PRO FOOTBALL ’95 : Can Lightning Strike Twice? : Chargers Will Have to Shrug Off Eight Months of Distractions to Repeat as AFC Champions
Beating up on some sod-forsaken team now based in St. Louis in a football exhibition would not normally be cause for renewed optimism.
Unless, that is, you’re the San Diego Chargers, who, until a recent 17-9 victory over the Rams, had little to cheer about since winning their first American Football Conference title last January.
“I hope it means some of our problems are behind us,” Charger General Manager Bobby Beathard said guardedly after the victory.
He spoke as his team’s coach, Bobby Ross, was being propped up for lunch at a local hospital three days after undergoing abdominal surgery to remove 40-year-old scar tissue.
It has already been that kind of season for the Chargers.
Success in San Diego used to be measured by how many championship banners you ran up the flag pole.
For now, an inspired August performance against the Rams has to suffice.
What else is there to hang a helmet on?
The Chargers staggered into the Aug. 25 Ram game, having gone winless in two exhibitions.
A third game, against Houston, was canceled after officials deemed the Astrodome’s artificial surface unsuitable for play.
This team was not ready to rumble.
Natrone Means, star back, had gained two yards in eight carries.
Junior Seau, star linebacker and team conscience, had not played because of a hamstring injury.
Stan Humphries, star quarterback, had thrown 20 passes, some of which spiraled.
Courtney Hall, the center, had undergone five off-season surgeries and come to camp sporting more stitches than Herman Munster.
The receivers, suspect already, needed flypaper after playing “dropsy” with the ball all summer.
Ross, pained by what he was seeing, at last doubled over himself and ended up in intensive care.
“It was pretty dismal,” Beathard said. “It was hard to say we were going to go into the regular season with a lot of confidence.”
Good thing the Rams didn’t miss their charter.
After an 0-4 exhibition start last year, remember, the Chargers mopped up on the then-Los Angeles franchise and opened the season with six consecutive victories.
San Diego is looking for the same bounce out of the Rams this year.
With no time to spare before opening the NFL’s toughest schedule Sunday at Oakland against the Raiders, the Chargers have at least registered a pulse.
Means, who began camp with a messy 11-day holdout, started to earn his $7.337-million keep against the Rams with a 73-yard outburst.
Humphries’ passes again had zip.
Seau reintroduced himself to the troops and roamed the field without pain.
“What you saw out there was the San Diego Chargers going out there and wanting to win,” Seau said.
But can this team simply flip on a switch and start the season, or will a tumultuous and tragic off-season linger into the regular-season huddle?
“There’s definitely no overconfidence,” Means said. “But we’re still a hungry team.”
The Chargers, really, never had time to savor the good times.
Fortunes started to turn only hours after the team’s dramatic, Jan. 15, AFC title-game victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The champagne barely uncorked, it was learned that the ex-wife of quarterback coach Dwain Painter had committed suicide, apparently distraught that she could not be a part of the Chargers’ success.
It was the first in a string of San Diego misfortune:
--On Jan. 29, the team was humiliated by the San Francisco 49ers, 49-26, in Super Bowl XXIX at Miami.
--On Feb. 2, Painter’s daughter was swept off the rugged Mendocino coast and drowned while scattering her mother’s ashes.
--On June 19, starting outside linebacker David Griggs, driving alone, was killed in a car accident in Florida. It was later revealed he was drunk.
--Darrien Gordon, an emerging star at cornerback and the conference’s leading punt returner, spurned the team doctor’s advice to have major surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff.
Gordon re-injured the shoulder in the first exhibition, ended up having the surgery first suggested and is out until November.
--Leslie O’Neal, star defensive end and lightning rod, shook up training camp by telling the San Diego Union-Tribune “it would be lovely” to play somewhere else.
O’Neal was upset because former defensive assistant Willie Shaw, who is black, was passed over for the position of defensive coordinator in favor of Dave Adolph, who is white.
--Means, the team’s leading rusher with 1,350 rushing yards in 1994, staged an 11-day holdout to protest his salary of $330,000 this season. He was asking $16 million over five years, said that Beathard had betrayed him, then finally signed a new four-year deal with a promise it would be reworked if he had another big season.
--On Aug. 24, the day Ross was admitted to the hospital for his abdominal ailment, the daughter of offensive line coach Carl Mauck was involved in a bus accident at the University of Nebraska and lost part of her big toe.
“I’m not saying we don’t have feelings for what’s happened,” defensive lineman Reuben Davis said. “But we’re put in a situation where it’s sort of like war, you got to keep going, regardless of what’s happened around you. You’ve got to keep fighting, but at the same time, we’re praying.”
How does a team deal with the distractions?
“You can’t,” Davis said. “You’re going to have that all year long. You’re going to have injuries. You’re going to get people hurt, people are going to get sick, people are going to have personal problems. You can’t deal with it. It’s part of the game. It’s a sport where sometimes you look at it and say ‘Man, it’s pretty cold.’ Like the guy who gets hurt on the field. Hey, all they do is kind of move on, move the drill over. It’s like that. It’s sad, but it’s like that.”
NFL wolves are circling.
Many experts have written the Chargers off; some have them out of the playoffs; some have them struggling to make 8-8.
Thanks to its fine run in 1994, San Diego was awarded the NFL’s most demanding schedule, based on opponents’ 1994 won-loss records, a weekly land mine that includes nondivision tests against Pittsburgh, Dallas, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Miami, the New York Giants and Arizona.
Of his team’s opponents, Beathard said: “They want to beat us, rub it in our face, laugh at us and say, ‘See, you guys weren’t for real.’ I think our guys have to go into the season prepared for that.”
Beathard, though, thinks the impact of his team’s “distractions” are exaggerated.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been associated with a team that went through an off-season without some distractions,” said Beathard, associated with seven Super Bowl teams as either a general manager or personnel man.
Beathard acknowledges the death of Griggs “had the biggest effect on us.”
The Means holdout?
“That seems a long time ago,” Beathard said, dismissing the potential hangover.
The O’Neal comments?
“That’s Leslie. I don’t know that anyone’s going to try and change Leslie. It might do more harm than good.”
Gordon’s decision to put off surgery?
“Disappointing,” Beathard said, though he is quick to point out he might have already found a replacement in rookie Terrance Shaw, a second-round draft choice.
The Super Bowl blowout to San Francisco?
“I believe it probably hangs with everybody,” he said.
Then again, Super Bowl embarrassments never stopped the Buffalo Bills from coming back for more.
The players do not appear to be dwelling.
“We’re not sitting in here beating each other over the head saying, ‘We’ve got to get back to Super Bowl,’ ” Means said. “But if we come out and play ball like we’re capable of playing, we’re going to get back, no doubt.”
Despite their status as defending AFC champions, the Chargers appear in no better stead with the pundits than they were last year, when many picked them to finish last in the AFC West.
They say it doesn’t matter.
“It’s the same people who made the same calls last year,” Davis said of the critics. “I don’t think there’s any facts written in these predictions, just a bunch of Dionne Warwick psychic lines out there.
“The only weakness in our team is if we let the outside come in and take us apart.”
