He Won’t Eat His Heart Out in Heartland

INDIANAPOLIS —  He went from the toast of Malibu to the toast of Kokomo. He passed up the shores of the Pacific for the banks of the Wabash.

Look who’s back home again in Indiana. Down among the sycamores with the smell of new-mown hay and all that. Guess who gave up Palm Springs for French Lick?

Guess who gave up the Sun Belt for the Corn Belt, the Chrome Belt for the Rust Belt? Who’d rather take the show out of town, who’d rather be a Hoosier hotshot than a Hollywood hero? Whose anthem turned out to be, “California, here I go”?

Eric Dimitric Dickerson, the football star, is who.

Just when we were getting ready to put his footprints in the forecourt of the Chinese Theater, we found them leading out of town. In the direction of Terre Haute.

It is the notion of those who live in this Paradise of the Pacific that a transfer anywhere else in the world is never a promotion, it’s a punishment. It’s an exile, not a career. Every place else is Elba. You are bucking a very large trend when you pack the family belongings in a car and head out for a home where the snowplows roam and the skies are not sunny all day.

Besides, everyone thought Eric D. Dickerson was as Hollywood as a gold chain. How could he bear to go someplace where you had to wear socks with your loafers, where you’d need snow tires on your Maserati? He’d go crazy, right?

He wouldn’t even need an answering machine. He’d get the bends back there in all those war memorials. How could the studio find him? His press agent would need smelling salts. How can you “do” lunch in Indianapolis? Buffet?

It was too depressing to think about. So, more than a week ago, when Eric Dickerson bitterly commented on his former Los Angeles connection--the Rams--in terms people ordinarily save for divorced spouses, the wise guys nodded sagely.

It was sour grapes, they said. Eric was regretting his rashness. He was lashing out at the Rams for not missing him more, for getting along without him and having the audacity to paste up a winning record in the bargain, for trying to make him a non-person in his own town. He had made a mistake, was the consensus, and it was beginning to sink in.

Eric Dickerson stood in the middle of a locker room here the other day and laughed.

“Hey!” he said. “I like it here. I have guys who come out from L.A. and they say, ‘Wow, man! How do you handle it here? All those cows!’ And I say, ‘Hey, it’s not so bad.’

“It doesn’t matter. It’s a job. You belong to football 6 months a year. It doesn’t matter what’s outside the practice room door. It’s not for you.

“People in L.A. think you owe them something. Like they invented the nice weather and the sunshine, personally. Like there’s no place else. Well, I don’t owe them anything. I’m not from L.A. I’m from Texas. If I owed anybody, I owed Texas. Houston wanted to draft me, but they already had Earl Campbell. I wanted to go where they needed a running back. And the Rams sure did.

“But I wasn’t lashing back at L.A. They asked me a question. Did I think I was the greatest running back in the NFL? Well, what am I supposed to say, ‘No, but I think I’m in the top 10’? Of course I think I’m the best running back in the NFL. You’ve got to have confidence in this game. If you don’t, you start flinching.

“You got the biggest, meanest guys on the planet out there. They’re telling you, ‘You’re not so good! You’re not going to get your 100 yards today, movie star!’

“You want me to start believing them?”

But he did call his successor as Ram running back, Greg Bell, “the dwarf,” right?

“The Rams went around saying they were a better team without me,” Dickerson says. “Greg Bell said ‘anybody’ could run behind that Ram line. Well, I took those as slurs at my ability. Greg Bell doesn’t have my ability.”

Dickerson had also said that, if it came to a crunch, he wouldn’t save his old coach, John Robinson, from death by drowning. Dickerson laughs.

“Look, I can’t swim too well myself!” he says. “I respect John Robinson, but I think I would have trouble enough saving myself in a shipwreck.”

He had been quoted as coming close to saying he would not play his best in L.A. unless his salary demands were met. Wasn’t this a serious breach of football’s, as it were, Boy Scout oath?

“I am portrayed as arrogant,” admits Dickerson. “I am not arrogant. I am confident. I am portrayed as selfish. I am actually very giving. I find that, when you’re successful, the first way you find out is when you make people jealous. It’s the surest sign of success. I pity jealous people. They waste their energy.

“I had a contract with the Rams. For $350,000. It was grossly unfair. Everyone agreed. Then they gave me a contract for $682,000. And they added 3 years to it. They said I had to take it or leave it. I had no options. I was unhappy.

“What I said was, ‘It is very hard for a player to play his best when he is distracted by these other things, when his head is messed because he feels he’s being taken advantage of.’ Everyone knows every time I played, I played my best. I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise.

“The team never had any trouble with me as far as drugs or owing the club money was concerned. I came, I suited up, I played. These other things were, after all, negotiating ploys. I was just trying to get out of there. I didn’t care what it took.”

In the game just preceding the interview, Dickerson had what, for him, was an average game--19 carries, 1 touchdown, 3 catches for 24 yards, a sub-100-yard day. But this followed his explosive Monday night performance last week of 4 touchdowns rushing in little more than a half, and his season mark now stands at a league-leading 1,096 yards and 10 touchdowns. In the NFL in 1988, he is, as usual, the force.

Any message for the gang at Hollywood and Vine?

Dickerson laughs: “Just tell them there’s life after California. I don’t have a pickup and a dog. I dress nice, eat well and I have a job.”

It ain’t Broadway, or even Burbank, but Dickerson says he likes the wages, hours and working conditions just fine. If Daily Variety were to cover it, it might dust off the famous old headline, “Stix Nix Hix Pix,” to read “Dix Pix Stix,” and “No Nix Hix for Dix.”