Vikings Tackle Controversies : Pro football: Minnesota can’t wait to play after troubles involving Moon, coaches and player discontent.

They had waited patiently in the lobby of the Gage Center at Mankato State University, summer headquarters of the Minnesota Vikings, while Warren Moon ate his lunch upstairs in the dining room. When the veteran quarterback finally came down, he headed straight toward the flock of star-gazers, some wearing purple jerseys with his name and No. 1 on the back, and for the next 10 minutes he signed everything thrust in his face.

“We’re with you all the way,” said a man who had brought along his two young boys. They stood at Moon’s feet and looked up in wide-eyed awe at their unsmiling and mostly silent hero, then posed with him for a Polaroid snapshot, which Moon waited to sign so the chemicals could dry.

Another woman standing off to the side also professed loyalty to Moon, the 1989 NFL man of the year for all his charitable good works and a player whose carefully cultivated public image made him one of the game’s most popular figures.

“What he did was wrong,” she said quietly, preferring not to give her name. “But he admitted it, he says he’s taking steps to deal with it, and that’s good enough for me.”

Moon’s family-man, good-Samaritan image has been tarnished this year by allegations of domestic abuse by his wife and a sexual harassment suit filed by a former Vikings cheerleader. His problems are the latest for the Vikings, who have become one of pro football’s most troubled teams.

Since last season ended, there have been sexual harassment allegations against Coach Dennis Green and assistant coach Richard Solomon. There have been allegations of widespread discontent in the organization. There have been the resignations of five assistant coaches. In addition, the Vikings lost five defensive starters, including all-pro defensive end Henry Thomas to free agency during the off-season. Just before training camp, newly acquired free agent linebacker Broderick Thomas was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.

It has been a tough fall for a team that considered itself a serious Super Bowl contender after acquiring Moon before last season.

“Every team has problems, that’s nothing new,” said Roger Headrick, the team’s president and chief operating officer since 1991, when he left Pillsbury after a 30-year career in business. “I still can’t read this team very well. To my way of thinking, a lot of this has been a media thing. I mean the stuff about Denny at Stanford was five years ago; it’s old news. Things like that happen and you’ve got to put it in the background and focus on what we do, which is football. It’s more media driven than anything else.”

Green said: “I treat all that stuff for what it is. It’s the 1990s. There’s a reason why sensationalism sells. It’s on the talk shows, radio, TV, and 90 percent of what’s going on the air or in the media is not true. In my case, none of it is. So I treat it for what it is--sensationalism which is mostly unfair--and then you move on. As a team, we think we’ve taken it on, and now we’re ready to play football. We’re here to play, not explain ourselves.”

Moon’s troubles began with an out-of-court settlement of a sexual harassment suit filed by a former Vikings cheerleader who said the 38-year-old quarterback had forced her to have sex with him. But on July 18, it got much worse, when a 911 emergency call summoned police to a domestic disturbance at Moon’s estate in a Houston suburb.

According to a police report, Moon had allegedly struck Felicia--his wife of 15 years and the mother of their four children--in the head with an open hand and choked her to the point she nearly passed out. And while Felicia Moon said later she did not want to file a complaint, under Texas law, prosecutors exercised their option to charge him with a Class A misdemeanor assault with a maximum punishment of a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. Arraignment is set for Sept. 19 in Fort Bend County, Tex.

Three days after he voluntarily reported to a Houston police station accompanied by his wife, his attorney and his agent, Leigh Steinberg, Warren and Felicia Moon and their four children sat on a sofa in their Houston living room and faced a sea of cameras and inquiring reporters. Clearly uncomfortable in this sort of spotlight, a somber and contrite Moon accepted full responsibility, said he had already taken steps to undergo counseling and asked for forgiveness and understanding for what he described as “a very unfortunate incident.”

That same day, Felicia, who has worked as a volunteer in women’s shelters, said: “After many hours of prayers, tears and consultation with my husband, I feel completely safe in his presence. And I am convinced he will stick to the counseling that has begun since this incident has occurred . . . We will survive this crisis.”

