This Job Requires Little Work

Away from the circus that is Media Day, on the fringe of the playing field that will host Super Bowl XXXII, Mark Collins talked business.

Not that cliche-ridden stuff like “we have to take care of business on Sunday.” Business. Some words about dollars and some things that didn’t make sense, from a man who sometimes fires people and has been fired himself, a man whose current job pays him to do nothing.

Collins is a defensive back on the Green Bay Packers, which came as news even to an NFL public relations man this week. The good portion of Collins’ 12-year career was spent with the New York Giants. He won two Super Bowl rings with them.

Collins went to Cal State Fullerton, back when it had a football team, before it cut the program in 1992 because it was losing too much money. (Business, you know.)

Collins also is a small-scale entrepreneur, the owner of four Checker’s hamburger stands in Kansas City, Mo., and Sportstuff, a sporting goods store, in Redlands.

“I’ve always been business-oriented,” Collins said. “Because in this game, nothing’s promised to you.”

It’s good to come to that realization early, because sooner or later every player gets to experience it firsthand. For Collins it came last year, in the off-season, after he had been named the Kansas City Chiefs’ most valuable defensive player for 1996.

In March he met with Chief Coach Marty Schottenheimer. It seems Kansas City had some salary cap issues and needed to make some room to sign free agents.

“Marty told me to my face, he said my skills have slipped, I haven’t done the things I had to do,” Collins said. “And then it came down to money. Well, I was voted the team MVP. So the first thing he said was crap. And the second one was about a pay cut . . .

“Being the owner of restaurants, that’s like me going to my best employees and telling them to take a pay cut.

Then he suffered the ultimate pay cut: He was waived. Axed. Fired.

“If an employee isn’t producing, yeah that’s something you had to do,” Collins said. “But good people and good employees, you want to keep them around at all times. Owning businesses, that’s the way I look at it and I think that’s the way good business people work.

Collins went back to Redlands and concentrated on his businesses, letting his agent handle the football. Collins attracted attention from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Detroit Lions and the Atlanta Falcons, but he wanted to play for a contending team. The Packers offered Collins a contract at the NFL minimum. After balking initially, he signed with Green Bay on Nov. 27.

Give him credit for picking a winner. The Packers made it to San Diego and are prohibitive favorites to win it all.

“Isn’t it ironic . . . ,” Collins started, “I thought about this in talking to Neil [Smith] and Keith Traylor and Steve Bono, who are all good people [and all ex-Chiefs]: Isn’t it ironic [Schottenheimer] let good people go and he replaces them with people with questionable ethics: Andre Rison, Wayne Simmons, people like that? And we’re all here and they didn’t make the Super Bowl. It’s ironic, to me.

“Good people, you never let go--in anything. You never let good people slip away in anything.

Yep, it seems some basic business principles apply to everything. Even the NFL.

“You go back through the mid-80s, you see the same teams in the playoffs, all in contention,” Collins said. “You know they’ve got a grip on the situation and they know how to run it. The other teams are perennial losers; they don’t give a crap. You look at the Cincinnati Bengals, they’re $7 million under the salary cap every year. Do they care about winning? Do you think? No.”

So what are Collins’ keys to a sound business?

“First of all, location,” he said. “You’ve got to have a good location. Location’s everything.

“You’ve got to have someone other than yourself who you really trust, to be your eyes when you’re not there. You need someone you can rely on and count on.

“My third is great employees.”

The Packers meet all the criteria.

“It’s a great location,” Collins said of Green Bay. “Football is all they have up there. For their business, the location is perfect.

“People you trust and believe in? [General Manager] Ron Wolf and [Coach] Mike Holmgren. Two good, solid, stable people.

“Look at their employees: Reggie White, Leroy Butler, Brett Favre, Dorsey Levens. Great employees. With those ingredients, you’d be amazed what you can do.”

Green Bay has all of the components of a championship team. Collins is just a spare part.

“The opportunity looked great,” he said. “I came out here to work . . . and haven’t worked since.”

Collins quickly discovered the drawback of playing for a contending team: The Packers wouldn’t be Super Bowl champions without great players. There just weren’t a lot of opportunities in a defensive backfield led by Butler, the Pro Bowl strong safety.

Collins didn’t play in his first two games, saw some action against Buffalo on Dec. 20 and hasn’t played since. It’s quite possible the only time his name will be heard Sunday is when the press box announcer reads the list of inactive players to the media.

He didn’t even bother to pick up his first two checks. He felt he hadn’t earned them. He’ll probably wind up giving them to charity.

If they win the ring, he says he’ll keep it.

“I’ll put it on a shelf in my grandfather clock,” Collins said. “I won’t wear it like my Giants rings. I wear those.”

The Packers ring could merely serve as a reminder of the time he got paid to watch, how sometimes less is more. He could have played on yet another Schottenheimer-coached playoff loser. Then he wouldn’t be in San Diego. This way, he might win a championship less than a year after being told his services were no longer needed in Kansas City.

“I fired employees because they weren’t producing,” Collins said. “It’s strange being fired when you’re producing. That’s the strange part of it.”

That’s the business of the NFL.

J.A. Adande is a columnist for the Times Orange County edition.