Persistence Pays Off : After Raider Torment and a Backup Role in Dallas, Beuerlein Is a Starter

He is lean, tanned and the proud owner of a desert home with enough land out back for a basketball court.

He has Garrison Hearst behind him, Gary Clark in the corner of his eye and nothing but clear, twinkling skies ahead.

Steve Beuerlein, the new quarterback of the new Phoenix Cardinals, is so giddy that he doesn’t even think about the Raiders.

Not that Raider owner Al Davis didn’t almost win.

With the quiet honesty of a survivor, Beuerlein now acknowledges that at one point during the 1990 Raider season, Davis almost dislocated Beuerlein’s psyche.

That’s some word, almost.

It was late October. Beuerlein’s nightmare had reached midseason. He was still in the dark as to why he was not allowed to wear a Raider uniform on game day, even though he belonged to the team and had been the starting quarterback one year earlier.

He was still naive enough to think that his preseason holdout would soon be forgotten. He still thought that, any day, his exile would end.

But weeks stretched to two months, and always it was the same.

George Karras, a Raider official, would walk up to him on Saturday, after Beuerlein had spent a week preparing to play, and inform him that he would watch the game in blue jeans.

On the day before the eighth game, when Karras approached Beuerlein on a Saturday afternoon in a hotel hallway, it finally sank in.

Beuerlein suddenly realized what was later confirmed by an assistant coach in a whisper: Davis had ordered that Beuerlein would not wear a uniform the entire season.

“ ‘I thought, ‘No, George, please, don’t tell me this again,’ ” Beuerlein says.

He wanted to scream at Karras, to grab him by the neck and shake him and ask him if he knew what it felt like to have a career stolen.

But he held back. To this day, he is not sure how, but he held back.

“I thought, ‘Why are the Raiders putting me through this? Why?’ ” he said.

Beuerlein no longer has such thoughts. With the birth of NFL free agency this year, the word among veterans is, why ask why?

When you are unhappy in your current situation, simply wait until you are free, then make a 40-yard dash to that grass on the other side.

By joining the Cardinals, Beuerlein has done this better than most.

“I am being very serious when I say that I feel like one of the luckiest men on earth,” Beuerlein said.

The Raiders might have burned a year of Beuerlein’s professional life, which might have forced him to accept two more years as a backup with the Dallas Cowboys. But they couldn’t do anything about that phone call he received on March 1.

It was 12:04 a.m., four minutes after teams were allowed to contact free agents. Beuerlein sleepily picked up the phone in his Dallas apartment and heard these words:

“This is Erik Widmark, director of pro personnel for the Phoenix Cardinals, and we’re doing everything we can to get you.”

Seven weeks later, they got him--for $7.5 million over three years and the unspoken promise that this franchise was capable of winning its first playoff game since 1947.

After enduring six professional seasons as mostly a backup or outcast, Beuerlein finally has status, serenity and an offense that is ready for a leader.

“We are not going to be the Walker Boys of the NFC East anymore,” said Gary Clark, a four-time Pro Bowl wide receiver who signed with Phoenix in March. “Nobody is going to walk on us anymore. Those days are over. This team is not going to stand for that.”

Clark, lured from the Washington Redskins for $6 million over three years, was only getting started.

“The first eight games of the season, people are probably going to be looking at us as the same Phoenix Cardinals,” he said. “But the last eight games, they will be saying, ‘You better watch out for these guys, they’re for real.’

“If we don’t win 10 games this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s time to fly, baby.”

Hopes in Phoenix are truly soaring and season-ticket sales are up 20%, the first increase since the team moved from St. Louis six years ago. At the annual select-a-seat day in the spring, the club sold more season tickets, about 1,000, than during all the previous such days combined.

Fans noticed the difference at Sun Devil Stadium during the first exhibition, against the Rams.

Attendance at that game was greater than in the Cardinals’ last regular-season game there last year--by more than 7,000.

“Last year when we made sales calls, some people hung up on us before we were done talking,” said Eric Gronning, director of sales. “This year, we can’t get them off the phone. We’re trying to get to the next call and people are asking questions that don’t have anything to do with the location of their seats, questions like, ‘Who’s going to be the quarterback?’ ”

People want to talk not just about Beuerlein and Clark, but top rookie running back Hearst, and newly acquired safeties Chuck Cecil and John Booty, and a defensive line that averages 322.5 pounds.

When they talk, the conversation often gets around to the team owner. This is where the customers, at least for now, start sounding apologetic.

For years, Bill Bidwill has been criticized for everything from his extra-large frame to his double-locked wallet. But after events of the last six months, everybody has stopped saying that he doesn’t want to win.

It began this winter when he gave Coach Joe Bugel and General Manager Larry Wilson an ultimatum: Have a winning season, or update your resumes.

Then he dropped plenty of help at their feet by spending $22 million for the four free agents. He also stayed out of the way of the new scouting director, Bob Ackles, whose eye for talent previously had helped the Dallas Cowboys become champions.

The results are a significantly improved offense and perhaps the best draft class in the league.

It was generally agreed that nobody worked this new system as well as the team that made a fool of itself under the old one.

