Ultimate Linebacker : Super Charger Junior Seau Has Found Niche in NFL, but He’s Athletic Enough to Play Almost Any Position

Dale Lindsey clicked off the projector. He had run about a dozen plays featuring the San Diego Charger defense. It might have been called a highlight film. Junior Seau was the highlight.

“You want more?” asked Lindsey, the Chargers’ linebacker coach. “How much time do you have?”

No mas, thank you.

In his varying alignments at linebacker, with a few plays at defensive end as well, Seau had gone mano-a-mano with offensive players of virtually every job description.

Given his background and athleticism, Seau could probably become the first NFL player to play every position in the same game. It has been done in baseball, but the NFL is probably too stodgy for such shenanigans.

“If the opportunity came, I’d love to play quarterback,” Seau said.

Seau played quarterback up Interstate 5 at Oceanside High School, but he also played safety, running back, wide receiver and, of course, linebacker. It wouldn’t be fair to say he played center and guard as well, because that was in basketball.

Stan Humphries, the Chargers’ quarterback, can undoubtedly rest easily. Take it from Burt Grossman, Seau’s teammate on the San Diego defense.

“Nobody could argue that Junior couldn’t play running back or receiver or tight end or anywhere on the defense,” Grossman said. “I think about the only position he couldn’t play would be quarterback. You take quarterback away and he could probably play any position on the field.”

Seau’s skills have made him perhaps the premier linebacker in the NFL, a superstar on a Charger team long noted for offensive explosiveness and defensive ineptitude. He was a major force as the 1992 Chargers went to the playoffs for the first time since 1981. His feats were applauded and his number draped from the railings of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. The name is pronounced Say-ow, but fans modified it to Say-wow.

Life in the NFL has not always been so glorious for Junior Seau.

His pro career began in the late summer of 1990, when he was dreaming of a triumphant return to San Diego. He was born in San Diego and had gone away to USC, but now he savored the thought of the reception he would get.

But he was a No. 1 draft choice, and the inevitable happened. The first players picked seem to be the last into camp, and Seau was no exception. He held out until just before the last exhibition game.

The irony was that this last exhibition game was against the Raiders in the Coliseum, Seau’s home field during his days at USC. His family and friends packed themselves into a caravan and headed for Los Angeles to witness this long-awaited debut.

Seau was ejected after the first play of his first game as a professional football player for doing a clean and jerk on one of the Raiders’ facemasks.

This, combined with controversy over the holdout, did not sit well with the San Diego populace. San Diegans, at the time, were less than thrilled with most things associated with the Chargers, who had not had a winning non-strike season since 1981.

“My first game at home in San Diego and the defense is introduced first,” Seau recalled ruefully, “I get booed in front of my whole family. It killed me. I knew I had a lot of work to do to get the respect of the fans back.”

The date of that occurrence was Sept. 16, 1990. Seau has been endeavoring since to earn the respect and affection of San Diego’s fans. He has taken this pursuit far beyond the football field and onto swollen river banks, into troubled malls and in front of receptive high school students.

Everything begins, of course, on that football field. The fact that Seau is all over the field has caused his presence to be in demand all over the community. And Seau is all over the field.

“He’s so versatile and so active, you never know where he’s going to be,” said Warren Moon, Houston’s quarterback. “It seems like they line him up in a million different places. He can be effective no matter where they put him, because he has such tremendous speed and tremendous acceleration.”

Seau is but one man in a defense that includes luminaries such as Leslie O’Neal and Grossman, but he is the one who gets the most attention when opponents are devising offensive game plans.

“No question,” Moon said. “It’s because of the way they use him. You better make sure you know where he is at all times.”

Larry Kennan, the Seattle Seahawks’ offensive coordinator, has to contend with Seau twice a year in the AFC West.

“He’s the guy you have to figure out,” Kennan said. “You have to figure out where he’s going to be and compensate in the game plan. He shows up so much on film, it’s not hard to find him. You see him everywhere.”

How, then, to cope with this man named Junior who is unusually big for a fast guy, unusually fast for a big guy or both?

“You run away from him and he chases it down,” Kennan said. “Sometimes I think you’re better off running right at him, even though nobody seems to be able to block him. The best bet is probably counter stuff, hoping he takes off with the flow and gets caught up in the wash.”

In a word, Seau is an athlete.

Unfortunately for Seau’s ambitions, he will have to settle for playing linebacker. From that position, he settles for handling the ballcarrier rather than the ball.

“I love to control the defense,” he said. “I love to make the calls. If there’s a fourth and one, blitz me. If there’s someone they want to count on, I want to be the guy. I’ll take care of it. That’s the attitude I have. I can’t be satisfied going home after a game, knowing that someone else screwed something up. If something goes wrong, I want it to be my fault.”

