One From the Heart : After All Is Said and Done, Chiefs’ Defensive Lineman Dan Saleaumua Is a Regular Guy

Some holiday stories just aren’t meant to happen behind frosted windowpanes or shining trees.

Some stories develop in hearts, like Dan Saleaumua’s, so big and joyous he needs a double-wide chest to hold it.

This story begins in a small house south of San Diego, where a hungry young Saleaumua would mix jelly in his rice to give it some flavor.

It moves to a car outside a liquor store. The car is running. Saleaumua is talking his older friends out of armed robbery.

It continues to the ninth floor of a Phoenix office building, where, five years ago, Saleaumua was working the graveyard shift pouring concrete.

Today the story has come to Kansas City, where Saleaumua is a 300-pound defensive lineman with an extended-wear smile.

Saleaumua, having an all-pro season for the powerful Chiefs, has turned a troubled past into a deep, deep laugh.

“When young people ask for my autograph, I say, ‘Touch me. Go on, touch me. I’m just like you. I’m real.’ ” he said.

Short, round, jolly Dan Saleaumua’s greatest love is not football, but children. During the off-season, in fact, he often joins his two sons, Rocky and David, for lunch at their elementary school.

Sometimes he even finds a chair that fits.

“I stand in line and pay my buck and a quarter like everybody else,” he said. “But it’s worth it. I get to sit next to my sons and say, ‘Look at that girl over there. I think she’s checking you out!’ ”

His second-greatest love is, well, children. He has installed speaker-phones in his sons’ bedrooms and not only does he phone them at their mother’s house in Phoenix in the evenings, and before and after every game, but now he phones them many mornings as well.

“I walk in their room, turn on the phone, and then leave,” said his former wife, Rique. “I can hear him saying, ‘Get out of bed!’ They say, ‘Oh, Dad.’ Then they talk.’ ”

Saleaumua’s third-greatest love? Need you ask?

When his sons, 8 and 7, are spotted at local malls during the middle of the day, he does not reprimand them. He gets reprimanded.

“My ex-wife says, ‘Please, stop taking them out of school to play video games,’ ” Saleaumua said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

It would seem that this is a man who, if he wasn’t going to be busy in Minnesota with the Chiefs this weekend, would be busy driving eight tiny reindeer.

But one of Saleaumua’s few regrets is that he has never been asked to play Santa Claus.

“I guess nobody wants their kids to come home and say, ‘Mommy, Santa has a tan,” Saleaumua said.

Yet those who know him think he’s ideal for the part.

“With all the trouble in the world today with divorced families, I know my former husband’s specialness is hard to believe,” Rique said. “But you just have to know Daniel.”

Although the Chiefs love their special player and his story, Saleaumua refuses to be treated like a holiday window display.

He doesn’t even dress with the rest of the regulars. His locker is down the hall--past the trainers’ room, past a TV room--in a dark room used by members of the practice squad.

Several times, as his popularity has increased, the Chiefs have moved him to the main room. Each time, he has gathered up his things, including the flowered island sarong he often wears, and moved back.

“This is where I came in, and this is where I will go out,” says Saleaumua, 29, who will not be leaving anytime soon.

He leads Chief defensive linemen with 55 tackles. Even though he has played in Kansas City only five years, he recently tied a Chief career record with his 15th fumble recovery.

It occurred at the start of the second half of a Monday night game against the Green Pay Packers. He picked up a ball that had been knocked out of quarterback Brett Favre’s hands and returned it 16 yards for a touchdown.

In that game, he saved the victory in the final minutes by forcing Darrell Thompson to fumble three yards from the Chief goal line.

“He is the most light-on-his-feet 300-pound man that I have ever seen,” said Carl Peterson, the club’s general manager who rescued Saleaumua from obscurity in Detroit. “He makes more big plays than any interior lineman I have ever been involved with.”

And provokes more laughs.

He once ended a 19-day holdout by announcing to reporters that he hadn’t really meant to report to camp. He said he had boarded the wrong plane and was having a bad dream.

He once offered to work off a fine by washing Coach Marty Schottenheimer’s car and shining his shoes.

He turns down many offers for local radio and TV work because he says nobody will let him talk about what he wants to talk about.

“For me, analyzing a game would be analyzing a tailgate party or a good fight in the stands--two things I pay attention to,” he said. “Who wants to talk just football?”

Who, indeed? Saleaumua is perhaps the only NFL player who participates in bowling leagues and on community slow-pitch softball teams during the season.

“I played catcher, how hard is that?” he said. “And when I bat, either I hit a home run or I go to the bench. No way I try to run the bases.”

Where other players are making strictly commercial appearances in their spare time, Saleaumua travels to Independence, Mo., to participate in Samoan dances at small churches.

“So many NFL players lose themselves in the limelight, but Dan has been just the opposite,” said friend Denzil Cherry. “It’s amazing, but he is one of the most ordinary people I know.”

While visiting the home he bought for his mother in National City, he spends some evenings sitting beside her at bingo.

“She plays 30 cards, I play one,” he said. “But the food’s good.”