The best move the Cardinals made involved a player they didn’t even get. As finalists in the Joe Montana auction, they proved to the town that they were serious.

What other occasion could cause two Phoenix TV stations to order their traffic helicopters to shadow Bidwill as he drove to dinner? He was, of course, dining with Montana.

“I felt it was necessary to let everyone know I was serious about winning,” Bidwill said while watching his team practice during training camp at Northern Arizona University. “It would have been very tempting to stand back and watch how this new system works . . . but this was our opportunity to make a fast move.”

Not to mention change the image of a franchise that has done little right while winning no more than five games in each of the last four seasons.

Bidwill, who previously was seen around Phoenix about as often as snow, has been on the front lines of the new public-relations offensive.

Which brings this story back to Beuerlein. He has Bugel raving after winning a supposed training camp battle with incumbent Chris Chandler, the eighth-ranked passer in the league last season.

The difference between the two, as everyone knows, is that Beuerlein is a proven winner. While with the Dallas Cowboys in 1991, he subbed for injured Troy Aikman and led the team to five consecutive victories, including a first-round playoff triumph over the Chicago Bears.

Since coming to Phoenix, Beuerlein has understated this difference, and everything else.

He turned down every request for endorsements and commercials, and there have been many. Instead, he spent his time throwing passes in 115-degree temperatures, sometimes to the only person who would catch them, an assistant equipment manager.

He lifted weights with the defensive linemen. He bought the offensive linemen dinner.

“Here I was, the highest-paid Cardinal, and nobody knew me from Adam,” Beuerlein said. “It was important for me to establish myself with the team before anything else. I didn’t want any of the guys seeing me on TV and saying, ‘Who is this hotshot who hasn’t done anything?’ ”

Did it work? Listen to Bugel.

“Steve has this aura about him,” Bugel said. “I think he was meant to be a quarterback ever since he came out of his mama’s womb.”

Or at least out of Anaheim’s Servite High, where he led the Friars to a Southern Section title in 1982. He left Notre Dame four years later as its all-time passing leader.

He joined the Raiders in 1987 as a fourth-round draft pick, and by the end of the 1989 season, was their starter.

He was making $120,000. Jay Schroeder, his backup, was making $1.1 million.

The next summer, Beuerlein asked for a three-year deal worth $1.5 million. Davis countered with an offer of $450,000.

It might have been a reasonable sum to a player with only 15 starts, but Beuerlein couldn’t stomach being paid less than half the amount being given his backup. So he held out.

After one exhibition, he couldn’t stand watching anymore, so he called the Raiders and told them he would sign for their $450,000.

Wrong, Davis said. The offer had dropped to $400,000.

So Beuerlein angrily stayed away until the start of the season. While some might debate the wisdom of such a maneuver, few will debate the merits of what happened next.

“Every week I thought to myself, ‘No way can they keep me out of uniform this week,’ ” Beuerlein said. “And every week I was wrong.”

It wasn’t until the 10th week that Beuerlein was given the parameters of his purgatory.

“A coach pulled me over and said, ‘I don’t want to torture you anymore, but there are no plans to play you this season,’ ” Beuerlein said. “I said, ‘I could have dealt with this a lot better if I had known it from the start.’ ”

Even armed with the truth, Beuerlein did not fire back.

Not once during the year did he give an interview about the situation. Not once did he even complain to team personnel, not even Davis, who did not return phone calls from The Times for this story.

“If I said anything, then the person who made that decision would be able to say, ‘See, look, the guy is a troublemaker,’ ” said Beuerlein, always careful to avoid mentioning Davis by name. “I was not going to give the decision-maker the satisfaction of breaking me down. No way.”

Beuerlein bowled, played golf, Nintendo, or did anything else that would allow him to feel the thrill of victory again.

He felt the worst on Saturday nights before home games, when he would have to stay with the team in an airport hotel and abide by all curfews, even though he wasn’t going to dress the next day.

“I remember it would be about 10 o’clock at night, and I would be calling home to my brother and saying, ‘This is BS,’ ” Beuerlein said.

Beuerlein’s father, Al, a top civilian administrator with the Los Angeles Police Department, asked some friends whether his son should sue the Raiders. When it was determined that a suit wouldn’t work, the Beuerleins and their friends in Fullerton boycotted Raider home games.

“I can tell you that I would not have had the inner strength that my son had during that period,” Al said. “We wanted him to say a whole lot more than he did.”

On Aug. 25 the next year, Beuerlein said goodby to the Raiders, and couldn’t have been happier.

After relegating Beuerlein to third string, Davis answered his request for a trade, sending him to Dallas.

Three years later, the Cardinals signed him.

“I don’t know what happened in Los Angeles, but I do know that we were very impressed when the kid kept his mouth shut about it,” Bugel said. “He is not a player who gripes. This is obvious.”

Even in their only meeting, shortly before training camp in 1991, Beuerlein refused to criticize Davis.

“I went into his office and said, ‘What happened last year is done with,’ ” Beuerlein said.

But it is not. It will never be.

There is a hardness in Beuerlein’s eyes. It is striking against his soft features. It is the same intensity that teammates say they see in the huddle.