MOVING FORWARD

Only a few hundred fans are in the stands as the left guard fires off the line of scrimmage and pulls with controlled aggression to his right. The defense reacts much too slowly as he wipes out a defensive end and linebacker with a well-rehearsed block.

As the lineman strides confidently back to the huddle, a fan leans on a rusty fence and says to his buddy, “Man, did you see that? That guy could play in the NFL. He should be playing for the Steelers!”

What the unknowing spectator doesn’t realize is the No. 66 who just wiped out a semipro defense did play in the NFL, for the Steelers and Jets. He made the Pro Bowl, too, back when his life story was a football version of “Rocky,” not a real-life rewrite of Dostoyevsky.

Carlton Haselrig’s dark days have included six stays in rehab centers, two disappearances from NFL teams, numerous arrests, a jail stay, a gunshot wound, the loss of his family and repeated upheavals in his puzzling life.

In his 32 years, Haselrig has had nothing and had it all. He’s lived in either a comfortable $250,000 home or a jail cell. He had a life that many men would want and another that was a step away from homelessness.

Today, he is trying to repair a life ruined by alcohol and rebuild his fragile self-esteem. He even hopes to return to the NFL one day.

“I sometimes wish I never would have left or wish I hadn’t been going through what I’ve been going through, but that’s all behind me now,” Haselrig said. “It’s time to keep on pushing and moving forward. It would be an incredible story if I got back and, hopefully, it will come true.”

Encouraged by his return to football, Haselrig will shift to Arena ball this winter to play for the Buffalo Destroyers. So far, it’s the first time he has stayed straight while playing football.

“Well, you know, sure, I want to go out sometimes and tie one on with the fellows, but I haven’t been,” he said. “I haven’t gone out even once. I get in my truck and go home.”

When he first entered the NFL, the Steelers had high hopes for him. Tom Donahoe, the Steelers’ director of football operations who first scouted Haselrig in 1989, said the team liked him as a player and a person.

“The shame of it all is how much we tried to help him, and a lot of people tried to help him, but he had a lot of problems he couldn’t overcome,” Donahoe said. “We went more than the extra mile with him. He could have been a Pro Bowl player in this league for 10 years.”

But anyone who knows Haselrig realizes he does not live his life 10 years at a time.

In Johnstown High School in 1984, he was a standout offensive lineman who yearned to wrestle, but the school didn’t sponsor the sport. So he petitioned to be a one-man team, and a month later, he won the highly competitive Pennsylvania state championships without ever wrestling a regular-season match.

He went to Lock Haven University for football and wrestling, got hurt, stayed only a semester and went back to Johnstown, about 55 miles east of Pittsburgh. There was no football team at Pitt-Johnstown, so Haselrig concentrated on wrestling, much to the disappointment of heavyweights across America.

A loophole allowed him to win an unprecedented three national championships in both Division I and Division II, or six overall. Now, Division II wrestlers no longer can compete in Division I. They call it the Carlton Haselrig rule.

“He could have won the Olympics, he was that good,” said Pitt-Johnstown wrestling coach Pat Pecora, who made sure Haselrig also left with a degree in communications.

But NFL scouts were curious about this physical specimen with uncommon quickness and strength who tossed around wrestlers 50 pounds heavier as if they were mannequins.

“When we came back and told Chuck [Noll] about him, he thought we were totally nuts,” Donahoe said. “But the draft was 12 rounds then and as we got into the later rounds, we badgered Chuck to take him, and we did.”

Haselrig hadn’t played football in five years yet, on the first day of camp, he wiped out former No. 1 draft pick John Rienstra and the running back behind him with one forearm swoop.

“When I heard about him, I thought, ‘No way. There’s no way a guy who never played college football, just a wrestler, is going to be able to play in this league,’ ” said Tunch Ilkin, who played alongside Haselrig. “Boy, was I wrong.”

Noll, an accomplished teacher of line play, recognized Haselrig’s wrestling-acquired ability to stay on his feet, to move and manhandle, and shifted him from defensive lineman to offensive guard.

By 1992, Bill Cowher took over and so did Haselrig, leading the blocking as Barry Foster rushed for a Steelers-record 1,690 yards. In only his second season as an NFL starter, Haselrig made the Pro Bowl and signed an $850,000 contract for 1993.

But a public persona didn’t mesh with a private man who revealed little about himself even to teammates, who were disappointed when he didn’t accept their dinner invitations. His former wife, Sara, noticed a change in him after they returned from the Pro Bowl and, not long after, Haselrig vanished for a few days.

Haselrig’s life was being torn between pro and con--and the pros he played with and the cons who wanted to hang out with him.

He skipped minicamp for a stay in the Betty Ford clinic and, during a three-week injury layoff later in that 1993 season, he first tested positive for drugs in the NFL’s random tests, his ex-wife said.

Soon after, Haselrig’s life began spinning out of control. He would go on binges, then enter rehab centers from California to Pennsylvania, Texas to Kansas.

“Going to those places, they might have helped a little bit here and there,” Haselrig said. “Mainly it seems like it brings a whole bunch of things up, stirring up stuff in your mind.”

He vanished from training camp in 1994, causing his increasingly frustrated wife to file a missing person’s report. He was found 10 days later in a budget motel only 20 minutes from Three Rivers Stadium.

Suspended that season by the Steelers, he returned again to Johnstown and began working out with his college wrestling team, ostensibly to train for the 1996 Olympics. But he disappeared again, only to turn up in November 1994 driving his sport utility vehicle down the steep concrete steps of a Pittsburgh seminary, apparently to elude police.

Three months later, he was arrested again for not making a court appearance, and nine police officers were called to subdue the 295-pound lineman.

Still, the New York Jets signed him in 1995. Just as in Pittsburgh, his teammates liked him and his play was exceptional, until he disappeared once more in November after flunking another drug test. He was suspended by the league for a year and hasn’t played in the NFL since.

Later, his house was auctioned for back taxes; his wife sought a protection-from-abuse order and moved to Atlanta with their two children; and Haselrig was shot in the leg by a man who claimed self-defense. There also was a third drunken driving charge and an 11 1/2-month stay in jail.

Now, two years later, he credits jail with straightening out his life--not out of fear for his safety, but rather a hatred for the boredom, the isolation, the nothingness.

“There’s nothing positive about being there,” he said. “Being in there wasn’t that bad or nasty or physically dirty but, mentally, you get a chance to think a lot and go through what you’ve done.”

He later found work in a Johnstown factory and a new girlfriend, and the two now raise a 7-month-old daughter. Still, the Pittsburgh Colts, a not-for-pay team that shares a nickname with an NFL team but not much else, were as surprised as anyone when Haselrig approached them last summer.

Here he was, an accomplished player who was on the verge of signing for millions in 1993, willing to play . . . for free?

“We knew about his past, but he’s been a role model for our players,” said Tom Averell, the Colts’ senior vice president and the commissioner of the league. “And this is good football, pure football. We’ve had players tell us they never got hit this hard in the NFL.”

If Haselrig’s bid to return to the NFL doesn’t work out, he hopes to teach or coach.

“I still have a burning desire to get back out there and bang heads a little bit,” Haselrig said. “Playing here, down to the heart and soul of things, it proves that I must love the game of football a little bit.”