He’s One Angry Cuss : Hard-Hitting Steeler Linebacker Greg Lloyd Takes Me-Against-the-World Stance to a New Level

Grab a tissue and get ready for a real tear-jerker, the saddest woe-is-me tale at Super Bowl XXX.

Fact is, according to Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker Greg Lloyd, nobody has more going against him these days than Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker Greg Lloyd:

--The NFL is out to get him.

--NFL officials are out to get him.

--Reporters--that’s everyone packing a notebook or microphone and minicam--are out to get him.

--The owner of the Steelers, the benevolent Dan Rooney, is out to help the fans of Pittsburgh more than the players who play for the team.

--Pittsburgh fans will hold old-time players such as Jack Lambert and Jack Ham in higher regard, no matter what Lloyd achieves in the years to come.

--Ask him about Mother Teresa and no doubt he would sniff, “She’s probably a Cowboys fan.”

Simply put, said the angriest man in Pittsburgh, who cussed on national TV two weeks ago after the Steelers had defeated the Indianapolis Colts, “I can do a hundred great things, be a great community leader, do all this other stuff and then do one thing and all of a sudden it’s like you got a 666 [symbol for the devil] etched in your head.”

Lloyd, the firecracker of the Steeler defense with the short fuse, walks around like a man trying to balance a chip on each shoulder. To say hello to Lloyd is to risk receiving the cold rebuke of a brooding intimidator.

“You have one or two people, who for whatever reason have a [problem], because Greg Lloyd doesn’t really say things, act or respond the way they want me to respond,” Lloyd said in explaining his keep-your-distance style. “I couldn’t care less what anybody thinks of me. People can write any old negative thing they want, and the way I look at it is, they don’t know me. They haven’t taken the time to sit down and get to know me.”

Mark Malone, who was the starting quarterback for the Steelers when Lloyd was a rookie, had a shoe contract at the time and gave him shoes. Recently, when Malone, who now works for ESPN, approached Lloyd for an interview--a chance to get to know Lloyd better--Lloyd wouldn’t so much as turn around and acknowledge Malone’s presence.

Malone called his superiors at ESPN and suggested they send Sterling Sharpe, another broadcaster, to interview Lloyd.

“I feel this way,” Lloyd said. “If someone wants to come up and talk to me or stick a camera in my face, it doesn’t do anything for me. I don’t have to talk to anybody. I line up and, like the shirt says, ‘I wasn’t hired for my disposition.’ I was hired to be an outside linebacker, and all the other stuff is not me.

“People don’t like that. People don’t like me being blunt. They’d much rather hear lies, and that’s not me. This is how it is--it’s in your face, deal with it. And most people can’t.”

Lloyd told Steeler officials before the team’s trip here this week that he would not report for mandatory interview sessions. The threat of a heavy fine induced him to make an appearance on Picture Day, but on Wednesday, like several other Steelers, he was a no-show. On Thursday, the final day to get up close and personal with Lloyd, he arrived 40 minutes late, after club officials had tracked him down.

“My job is not to raise America’s kids,” Lloyd said. “It’s not ‘Be like Mike,’ or ‘Be like Greg.’ Be like your parents. I have a job to do on the field and there are times I might screw up and parents might not agree with what I do. But they aren’t down in the trenches. They don’t understand some of the pressures that go with it.”

There is always a but with Lloyd. After outraging many fans by telling a national TV audience, “Let’s see if we can bring this damn thing back here next year, along with the . . . Super Bowl,” Lloyd apologized, but with an addendum.

“I was wrong and I apologized,” although no one quite recalled that. “If some people want to still take it to the next level.

“If my wife and kids forgave me, then you don’t really want to say it, but the heck with everybody else.”

Always the but.

“I think Mr. Rooney is a good owner, but he’s more concerned about the people,” Lloyd said. “His concern is more that the fans are appreciated and taken care of. You look at the Cowboys’ owner and he seems more concerned about his players. It makes for a happy team and more money being spent, but Mr. Rooney, that’s old school and you have to understand that.”

No one is safe around Lloyd. A year ago he did a radio show twice a week, and when a woman called taking issue with one of his sideline tantrums, he told her, “Hey lady, kiss my . . . . What the . . . does that have to do with playing? What are you trying to tell me, I’m a great ballplayer until I do something that you don’t like?”

His “Real Men Are Black” T-shirt has stirred controversy in the past, but Lloyd couldn’t care less.

“When you play football for 60 minutes the way I do, you don’t have to answer to anybody,” Lloyd has said of himself.

The NFL, however, has repeatedly fined him for hitting quarterbacks too vigorously. The league charged him $12,000 after an exhibition game last summer for trying to dismember Green Bay’s Brett Favre.

“[NFL executives] are a bunch of paper-pushing . . . who sit back there and make those rules,” Lloyd was quoted as saying two years ago after earning a $1,500 fine for throwing a football into the stands. “They’ve never played a game in their life. I would like for some of them to come down on that field for just one day, we’ll suit up so we can knock the . . . out of them.”

It is the Lloyd way, the mean way. Smell the blood, or laugh, as he did in 1989, watching Al Toon’s eyes roll back into his head after Lloyd had knocked him into a concussion.

“People come to watch somebody get knocked out,” said Lloyd, who was ejected from his first pro game for punching Denver quarterback Gary Kubiak. “That’s what people come to see. Nobody is out there to protect us, but you go after a quarterback and everybody screams.

“The game is set up for the quarterback. The quarterback can play forever in this league because of the rules. They might as well put them in a glass case back there and put in a chute that they can throw out of.”

Oh, how it galls Lloyd to go easy on quarterbacks. This is a man who once head-butted a teammate and then needed stitches to close a gash on his head. His teammate was fine, because he was wearing a helmet. Lloyd wasn’t. This is the football player who promised to knock Miami quarterback Dan Marino “into tomorrow” before knocking him out of the game, although he said later he was misquoted.

“Whoever you have on the other side of the ball, I guess as a key player, to get Emmitt Smith or to get Troy Aikman out of the game is definitely going to help the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not that you go out there with that intention to hurt, but to get him out of the game.

“When you go back there and hit the quarterback, he gets a concussion and comes out of the game, that’s the risk you take sitting back there. That’s part of that joy, beating that tackle and getting back there. Now understand, they’re just not going to let you run back there and tackle him. You get to him, and you can tackle him and take him out of the game. That’s just part of the game. That’s the same thing as getting chop-blocked. If the ref doesn’t call it, a player has to deal with that. America has to deal with that.”

This is the world according to Greg Lloyd: The end justifies the mayhem.

“If I have to scream, if I have to bite, spit, get a 15-yard penalty, curse somebody out, even if I have to curse out one of my coaches and it means winning, then that’s the ultimate thing. If you don’t like it, the hell with you.”