About the only thing that irks Saleaumua is youngsters, particularly Samoans, who treat him like royalty.

“If they are older, they usually ask football questions,” Saleaumua said. “I say, ‘Forget football, fool. You got a job?’ I make sure they know I’m no hero.”

Hero is a name he reserves for his father, Marine Sgt. Uiniferti Saleaumua. He died in Vietnam by rapid fire, according to the death certificate.

Dan was 2 at the time, the third of four boys in a seven-year age span bound together by constant hunger.

“Our mom would take us to parties and say, ‘Boys, eat for broke,’ ” said brother Wes.

His mother, who spoke only Samoan until Dan was in junior high, supported the family by working at a dry-cleaning plant. On his own much of the time, Dan tried everything from Pop Warner League football to attempted burglary.

The Pop Warner business didn’t work. Dan was too fat to play, so he accepted a position as the water boy and didn’t put on a uniform until he was in high school.

“I run onto the field my freshman year and all my pads fall down my pants because I put them in the wrong places,” he said, omitting that four years later he was voted San Diego high school lineman of the year.

The attempted burglaries, under the direction of older boys, didn’t work either. Saleaumua said he was scared to death crawling in the dark through other people’s bedrooms before his ninth birthday.

One day during his junior high school years, he was caught riding in a stolen car. He spent two days in juvenile hall, then was released into the custody of his crying mother.

“I saw her and right then, I vowed that I would never make her cry again,” he said.

It was also about then that he became more aware of a photo, hanging on a wall in a simple frame, of a man wearing fatigues. The man had a smooth brown face and piercing eyes.

“I started to get this funny feeling, that maybe somewhere, my father was watching me,” Saleaumua said. “I’ve had that feeling ever since.”

He felt his father’s presence the night his mother phoned him at Arizona State during his freshman year. He heard her crying and telling him that their home had been repossessed.

He decided to quit school and return to care for her, and only after much persuasion by her did he stay in Tempe.

He also felt his father’s presence during his junior year at college, after his younger brother, George, had served time on a youth farm for robbery.

Dan became George’s guardian and allowed his brother to move in with his young family, which then consisted of Rique and their first child. His brother righted himself.

“Somebody had to take care of our family,” Saleaumua said. “I felt my father telling me that it was me.”

Today, his three brothers are so animated in their support for Dan that they have been thrown out of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium four of the last five seasons when the Chiefs played the Chargers.

And at Kansas City, they were so rowdy that they were ejected from the wives’ section in Arrowhead Stadium last season.

“That’s our brother playing down there,” Wes said. “How do you want us to act?”

His family didn’t always have something to cheer about. After two nondescript seasons with the Detroit Lions as a backup nose tackle and generally useless seventh-round draft pick, Dan was left unprotected after the 1988 season.

He worried about providing for his wife and two small boys. He knew his father would have provided.

He met a man in a bar on New Year’s Day. The man had some difficult high-rise concrete work available for a man who needed the money.

Dan started immediately, working the night shift during the week and the midnight shift on weekends.

The Minnesota Vikings were interested in signing him. But he couldn’t visit there for interviews and physical exams because he had to work.

The Chiefs tried to call him. And tried. And tried.

“We could never get him on the phone because of his crazy working hours,” Peterson said.

Finally, Saleaumua’s agent reached him at 2 a.m. Would he consider a place that believed he had the quickness and power to become a starter?

He signed almost immediately.

Soon, though, there was the divorce, and his personal life was in turmoil again.

But there also was that image of Dad again.

“I sat my children down after the divorce and told them, ‘No matter what happens, you will always have a father,’ ” Saleaumua said.

And so they have.

Friends and family members talk about the time Saleaumua canceled a fishing trip during his only weekend off one season and flew to Phoenix to watch one of his sons play football.

They tell how he spends much of the off-season in a Phoenix hotel so he can be near his sons.

They also talk of the several times he has flown to Phoenix in the middle of the season only for the night.

“He’ll call us from the Phoenix airport, say he’s sorry that he can’t be here with us, and then 30 minutes later he is on our doorstep,” Rique said. “We’ve come to expect those surprises.”

Saleaumua finally realized the genesis of his attitude two years ago while driving his grandmother and aunts to visit his father’s grave in south San Diego.

It was the first time his grandmother, who has spent her life in Samoa, had seen the site.

“When we pulled up to the stone, I heard sniffling in the back seat,” he recalled. “Then she falls on the stone and starts crying and crying, and I’m saying, ‘What’s up?’ ”

Slowly, in her native tongue, his grandmother began telling stories about Dan’s father. About how he protected her during hard times on the island. About how he cared for his family above all else.

“I understand enough Samoan to understand those stories,” Saleaumua said. “It was then that I realized what my father was all about. I had always sensed it, but now I knew it.”

This should be an extra-special Christmas for Saleaumua for another reason. For the first time, he has bought toys.

“In the past, I’ve only bought my boys clothes because that is all I ever received,” Saleaumua said. “But now, I realize, hey, they’ve got enough clothes.”

The shipment arrived Thursday. Rique didn’t know where she was going to put it all.