Now You See Him, Now You Don’t; Now He Has It, Now He Hasn’t

SAN FRANCISCO —  The best player on the field in Super Bowl XIX may not be some 6-foot 4-inch collar-ad type who can throw a football through three time zones and hit a running rabbit. He may not be this lanky sprintout type who can complete passes from the back of a moving train to a guy standing in a crowd 40 yards away. He may not even be Italian.

The best footballer in the tournament may be this funny little guy who giggles a lot and who is so hard to see that there are linebackers in the league who think he should wear a bell or a day-glo jersey.

The scene at almost any San Francisco line of scrimmage goes like this:

Linebacker A: “Did you hear something just then?”

Linebacker B: “No, but I thought something just brushed me.”

Linebacker A: “Oh, Lord, do you suppose it’s No. 26 again?”

Linebacker B: “Either that or they got bats in the backfield in this ballpark.”

But what makes Wendell Avery Tyler the best football player on the field is the fact that he’s here at all. You see, Wendell’s hard to see, hard to catch, hard to stop and hard to guess, but he has this delightful nonchalance about the football: He doesn’t care whether it accompanies him or not.

To Tyler, it’s just a detail, and he’s not good at details. His goal is to get in the secondary, the end zone. The ball is on its own. If it wants to come along, fine. If it doesn’t, he won’t coax it.

Tyler fumbles.

That’s like saying a guy drinks. Wendell used to do that, too, till he found God. But you know how they will say of a man, that he’s a great guy till he drinks. Wendell Tyler is a Hall of Fame player. Till he fumbles.

Now, if an organization puts up with a man who drinks, if it tolerates his absenteeism, his lapses in performance, you would conclude he must be a valuable employee, indeed. So it is with Tyler. He has been around this league eight years now and around this game 12. And he’s consistent. He fumbles just as much as he ever did.

If a player keeps dropping throws or muffing line drives in baseball, he’d better be a tremendous hitter. If a fighter can’t slip a punch and keeps taking four to land one, that one had better be some wallop.

Tyler’s is. If he could just remember where he last put the ball sometimes, they would be mentioning him in the same breath with Walter Payton or Marcus Allen. On a team and under a system that considers the run as a kind of loss leader or something you only show to befuddle the rube while you get ready to play the ace, Tyler gains five yards a crack and 1,000 yards a season. And that’s only the times he remembers to bring the ball along.

Some years ago, the pitcher, Jim Brosnan, used to argue that a rival pitcher, Stu Miller, was the best in all baseball. That was during an era that had Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale.

Brosnan’s reasoning was that Stu Miller had no fastball, his hardest pitch was a floater you could catch in your teeth, he had no slider and a Little League curve. To win games with that arsenal, contended Broz, you had to be a far better pitcher than a guy with a 100-m.p.h. fastball.

Thus with Tyler. He fumbled the ball 13 times last year. And that was one of his better years. Now, when I tell you the 49ers let Tyler carry the ball 246 times last year despite his infirmity, you know he has to be like Stu Miller. A guy who spots you the first draw and still beats you. If he ever stopped fumbling, he’d be a more famous Tyler than James.

No one has fumbles like Wendell Tyler. He has had end zone fumbles, coffin-corner fumbles. He has fumbled kicks and handoffs with equal skill and enthusiasm. Tyler is a money fumbler. He saves them till they mean something, usually the game. His fumbles are like Babe Ruth’s strikeouts. If he ever stopped fumbling, the customers would feel cheated.

The rap would break a lesser man. But Tyler thinks his fumbles are kind of funny. He’s proud of them, in a strange kind of way. All week long, journalists from hamlets he never heard of have been coming up to him, and the first thing they want to know about is the all-time drop and how Wendell deals with it.

Wendell deals with it with a giggle. “How do you hold a fumble?” one wanted to know.

Actually, Tyler carries a football like a sailor on shore leave carries his wallet--very conspicuously. It is the misfortune of some habitual fumblers that they change their styles and try to lock the ball into their chest. Tyler disdains this cop-out. It would cost him his concentration, he insists.

There are those who think that would be a very small loss, but Wendell concentrates on more important things than the ball. For instance, he concentrates on being scared. Not timid. Afraid. Tyler agrees with the guy who points out that if a lion is not scared, it’s harmless. If it’s scared, God help you. Same with Wendell. When he’s running scared, your only hope is a fumble.

Tyler almost fumbled his life away five years ago. He was riding in a car on a West Virginia mountain road when the driver, a relative, fell asleep. Or something like that. If the car veered left, all the occupants would have been killed by a dive off a cliff. It veered right. Wendell suffered a smashed hip.

“Can I play football again?” Wendell asked the doctor.

“In a wheelchair?” the doctor wanted to know.

Tyler had to learn how to walk all over again. But the fumble came back to him right away. Like riding a bike, you never forget how. It all came back to Wendell.

The story in the Ram camp that year was that Wendell was standing on the sideline when someone handed him a football. When he dropped it, the coach patted him on the shoulder.

“Go on in, Tyler,” he told him. “You’re ready.”