A few days later, Moon reported for his 12th and easily most difficult NFL training camp. Never mind the sore right shoulder that kept him out of practice and the Vikings’ first two preseason games. Far more significantly, he’s still very much under scrutiny for what he also described to one Houston TV reporter as “not a case of domestic violence. It was a domestic dispute.”

That scrutiny will continue. “Will Moon get cheers or jeers?” asked the headline at the top of last Friday morning’s St. Paul Pioneer Press front sports page. That night, the Vikings played the Raiders in their first home game in Minneapolis since Moon was charged. But Vikings fans never really had a chance to answer the question because the team propitiously chose to introduce its defense, not its offense, before the kickoff, avoiding any editorial comment from the crowd.

Moon was booed lustily when, in the grasp of a Raiders linebacker, he threw an ill-advised pass on the Vikings’ first series that was intercepted and returned 64 yards for a touchdown. The boos clearly were directed at his performance; he was cheered each time he completed a pass.

In an interview at camp recently, Moon said, “I don’t really think it’s affected the football team. But it’s deeply affected the individuals involved in it. When you’re involved in a situation like this, you deal with it, and that’s what I’ve tried to do from the beginning. You can’t let it get you down.

“The most important thing for me was to take care of my situation at home and go on from there. That’s what I’ve done. Everything I get now is speculation from the outside, and that’s fine. It’s the way the world is. I don’t listen to it. I don’t read about it in the papers. Everyone thinks they have the answer. But as long as I know I’m doing everything I can to make it better and fix the problem, that’s all I can do.”

And so it is that life and football, always football, definitely goes on for Moon and the Vikings after the most tumultuous off-season in the history of the team. “We’re just concentrating on football,” Green said. “We can’t afford to think about anything else.”

A month after the Vikings were eliminated in the first round of the ’94 NFL playoffs for the third straight year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, in a front page story, detailed widespread unhappiness in the organization about the treatment of players, assistant coaches and other employees. The newspaper also reported that a settlement of $150,000 had been paid by the Vikings to a former team secretarial intern. She had claimed sexual harassment against secondary coach Solomon, Green’s longtime friend and closest confidant. Solomon is still on the team’s coaching staff.

An affidavit submitted in September 1993 by former Vikings operations director Dan Endy as part of the suit against Solomon also became public in the Star-Tribune story. The affidavit alleged sexual harassment by Green toward a woman whose company had done business with the Vikings. And in February, it was reported that Stanford University, where Green was head coach before taking the Vikings job in 1992, had agreed to settle a second woman’s employment discrimination suit against the school. That deal kept her complaint from including Green and Stanford in a separate sexual harassment claim.

Green initially responded to those charges with a 50-second taped statement released to the Minneapolis media. “I want to say here and now those claims are not true,” he said. Green has since declined repeated requests from the Star-Tribune and other news organizations to answer specific questions about the alleged sexual harassment incidents.

The Vikings have had to deal with other off-season problems, including the resignation of five assistants and the losses of players to free agency. Headrick insisted that he was comfortable with Green and his coaching staff, that the issue of job security really wasn’t an issue at all going into Green’s fourth year as head coach, even if those pesky media types keep insisting that it is.

“It’s no more pivotal than any other year,” Headrick said. “We’ve been to the playoffs three straight years. He’s won 30 games over that time, and other than [49ers Coach George] Seifert and [Steelers Coach Bill] Cowher, who’s done better? He’s done very well.”

Several players also insisted the team’s off-season problems have not been much of a distraction the past few weeks. Not with their own jobs at stake in the competitive crucible of a training camp, not with a regular season schedule that starts off with four straight playoff teams. Moon also made it a point to speak to the team, coaches and players about his off-field problems at the first full meeting in camp.

“He told us what was going on, he just stood up and talked about it,” said Dewayne Washington, a second-year cornerback. “Denny introduced him, and that was that. It was emotional, sure. But no one asked any questions. The way Warren put it, you didn’t have to ask questions. Now, all you can do is go on. That’s all we’re trying to do.”