Rams’ Lyle Forces Father to Shift Football Allegiance : NFL: Rookie free safety’s dad played with Chicago Bears, L.A.’s opponent on Sunday.

Garry Lyle knows that on Sunday he will remember his first game with the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field, and how the artificial turf there at the time turned as hard as concrete when the wind blew off Lake Michigan in December.

He will remember the team’s last game at Wrigley Field, of starting at safety on a defense with Dick Butkus.

And he’ll recall playing as a rookie under team founder George Halas in his final season as coach in 1967.

Twenty-seven years later, Lyle and his family will gather at a sports bar in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Sunday to watch a satellite feed of the Bear-Ram game.

Not that Lyle will be rooting for his former team, mind you. His allegiance is with his son, Keith, a rookie free safety with the Rams.

“Do I have torn allegiances this weekend,” Garry said, laughing. “I have a lot of warm thoughts about playing back in Chicago, but I want you to know this: I want the Rams to win, and I don’t want it to be close.”

Throw in an interception by Keith, and Garry just might buy a round of chilled ones for the gang.

“I would like to be there for that game, especially because it’s where I played for so long,” Garry said. “But I’m not going. It’s tough to sit there in the stands, knowing how much he wants to start. I know it’s driving him batty. It drove me crazy when I came into the league too.”

Garry Lyle, a third-round pick from George Washington, played from 1967-74 with the Bears. It took him three years to move into the starting lineup on teams that didn’t make the playoffs once in his time there.

Keith Lyle, a third-round pick from Virginia last spring, has been a standout on special teams for the Rams and has played in nickel packages on defense. He showed promise early in the season, intercepting a pass in his first regular-season game, against Arizona, and picking off one by Joe Montana at Kansas City in Week 4.

“Things have been working out well,” Lyle said. “I got some early interceptions and breakups. The past couple games I haven’t had an opportunity to make a play. I’m just learning a lot.”

Projected as the team’s free safety of the future, Lyle has backed up Anthony Newman for most of the season and will play behind Marquez Pope, who moved over from strong safety, on Sunday.

With the Rams, losers of five consecutive games, at 4-10 and out of the playoff race, young players such as Lyle are getting more playing time.

Perhaps Garry, better than anyone else, understands what his son is going through. He played sparingly on a 7-6-1 Bear team his rookie season, and suffered through a 1-13 record in 1969, the year before he became a starter.

“My wife and I were talking about Keith the other day,” Garry said. “We realized that he has never been part of something that wasn’t in a winning situation. All the way back to youth sports, he was always on winning programs.

“I’ve wondered about how he’s handled it, but you know there’s always going to be adversity in your life. The key is if he learns from it.”

Garry was drafted as a running back by the Bears but played both safety and wide receiver his first three years. His best season was in 1973, when he came back from a knee injury the previous season and finished with 88 tackles and five interceptions.

He played four seasons at Wrigley Field--”an old wreck of a place, but it was home”--before the team moved to Soldier Field in 1971.

“Going to Soldier was quite an adjustment,” Garry said. “It was an AstroTurf field back then, very hard.

“I can remember walking out from the locker room, looking up and seeing water running down out of the cracks in the place.”

Soldier Field has undergone a face lift since then. The artificial turf has been replaced by natural grass, and many of the cracks in the stadium have been filled. But a sense of tradition remains, one that has stuck with Garry Lyle since he left the team.

Sunday, the younger Lyle will pull on jersey No. 35 in Soldier Field’s visitors’ locker room, the same room where his father watched game films a quarter-century ago.

“I’ve thought about that quite a bit,” Garry said. “I’ve wondered where he will be in the locker room before the game, that maybe I had been sitting in that same spot years ago.

“But that’s just in my deepest thoughts. I know if I tell Keith, he’ll say, ‘Aw, Dad, why are you bringing that up?’ ”

Quiet and unassuming, the younger Lyle knows his father’s playing days only through scrapbooks and watching films and tapes. He and his twin brother, Brian, were 2 when their father left football.

But they grew more inquisitive as they grew older. What was their father like as a player? What did he look like in a Bear uniform? Did he really play with Butkus and Gale Sayers?

Garry gave them an answer by sending away to NFL Films for some highlight reels. The kids gathered around and. . . .

“Made fun of me,” Garry remembers. “They kept saying, ‘Dad, you can’t do any better than that?’ ”

Keith smiled.

“Yeah, I’ve seen a little bit of him,” he said. “Not enough to study. But from what he tells me, we have a lot of the same characteristics--quickness, reading and breaking on the ball, stuff like that.”

His size--6 feet 2 and 204 pounds--and quickness made him a natural for basketball at Marshall High in Falls Church, Va., where he played against Grant Hill, the Detroit Piston rookie and son of former Dallas Cowboy standout Calvin Hill.

Keith played both quarterback and safety at Marshall, but moved to safety full time in the first week of practice at Virginia. A three-year starter, he intercepted five passes as a senior with the Cavaliers, who led the nation with 22 that year.

Keith has been with the Rams for 14 games now, and Garry has made it to five of them. An executive with Xerox in St. Petersburg, Garry attends as many games as his business schedule and cross-country flights will allow.

The whole family was at last week’s loss at Tampa Bay, and they’re planning a trip to Anaheim for the Rams’ finale against the Washington Redskins on Dec. 24.

But Sunday will stand out for both father and son, former player and current player. Just don’t ask Dad to pull for his old team.

“Chicago is a great city,” Garry said. “But it would be nice to see the Rams go in there and steal a win.

“They need it.”