SPORTS EXTRA / FOOTBALL ‘99: A LAND OF PLENTY : HOME GROWN : Former Hawthorne, USC Star Conway Plays in Obscurity With Bears, but He Has Found Plenty to Talk About

He’s playing for a crummy team that shows little interest in scoring, which is not good if you make your career trying to catch touchdown passes.

His team averaged 17.3 points a game last season. The Minnesota Vikings, residing in the same division, rolled up 34.8 a contest.

You play for the Chicago Bears and it’s the NFL’s version of the witness protection program. The Sporting News recently ranked the top 100 players in the game and not a single Bear appears on the list.

The woeful St. Louis Rams have five. The pathetic San Diego Chargers two. The list actually went 102-deep because San Francisco 49er running back Garrison Hearst and New England Patriot linebacker Ted Johnson made it but were taken off after suffering season-ending injuries.

No mention anywhere of Curtis Conway.

That’s Hawthorne High School’s very own Curtis Conway, who once scored touchdowns as a quarterback, wide receiver, running back and defensive back--in the same game.

That’s USC’s very own Curtis Conway, the first Trojan in 39 years to score on punt and kickoff returns in the same season.

The very same Curtis Conway who was sentenced to shovel snow in obscurity after being selected by the Bears with the seventh choice in the first round of the 1993 draft.

The transition from high school and college superstar to lost in middle America has been a trying one. Conway has been diving for passes thrown by Rick Mirer, Erik Kramer, Steve Stenstrom, Steve Walsh, Peter Tom Willis, Shane Matthews, Dave Krieg, Jim Harbaugh and Mark Butterfield.

This year he gets Cade McNown, a pipsqueak from UCLA who can’t see over the heads of his offensive linemen without a stepstool.

So be it, says Conway, admittedly California homesick his rookie season, but now seven years later a graduate with honors from the NFL’s hard-knock school of unreal expectations.

The thing is, Curtis Conway might be one of the game’s best receivers, but there’s no sense pumping him up here because no one will see him play this season. He still plays for the Bears.

If not for Carolina, San Diego, Philadelphia and Detroit, Chicago would be the worst team in the league.

The NFL season should begin each year with a visit with Conway before the Bears officially go into hibernation. A conversation with Conway is refreshing, a little controversial and almost always enlightening.

“You want to know the only thing I really hate about this business?” Conway says without prompting. “It’s what happens to someone like Rashaan Salaam.”

Salaam, a former Heisman Trophy winner and first-round pick of the Bears in 1995, failed miserably with the Bears and after joining the Raiders this year blamed his misfortune in Chicago on smoking too much marijuana.

“People take something like that and make jokes about it,” Conway says. “This guy had a problem. Just because we’re athletes, people target us and think we’re supposed to be Jesus Christ. We can’t make any mistakes.

“They talked about how immature Rashaan was. He was a kid, maybe 18 or 19, still a baby with all this pressure on him. I can relate. I was a kid from the ghetto; they talked about him not having a suit when he showed up to be interviewed for the first time. Shoot, we didn’t have any suits growing up--there was no money for a suit.

“They didn’t like the way he talked. I don’t mean to get racial about this, but most black kids talk the way we talk and talk slang; it’s the way we communicate with each other. Now we get in front of a camera and people say this guy doesn’t know how to talk. Well, the people I’ve been communicating with all my life understand what I’m saying. But we have to take it to a different level, and if we don’t. . . . An athlete gets a negative rap on any little thing he does wrong. It’s not fair. It’s all about being on TV and because we have a lot of money.”

Given little chance to score, let alone win, Conway chooses instead to be provocative, seeking both understanding and consideration for today’s poor, poor athlete.

“As athletes we know a lot of people just don’t care about us,” he says without waiting for an “Amen.”

“I found that out last year when I struggled with a groin injury. Nobody really cares about you as a person except for your family. People cling to Curtis Conway because I’m Curtis Conway, who plays for the Bears. So long as I’m playing for the Bears and doing good, everybody wants a little piece of me. As soon as my career is over. . . .”

At this point, some people might be thinking: “OK, maybe it’s a good thing that the Bears aren’t any good and Conway’s a nobody who can’t get anyone to listen to his woe-is-me tale--after all, opinionated wide receivers should be seen and not heard.”

But maybe there’s something here. There is no question that along with the skills identified in great athletes, there comes an expectation of proper behavior and immediate maturity. Is that too much to ask?

It can be, says Conway. “I’ve always felt you can’t have maturity until you’ve actually experienced some things, and a lot of athletes aren’t prepared for what they are about to go through. And in some cases, we can’t win no matter what we do.

“As athletes we are expected to go back into the neighborhood,” says Conway, who grew up near 56th Avenue and Central in South-Central L.A. “Anybody who emerges should go back--not just athletes. Everybody in the ghetto is struggling to get out, and the first thing we want to do is move out. But do you see doctors and lawyers coming back? Where’s the pressure on them? What really kills me is you take a black athlete who came from nothing, and now he has some money and he has to go back. It’s like an obligation. If we don’t go back we feel the wrath of our own people, and if we do, we get it from the media who want to know why we’re hanging around there.

“My grandmother still lives there, so I have to go there. But as players we talk about it in the locker room all the time--you just can’t go back. I mean I’m hanging out with the boys every Sunday after church, but if something goes down and the police pull up on me, then it’s my name that goes on ESPN--not the homeboys.”

Bristling at the suggestion that maybe he stands tall as someone who has made it with a story to tell, Conway says he will tell it, but without the implied obligation.

“I’ll talk to kids because I want to talk to kids not because as an athlete I should talk to kids,” he says. “Kids are getting fooled so much by images and that’s a lot of what is happening today. Kids shouldn’t want to be like Mike. Or like Curtis Conway. I don’t buy this whole image thing. You’re going to see me with a kid the same way you’re going to see me playing with my three kids.

“I don’t believe in role models; I believe in being yourself. Role modeling is just that--acting. What’s wrong with the world today is it’s so fake. When I was growing up I thought Bill Cosby was the man, then all of a sudden I hear this stuff about him having [an illegitimate] daughter. The same with Dr. J now. . . . I was buying the TV image of what a family was really like watching the Cosby family.

“You don’t really know what an athlete is like because of his image. The people who really believe in you are your parents. But these kids see these athletes and the way they are puffed up and all these kids think they are going to be professional athletes. And that’s not true.

“Shoot, I wasn’t the best guy on my team. First thing I hear when I go back into the neighborhood is, ‘Man, you were lucky.’ And I say, ‘Me and you were on that same bus with our helmets and shoulder pads only you took the detour when it was time to practice or study.”

Nice speech, but then Conway does another one of those down-and-outs talking about how it’s not his responsibility to be a role model, recoiling at the athletic demands of having to be perfect. Football’s very own Charles Barkley. “We’re human,” he pleads, but that doesn’t really dismiss the obligation to spread the gospel of experience and understanding according to Curtis Conway.

“It’s too bad if people don’t like what I’m saying,” he says. “But it’s not my obligation. I don’t want any kids looking to Curtis Conway. Don’t wait for Michael Jordan to give a speech.

“Kids should be listening to their parents; they’re going to love you no matter what you do. I look at people in my neighborhood who robbed and killed, and yet when they needed a place to go, they went straight back to their mommas. And no matter what they did--their momma’s door was always open. Kids are listening to the wrong people . . . looking at the wrong images.”

That said, Conway and the Bears can now settle down for their long winter’s nap.