Whitewashed : Cut by Rams, Former All-American at Cal Can’t Find a Job

As the NFL regular season grinds toward its finish, Russell White sits in his Oakland apartment trying to keep a smile on his face and excess pounds off his body. And he wonders why nobody calls.

Never mind a pro contract. NFL teams haven’t even been offering him tryouts.

Uh, guys? This is Russell White. All-American at California. Heisman Trophy candidate. The school’s career rushing leader. Had three 1,000-yard seasons.

You know. Russell White.

“I’ve had guys who are free agents with only marginal ability and I’ve still been able to get them workouts,” said White’s agent, Angelo Wright. “This has been a very strange process for a guy with this type of talent.”

White was cut in August by the Rams after one unproductive season. Since then, the former Crespi High standout has had one workout with the San Francisco 49ers. And . . . that’s all.

NFL running backs are injured every week. Replacements must be found. And still, White’s phone doesn’t ring with any solid offers.

“Every day, I’m keeping my head up,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s all I can do. I’m definitely learning patience.”

He lives with Cal tailback Tyrone Edwards, who gained a career-high 208 yards two weeks ago against Stanford, and then credited White with getting him ready for the game.

On Sundays, the two watch NFL games on television, always focusing on teams’ rushing attacks, looking for weaknesses, opportunities.

“I tease him and say, ‘Russell, you could go in there and help that team a lot,’ ” Edwards said.

Every so often, White will joke, ‘If I could just get a job . . . ‘ and grins as if it doesn’t matter. But he can’t fool his roommate.

“I know deep down in his heart, it hurts him,” Edwards said. “It’s just a crying shame to me that somebody with talent like that is sitting out and nobody’s willing to give him a chance.”

White works out daily for two hours, going through a mixture of stretching, wind sprints and agility drills. He says that he feels strong, quick and light.

His agent, Wright, burns up NFL front-office phone lines--but to no avail. Once projected as a first-round NFL draft choice after his junior season, White fell to the third round a year later. Now, he gets the silent treatment from pro teams.

Why?

Three factors, it appears.

* Special teams. Russell may know touchdowns, but he doesn’t know punt coverage. “Let’s face it, the guy has always been a star player,” Wright said. “He hasn’t played special teams.”

That’s fine if you’re an NFL running back and your name is Emmitt Smith, Barry Sanders or Thurman Thomas. If not, you should play special teams, and play it well. And that goes triple for backups.

“We run into things like, ‘If Barry Sanders goes down, we sign Russell White, but if a backup goes down, we sign someone who helps us on special teams,’ ” Wright said.

Ram offensive coordinator and running backs coach Chick Harris said one of the reasons White became expendable--other than emerging star Jerome Bettis--was that other Ram running backs are better special teams players.

White certainly never refused to play special teams, but that area is clearly not where his interests lie.

“Russell wants to go where he can play,” Wright said. “To go somewhere and carry a helmet around is not going to happen.”

* Weight/speed questions. “When he was running well in college, he was 190 pounds,” Harris said. The last time White weighed 190 pounds was his sophomore year. Cal running backs coach Tim Lappano battled with White over his weight during his senior year, and Harris said White was “a little heavy at times, 212, 214” with the Rams.

White said he came to training camp this summer in shape at 207 pounds but wasn’t given an opportunity to prove himself.

However, any questions about weight tend to stick with athletes (see: William Perry, Ironhead Heyward). And they don’t mix well with 40-yard dash times in the 4.5 to 4.6 second range--blinding to John Q. Public, ho-hum to a running back coach. Those times are what White ran for NFL scouts as a college senior, Lappano said, down from 4.4 as a sophomore.

“Sometimes people question his speed or the suddenness in his running,” Harris said. “And those are problems.”

* Attitude. Good or bad? Selfish or self-assured?

White has bent to no one’s will but his own. He enrolled at Cal as its first Proposition 48 athlete. He later criticized Crespi, saying faculty members granted him higher grades than he deserved (school officials vigorously denied the assertion). He went public--very public--when he was found to have dyslexia at Cal, and gloried openly in his subsequent academic turnaround. After his junior season, people advised him to turn pro. He stayed at Cal to earn his degree. A new coaching staff arrived for White’s senior year and expected him never to miss practice. When it conflicted with his classes, White missed practice.

See a pattern?

His individuality might be admirable to many, self-serving to others. Unfortunately for White, football coaches usually take a dim view of non-conformists. The nail that sticks up will get pounded down.

“Every team we talked to says, ‘Give me a little history on him’--which means they have negative information on him,” said Wright, who also represents NFL players Webster Slaughter (Houston), Sean Dawkins (Indianapolis) and Sam Adams (Seattle). “I don’t know, maybe he did (tick) a few people off.”

Wright contends that Cal assistants gave several pro teams unfavorable reports on White, a charge that Cal’s Lappano denies. “Those NFL scouts don’t give a damn what we say anyway,” Lappano said. “They’re going to watch the film and make their own decisions.”

White’s former coaches--from the Rams’ Harris, to Cal’s Lappano, former Bear Coach Bruce Snyder and current Coach Keith Gilbertson--have said nothing but good things about White publicly. They maintain they have reported as much to all NFL askers, and that White should be in the pros.

But agent Wright believes there is a backlash against his client--fueled by persistent bad-mouthing and White’s past. And, he said, it is patently unfair.

“Every team in the NFL has a guy who’s either a woman-beater, a substance abuser or a guy who doesn’t know how to behave in public,” Wright said. “Here’s a guy with none of these problems. How does this guy have problems where he couldn’t make your ballclub?”

To Wright’s and White’s frustration, they have been given no hard answers.

And so a personable, law-abiding, achievement-oriented and very talented young man is out of work. He earned a base salary of $165,000 from the Rams last season and has saved over half of it, so money isn’t an issue yet--but pride is. White doesn’t want to attend graduate school now, or start a post-football future working with high school kids. First, he wants his old job back. He wants a real NFL career.

“I’m not over the hill,” he said. “I feel like a young pup. My mind is set up, when I get my opportunity, to be the best NFL player that I can be--that a team will let me be.”

Chances are, that won’t happen this season. At this late stage, Wright said teams are offering only a commitment of only three to four weeks to finish out the year--and White isn’t interested in being a bench jockey. Leads with Chicago and Pittsburgh have not panned out, and Wright talks about Seattle or Jacksonville possibly signing White in the off-season.

Though this season appears a washout, White speaks without rancor. “I’m upbeat. It still hurts a bit, but when I get my chance, I’m gonna run with it. There’s a thing about Russell White: If you challenge me in anything, I’m going to try my damnedest to make you a believer.”

He has his work cut out for him. Again.

Russell’s Record

Russell White’s year-by-year stats, from Crespi to the Rams:

Year Team Yards 1993 Rams 10 1992 Cal 1,069 1991 Cal 1,177 1990 Cal 1,000 1989 Cal DNP 1988 Crespi 1,379 1987 Crespi 2,280 1986 Crespi 2,339