The Best Bettis He Will Try Hard

Looking for bright spots, you find Jerome Bettis slipping into a multi-color shirt. Battering Ram Bettis would love to rush for 2,000 yards this season. He would love to break Eric Dickerson’s greatest gridiron record. He would love to out-gain Emmitt Smith. He would love to. . . .

“Trade it all to go 10-6?”

Bettis whirls on you.

“Bless you,” he says.

Again, the steadily unimproving Rams have been defeated, this time, 29-20, by the deeper, stronger, vastly superior Raiders. At his cubicle, Bettis wears a mystified expression as he says, “We’re showing bright spots at times, but other spots, we’re looking dismal. We have got to get the bugs out of the armor.”

And soon. The Rams, who last won an exhibition when George Bush was in the White House, are running out of time, maybe even out of patience. They have one more exhibition date, Thursday night at San Diego, to locate those bugs and blast some DDT at them. Then off they go into the season, where the best thing the Rams have going for them is a schedule that opens with two eminently beatable opponents, Arizona and Atlanta.

But even the impenetrable visage of Chuck Knox seemed at last to reveal a crack, when he winced Saturday night over what had happened to his pass rush, having watched the entire right side of his defensive line hobble off on sprained ankles. Knox is not one to knock his squad. Knox is one of those guys who would tell you, “We saw some good things out there” after a forfeit.

Even he has limits, though.

“Definitely, we couldn’t get any pass rush,” the Ram coach said, after watching Jeff Hostetler occupy the pocket and Vince Evans meander out of it, virtually at will. “We could not get any pass rush. And I’m not sure why.

“Not only did they (the Raiders) have time to throw, but they also had time to maneuver. Which might be worse.”

The first-string Ram pass defense is, beyond Bettis, probably the team’s single most viable asset. But after Hostetler threw a rare wild pass near the beginning of the game that a referee had a better chance of catching than a Raider, he peeled off 14 completions in his next 18 attempts. Hostetler was afforded so much time by tackles Gerald Perry and Bruce Wilkerson, guards Steve Wisniewski and Kevin Gogan and center Don Mosebar, he could have taken the snap, then taken a few minutes to try to fix his audiblizer helmet.

The Rams gave up 26 unanswered points in 20 minutes. Even Evans picked them apart.

“They’re a very, very good ballclub,” Ram tight end Troy Drayton said of the Raiders. “They seem to know what they’re doing.”

For the home team, there was this lowest of low moments when Ram tackle Sean Gilbert found himself cut down like timber near midfield, motionless, having his ankle tenderly rubbed at the exact instant the Ram quarterback, Chris Miller, was being escorted back to the training room after taking a blow to the face.

From the sideline, Bettis watched, wide-eyed.

“That got me a little tense,” he said.

The Rams have problems aplenty without losing their best players. The defensive tackles, Gilbert and Jimmie Jones, and the ends, Gerald Robinson and Robert Young, will have a lot of impact as to whether the Rams end up the comeback story of 1994 or a continuing situation comedy. They and the secondary look solid--or, at least they did before Saturday, when the ankles of Gilbert and Robinson gave out.

Now it’s getting late. Preseason is nearly season.

About as blunt as Knox gets is, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Yeah, and so do the guys rebuilding the Coliseum.

There is one saving grace the Rams do have that the Raiders do not, and that is a running back deluxe. A rookie no more, Battering Ram Bettis looks around him and sees hope. He likes the way Miller runs the huddle. He looks at Drayton and sees a tight end to be reckoned with, so much so that Bettis says, “The team knows it, the coaches know it, now all that’s left is for the world to know it.”

As for what he wants for himself, Bettis wants the world to know something about those 2,000 yards.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be saying it, because I wouldn’t want people to misunderstand,” Bettis says. “What I meant is that what I want is 2,000 yards. What I think possible is 2,000 yards. But I’m not predicting 2,000. I’m just going for 2,000. Tell me it will help us win and I’ll try for 3,000. Tell me it will help us win and I’ll take 200.”