suggested obliquely that the team’s promotional efforts were racially motivated.

“It still could be; I don’t know,” O’Neal said. “I really don’t know. How could you say it’s racial when you have guys both black and white going to the Pro Bowl? But there are a lot of undertones in there.

“I didn’t make the Pro Bowl because the organization pushed me. I made the Pro Bowl because a lot of people had written me off after getting hurt, and boom, it was like where did this guy come from after I returned and played well? That’s why I got it.

“I never used Billy Ray Smith’s name, and I was not implying it was Billy Ray Smith. All I said was there were people getting a lot of publicity, and it should have been going to other people like Gill Byrd. I sat there watching Gill get overlooked and I thought it was my obligation to speak up.

“I wasn’t talking about Billy Ray Smith. But for me to say no one’s name, and then everybody throws his name up, then there must be something funky in the pot. Obviously a lot of people knew what was going on, but nobody said anything about it.

“I wasn’t suggesting racism was involved, although I probably could have taken a racist view. Here I was a black person, and I had gone through all these things and this guy had never gone through an ounce of what I had gone through, and look what he gets.

“But isn’t that a racist approach to even think that way? That would be racism on my part to say he’s getting all this publicity because he’s white. Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe he could be paying people under the table. The only way you can know about racism is to get into the mind of the person.”

When he does speak and it is controversial, he stands by what he has said. Two years ago Henning threatened in a meeting before the team to suspend him for things he had said publicly. Most players would have wilted under such pressure and retracted their comments or claimed they were misquoted.

“I said what I had to say,” O’Neal said. “I don’t regret it.

“I look at my dad now and that’s why I don’t let a lot of stuff bother me. A lot of people counted him out and he’s made it. He’s a man’s man, and he doesn’t have to play second-fiddle to anybody. That’s an inspiration. I wouldn’t be paying respect to my father if I wasn’t somewhat like him.”

He does things his way, and he always has since the day he demanded to meet team owner Alex Spanos before signing a contract to play for the Chargers.

“If I had listened to everything Al Saunders said to me when I was coming through my knee rehabilitation, would I be playing now? I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. But he’s not here. If I had listened to everything Dan Henning said when he was coach, and it didn’t work out, would he have given me a job in Detroit? Does he have that kind of power? I don’t think so.”

Like the army, the NFL does not take kindly to privates who do not heed command.

“I’ve heard that a lot: ‘I’m not a team player,’ ” O’Neal said. “But I don’t hear that when I’m taking on the guard and playing games with the tackle to set someone else free. They only say that in the off-season because I don’t conform to what every one else wants.

“I can make Mr. Spanos happy. As long as he owns the team, he’s in a position to say I don’t care what anyone around here says, I want him. He’s calling the shots, just like Bobby Beathard.

“Bobby Ross is running this time right now, but you don’t know for how long. Things are happening and he’s a good coach, but you don’t have any security there. The only security I see right now is basically with Mr. Spanos, Dean Spanos and Bobby Beathard. These are really the only people that can do something for me. They can say this player is on the team regardless of what the head coach says.”

Does he know what he is saying?

“Now when you say stuff like that--that’s not saying Bobby Ross doesn’t have any power, but it’s just business. Mr. Spanos owns the team and he gave Beathard the power to run it. I’ve had some meetings with Bobby Ross because Beathard has called my agent and my agent has said it’s a good move, do it. But what I do on the field, that’s all that matters.

“Maybe I could be better off doing it their way, but if they’re wrong, are they going to guarantee to protect me and keep me around until I can do it my way and get it right again? I know my way works, and if it doesn’t, I have me to blame.”