A REAL IMAGE PROBLEM

No more than a decade ago, one of the NFL’s top defensive linemen would get arrested almost every offseason for smashing up a bar back home. He’d get a slap on the wrist, and league and team officials would chuckle and suggest that, “Boys will be boys.”

No more.

Not after a season in which two players were charged with murder, another with breaking and entering, and many others with less-serious offenses.

“Yes, a certain amount of the reaction has been in the way society views things like spousal abuse or drunken driving.” commissioner Paul Tagliabue said as the NFL’s annual spring meetings opened Monday. “But it’s also very important that we do something about these things.”

Ask any club or league officials about off-field violence, and you get a simple answer: Everyone’s against it.

Probe deeper, and you get a variety of perspectives that demonstrate that sometimes it’s hard for some football players to make their livelihood in a game that encourages violence and then walk away from it in their private life.

“One of the problems is guns,” said Mike Holmgren, who left Green Bay after the 1998 season to become coach and general manager in Seattle.

“When I was with the Packers, we had a policy that when they reported for training camp they had to check their guns with the security department. We got maybe half a dozen. That kind of thing used to be unheard of.”

What was more common not so long ago was the covering up of a player’s off-field problems.

Many football people recall when player obviously under the influence was stopped. Instead of giving him a ticket, the police, most of them fans, gave him a ride home, and the club made sure things were hushed up.

Those were also the days when police summoned to a domestic quarrel simply separated the parties, told them to sober up and went on their way with no more than a warning.

None of that is acceptable any more--not with Ray Lewis of Baltimore and Rae Carruth, formerly of Carolina, charged with murder; former Dolphin Cecil Collins with breaking and entering, and others with a variety of charges from drunken driving to spousal abuse.

Two weeks ago, Tagliabue handed down the first suspensions for off-field violence--two game suspensions to Jumbo Elliott of the Jets and Matt O’Dwyer of Cincinnati for their part in a bar fight and to Denard Walker of Tennessee, who pleaded guilty to assault on the mother of his child.

This week, Holmgren, coaches Brian Billick of Tampa Bay and Tony Dungy of Tampa Bay held a “let-your-hair-down” seminar for owners and other coaches about how to deal with players who show the potential for violent behavior. Coaches talked about more intensive background screening on players eligible for the draft.

Dungy has a concrete examples

A few years ago, he and another club official sat down with a potential star who had had relatively minor off-field problems and gave him a blunt message: “Get rid of the homies.”

In other words, dump what has become for some players, a “posse” of hangers-on who have less money and less reason to stay out of trouble than an NFL player who’s making millions.

In this case, it worked. The player has become a star.

Lewis, one of the NFL’s top defensive players, appears to have been caught up with a “posse” when two men were stabbed to death outside a club in Atlanta following the Super Bowl. His lawyers claim that he had nothing to do with the stabbings, that he was simply in the vicinity.

If there’s any consensus, it’s that peer pressure can be the best solution.

Billick was offensive coordinator in Minnesota two years ago when Randy Moss joined the Vikings after slipping to 21st overall in the draft because of off-field problems in high school and college. He was taken under the wing of Cris Carter, who had overcome drug problems in the first part of his career to become a model citizen and team leader.

Moss became an immediate star and has had no off-field problems.

“Without the structured environment with Cris Carter and Jake Reed, it would have been much easier for Randy to slip into old patterns,” Billick says. “We were fortunate to have him there.”

“I think Randy would have become a great player in any case,” Viking coach Dennis Green says. “But having Cris to help him through it made things a lot easier.”

Other teams have been successful with counseling.

The New York Giants, traditionally reticent about taking on troubled players, have had become more aggressive lately about signing them, in part because they believe in their team psychologist, Dr. Joel Goldberg.

So they signed defensive tackle Christian Peter in 1997 after New England renounced its draft rights to him when they “discovered” that he had pleaded guilty to third-degree sexual assault while at Nebraska. Last year, they signed quarterback Kerry Collins, who had a history of alcohol abuse.

Both have undergone counseling. Collins is now the Giants’ starting quarterback and Peter has become a solid defensive lineman. Neither has had additional trouble, although team officials, who say Peter’s problem also was alcohol, acknowledge they can never be 100 percent sure something won’t resurface.

The league, meanwhile, struggles to find a policy that will both enhance its image and keep its players out of jail.

“When players come into the league, they’re very young. Many are African-Americans from single-parent families and economically deprived communities,” says Harold Henderson, the NFL’s director of labor relations, who himself is black. “It’s a real transition issue for them.”

Coaches like Dungy believes it’s best that things be kept within the team.

“When we get them as rookies,” says Herman Edwards, Dungy’s secondary coach and one of the members of the violence panel. “we emphasize that it’s not their right to play in the National Football League. It’s a privilege. And with that privilege are the hard cold facts that they have to conduct themselves like NFL players.”

All acknowledge, however, that that’s easier said than done.