This drive to be the force is born of a fear rarely stated in the macho world of professional football.

“I’m afraid of being average,” Seau said. “There’s going to come a time when I’m going to be average in terms of skills, when I get older and maybe I’m a step slower. Right now, I have my youth working for me, but I’m not going to be content to let my athletic skills carry me through the early part of my career like a lot of guys do. I’m not going to wait until I grow older to try to gain the knowledge I need to make up for lessening skills. I want to learn all I can and learn it now.”

Seau may never play quarterback in the NFL, but his job description puts him into the quarterback’s head on every play. He has to think like a quarterback to be a linebacker.

Jay Schroeder, formerly with the Raiders and now with Cincinnati, went head to head with Seau two and three times a year.

“He got to know our checks, and we got to know his checks,” Schroeder said. “We’d kind of start hollering out things back and forth and he’d be checking one way and I’d be trying to check the other way. Going against him was a mind-game within the game.”

Seau seems to surface wherever he is needed, on or off the field, wearing 55, rather than an S, on his chest.

“If something can be done, I want to be the guy to do it,” he said.

Seau does not restrict this philosophy to the football field.

When a gang-related shooting cast a pall over a mall in National City last winter, Seau knew there was something he could do.

“He wanted to go to the mall and get a message to the kids,” said Steve Morgan, a San Diego lawyer who helped set up the Junior Seau Foundation in December. “The people at the mall wanted to know how much he charged, but Junior wasn’t interested in money. He wanted to get a microphone in his hand and talk to the kids. About 1,000 people showed up.”

Earlier, when heavy rains caused flooding near the Mexican border, Seau and some friends went down and handled sandbags along the overflowing banks of the Tijuana River.

More than anything, Seau uses his growing fame and popularity to get messages to youngsters who share the deprivation he experienced in his Oceanside boyhood.

“Not everyone is going to be fortunate enough to play in the NFL,” he tells youngsters. “But everyone can work hard enough to succeed.”

Seau worked hard enough in high school, both in athletics and academics, to position himself to earn an athletic scholarship to USC. He had a 3.6 grade-point average and his world had a rosy hue.

Unfortunately, he ran afoul of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. His score was not high enough, according to the mandates of Proposition 48, to allow him to play his freshman year. He is of Samoan heritage and that was the language in the family home. He is Exhibit A for the argument that the SAT unfairly weighs against minorities, particularly where English is emphasized.

“I could sit here and make a lot of excuses about the SAT, but I’m not going to do it,” he said. “It drove me crazy, but I wasn’t going to let it drive me down. That first year was tough in the sense that I had been a three-sport guy in high school and now I get to college and I’m a no-sport guy. I just had to fight it and face it like a man.”

Seau made virtually a cameo appearance at USC, at least on the football field. He lost his freshman year, then limped and gimped through his sophomore season with an ankle injury. He was a special teams player and backup linebacker. He hardly appeared destined for stardom on any level past Oceanside High.

Still, something significant happened the year Seau was a sophomore, though it did not seem likely to impact his future. Barry Sanders left Oklahoma State after his third year and signed with the Detroit Lions. Suddenly, the floodgates were open for third-year collegians to head for the NFL.

Seau began that third year with half a year of spotty experience with the Trojans and ended it convinced that he was ready for the NFL. Seau’s third-year “Class of ‘90” included USC’s Mark Carrier, Florida’s Emmitt Smith, Illinois’ Jeff George and Alabama’s Keith McCants, all of whom seemed surer bets, but Seau went in the first round of the draft with the rest of them.

Back in that fall of 1990, he was a highly touted player beginning his first NFL season with what amounted to one year of college experience and one play of exhibition experience. He still became a Pro Bowl alternate as a rookie.

Recognition, beyond his peers, was coming slowly, however. The Chargers, given their years of mediocrity, were getting little national exposure. That came with success, the 11-5 record and playoff appearance, in 1992. This fall, for example, the Chargers will appear on “Monday Night Football” for the first time since 1986.

Could Seau be the middle linebacker of the ‘90s?

“Whenever he played, he’d be the linebacker of the decade,” teammate Grossman said. “You can talk ‘90s, ‘80s, ‘70s. If he had played in the ‘60s, he would be the middle linebacker of the decade.”

All of this is nice, but. . . .

“It’s warming to be compared with the elite players at your position, but there’s something else out there for me,” Seau said. “I’m not content with the season I had, and I’m not content with the season we had. There’s a bigger picture, and I’ll find it.”

Lindsey, the linebacker coach, has one target in mind.

“How many defensive players have been the National Football League’s MVP?” he asked. “Alan Page? Seau will be the second.”