First Cut Is the Deepest, but Others Hurt, Too

“The Blade” is just a nickname, but the man who carries it, Ram quarterback Jim Everett, swore he saw the real thing on a gory, ghastly Sunday afternoon at Anaheim Stadium.

“We were out there with a knife in one hand,” Everett said, “and we weren’t stabbing anybody but us.

“When you’re stabbing yourself in the leg all the time, the bleeding is hard to stop.”

Desperately seeking a tourniquet, the Rams instead merely ran up the cutlery metaphors.

They forked the ball over six times in four quarters.

They spoon-fed the New Orleans Saints to 37 points.

They were sliced and diced, carved and skewered, and, finally, served up on a silver platter. Rack of Ram, barbecued Cajun style.

“Totally humiliated,” were Everett’s words for this 37-14 defeat, which just as easily could have been 44-0 or 51-0, had that been Jerry Glanville on the east sideline and not Jim Mora.

But because Mora likes Chuck Knox, he called off the blitz at 37-0, pulled starting quarterback Bobby Hebert at 37-7, and had backup Mike Buck kneel three times in the shadow of the Rams’ goal posts, mercifully allowing the final 1:51 to expire in peace.

Come back from 24 points down? The Rams did that once, a week earlier in Tampa Bay, and might have been fooled into thinking they had a patent pending.

Come back from 37 points down?

With 12:30 to play?

Against the No. 2 defense in the NFL?

Come back next week.

“Take nothing away from Tampa Bay,” Everett said, “but this team is going to the playoffs. It has a fine, fine defense. To come back against these guys would have been a huge thing.”

At 37-0 . . . or at 6-0. And it was 6-0 in a hurry, just as soon as Cleveland Gary got his hands on the football and took them off, which, of course, meant the Rams’ first official play from scrimmage.

Everett couldn’t believe it. Handoff to Gary at the Ram 10-yard line, handoff to Saint linebacker Sam Mills at the Ram 12.

Spinning away from the play in disgust, Everett stomped his foot angrily into the turf.

“How many points are we gonna spot these guys this time?” he muttered to himself.

He was about to find out, the hard way.

Within seconds, it was 6-0. Eric Martin scored the touchdown on a 14-yard pass from Hebert and Morten Andersen, committing the only New Orleans error of the first three quarters, clanked the extra point off the right upright.

Then, 13-0--Everett to New Orleans cornerback Toi Cook for the interception, Fred McAfee over from the one-yard line for the touchdown.

Then, 20-0--Hebert to Torrance Small through a stream of broken tackles for a 16-yard scoring play.

Then, 23-0--Flipper Anderson fumbles at the Ram 33, Andersen kicks 21-yard field goal.

Then, 30-0--Vaughn Dunbar on a one-yard scoring plunge.

Then, 37-0--Gary fumbles again, Saints drive 77 yards, Craig Heyward scores the touchdown on a nine-yard burst up the middle.

Throw in two more interceptions, which Everett did, and the Rams were piling on the turnovers. There were six of them in a span of 38 minutes. Three fumbles, three interceptions. In Anaheim, this is known as a balanced offense.

Sunday’s lesson, Knox decided, “is that you cannot play Santa Claus and expect to have a chance to win.” He was not necessarily referring to Gary, who has gift-wrapped three footballs in the past two weeks, but he was asked about him anyway.

“I don’t want to make any (rash) judgments,” said Knox, skillfully juking the question. “The emotionalism . . . we’re still too close to the game. I want to look at the films first.”

When he sees them, he will see Gary playing up to his reputation. The yards keep coming--Gary is up to a career-high 981--but so, too, do the fumbles.

Frustrated?

“Not at all,” Gary insisted. “The way I look at it, I’ve had two bad games all year. As far as fumbles go, I had a bad day against Phoenix and I had a bad day today.

“I’ve done a lot of good things for the offense, too. Unfortunately, when you do great things, you don’t have as many microphones around you as when you make mistakes. That’s how it is in this profession.”

Someone suggested to Gary that this has been a season of highs and lows for him.

Gary frowned and shook his head.

“I haven’t had a lot of lows. I disagree with that statement,” he said. “The Phoenix game and the Saints game--those were the lows. We’ve played 14 games and two of them were bad for me. I’ve had a lot of highs. I’d say 98% high and 2% low.”

Math, obviously, was not Gary’s major at the University of Miami.

“There isn’t anybody on this team who has been great 100% of the time this season,” Gary continued. “Just like there isn’t anybody writing this down who has written 100% great stories. I had two bad games. . . . Two out of 14. I’m not going to worry about that.”

How about worrying about this: After Sunday’s debacle, the Rams are 0-15 against the rest of the NFC West since December, 1990.

That’s 0-4 against Atlanta, 0-5 against San Francisco and 0-6 against New Orleans.

The Rams are building, all right.

Building a mental block about their own division.

“I don’t know if I’d call it a block,” Everett said. “You’re talking about some good football teams. There are a couple teams in our division who haven’t lost very many games. There’s a reason for that.”

And there’s another team that has lost nine times already this season. There’s a reason for that, too.

According to The Blade, it has something to do with blades.