If Dickerson Won't Run, Let Him Walk

By Mike Downey

Oct. 21, 1987 12 AM PT

Eric Dickerson sure can pick his spots. On the very day when the life savings of people who help pay his salary were threatened or perhaps even wiped out in the stock market, the money-hungry Ram running back, whose position should be listed by the club as greenback, groaned and moaned about making more than $600,000 a year.

Pay me or trade me, he said. Set me free. Woe is me. Oh, I’m so unhappy. Oh, I’m so underpaid. Oh, I’m so good, but they treat me so bad. Oh, call me Mr. Blue. “Let me go. Release me. Waive me. Yeah, please release me.” If only he’d started singing it, he could have sounded exactly like Engelbert Humperdinck.

This is the same Dickerson who complained before the exhibition season that he might not be as good as he should be during the regular season unless somebody forked over some serious bucks, because, after all, a happy running back is a productive running back. He wasn’t sure he could give 110% every game, or even that piddling 100% that never seems to satisfy coaches. After a couple of weeks, we kept expecting Dickerson to say: “We gave it all we had today. I personally gave 83% out there.”

And you wonder why Americans told the football players to take a hike after they walked out. Some Americans can’t find jobs. They sleep in their cars, they push their belongings in shopping carts, they pray for lucky lottery numbers, and the little money they socked into stocks just got sucked into somebody’s computer. They’re supposed to sympathize with some guy who refers to the Rams’ latest contract offer of $975,000 as “a ridiculous figure.”

The only ridiculous figure around here is Eric Dickerson.

He wants out? Let him out. Pay his way. Tell him not to let the door hit him in the cheeks.

He’s willing to go to Buffalo if the Bills will pay him $1.2 million? Fine. Buy him a one-way ticket on a Greyhound and a box of Kleenex. We’ll see how many times he’s a guest on “The Late Show” with Arsenio Hall when he’s in Upstate New York, knocking icicles off his nose.

What did the Rams do when Dickerson signed his current contract? Did they hire two 49er linemen to hold him down while John Shaw from the front office forced a pen into his fingers and worked his hand across the dotted line?

If the Rams do give Dickerson double what he’s making now, does he promise to give it back if his performance drops off? Was the lesson of Willie Hernandez lost on everybody during the recent baseball playoffs?

The way Dickerson has been talking, why should anybody believe he is really doing his best to help the Rams win? Why should we take his word for it, when he promises not to “lay down?”

Whenever he fails to score from inside the five, why should we believe his heart was really in it? Why should we pay good money to see Eric Dickerson play? Why should the Rams even take a chance by giving him the ball? The scabs may have been lacking in talent and character, but at least we had the feeling they were playing their hearts out.

With Eric Dickerson, you have to pay him to get second effort. Until you do, you might get only first effort.

Why shouldn’t the Rams make this bellyacher happy and oblige him with a trade? Here we have a guy who wants out of his contract, but he is the very same guy who caved in on free agency even before the NFL players went on strike.

He stood there in the locker room after the Ram-Viking game and said he wished the union would get off that free-agency stuff. With free agency, Dickerson could have been in Buffalo by now, counting his money and shoveling his sidewalk.

Let us listen to more of this Ram’s rambling: “I’m willing to play out the year, if they just give me a solemn oath that they’ll get rid of me. . . . John (Robinson, the coach) makes more than all of us. He makes more than me. Let him run the 47 Gap. . . . I’d go to Japan. I’d go anywhere if they paid me.”

Fine. Send him to Osaka. Send him to Tokyo. He can play in the Nippon Football League, and go on the pregame show with Brent Musnoodle and Jimmy (the Asian) Snyder.

Dickerson says he is something like the 25th-highest paid player in the NFL, even though “I’m one of the top three players.”

Fair enough. Let’s draw up a list of 25 players, right now, and see if we would trade Dickerson for any of them, straight up.

Say when: Lawrence Taylor, John Elway, Dan Marino, Mike Singletary, Howie Long, Randy White, Joe Montana, Steve Largent, Jay Schroeder, Marcus Allen, Mark Bavaro, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Jerry Rice, Joe Morris, Curt Warner, Richard Dent, Al Toon, Tony Dorsett, Leonard Marshall, Dan Hampton, George Rogers, Rueben Mayes, Todd Christensen. We neglect Walter Payton only because he is retiring, Harry Carson because he is old, and Mark Duper and Stanley Morgan because we got tired of typing.

Maybe Dickerson is better than any of these guys, when he is a happy player. The Ram coaches certainly have strained their backs from carrying all those Super Bowl trophies to which Dickerson has led them. And remember, he did lead the NFL in rushing last season, even if he did carry 61 times more than the next busiest rusher.

We thought that’s what they paid him to do, but guess we were wrong. They only paid him to run, not to run well. If they wanted him to run well, they should have paid him more. Now we get it.

The Rams have lost seven of their last eight games, but don’t worry, Eric Dickerson will be out there again soon, giving his almost-all. As far as he is concerned, there is a reason they sometimes refer to the end zone as pay dirt. They should erase the team names spray-painted in the end zones, and replace them with dollar signs.

Scratch and claw for that extra yard? Not our Eric. Get out of bounds. As he said in an interview in the Sporting News’ pro football yearbook: “Running style is the big thing to staying healthy. They can say what they want about me. Defensive players have called me chicken. But, hey, I line up for the next play and the next game.”

That’s how the guy rushes for close to 2,000 yards a season.

What the Rams ought to do is put a $5 bill on every hash mark.

He’d make it 3,000 yards a season.