COLLEGE FOOTBALL: THE BOWL GAMES : TALK OF THE TOWN : Prime Time Deion Sanders Says He’s Ready, Willing and Able to Show His Stuff in Sugar Bowl

NEW ORLEANS —  Cornerback Deion Sanders, the uninhibited orator of Florida State, is often identified as the best athlete in college sports.

And he couldn’t agree more.

He is as good as he is flamboyant, his teammates and adversaries all say, and Sanders’ opinion makes it unanimous.

Deion, as in neon, is generally called by his first name, although at Clemson this season he was called some other things as well.

Fans of the home team baited him as he entered the stadium--as soon as they saw him--as well as every time he went back to field a punt.

It got worse as the half ended with Clemson driving 99 yards to take a 14-7 lead.

So Deion was ready when his opponents punted away in the third quarter.

“Watch out!” he shouted. “This one’s coming back!”

He was right about that, bringing it back 76 yards.

When Florida State won, 24-21, Coach Bobby Bowden said: “Deion’s touchdown turned the game around.”

As usual, Deion agreed.

“Our guys think we’ve got the best punt returner in the nation,” Sanders said, earnestly. “I do, too. Prime Time’s return inspired the whole team.”

Prime Time is Deion’s name for himself. He calls it a perfect name because he tends to hit his peak on the biggest days.

And this week, Prime Time has come to New Orleans.

Technically, the 10-1 Florida State Seminoles are here to meet the 10-1 Auburn Tigers in Monday night’s Sugar Bowl game, but what New Orleans really wants to know is whether Prime Time is as marvelous as he says.

As recently as Christmas Day, there was some doubt about whether he would even show. He had been arrested the night before at a department store in his hometown, Ft. Myers, Fla., after an argument over a purchase.

Neither the Ft. Myers police nor Sanders will discuss a case that has several people talking lawsuit. But Florida State authorities, citing Sanders’ flawless moral record, are taking him at his word and standing squarely in his corner.

And so here he is.

This is the first Sugar Bowl in which there’s less interest in the quarterbacks, whoever they are, than in two defensive players--Sanders and the Auburn winner of the Lombardi and Outland trophies, Tracy Rocker.

The only thing wrong with Rocker, in Deion’s view, is that he never does, wears or says anything outrageous.

That can’t be said of Deion, who, for instance, throughout his career at Florida State, has proved to be an instinctive, creative pop-off.

After the Seminoles routed Michigan State last season, he said of Heisman Trophy candidate Lorenzo White: “That must have been somebody else in Lorenzo’s uniform today.”

A year ago, holding a photo of the 1987 winner of the Jim Thorpe Trophy--which is voted to the nation’s top defensive back--Prime Time said: “They should cover up that man’s face and put my picture there.”

Of an opposing quarterback, he said: “He’s easier to read than the ABCs.”

Of Florida’s football coach, he said: “I don’t think (his players) respect Galen Hall like we respect Coach (Bobby) Bowden. I think that could help Galen lose his job.”

During the week of the game against arch-rival Florida this season, Prime Time dominated the news conferences as usual and gave a frank appraisal of the other team, speaking as if he had made a special trip to Earth for that purpose.

In response to a question from Miami Herald writer Dave Hyde about Florida’s receivers, Prime Time said: “Before I step on the field, they are intimidated of me. . . . I’m told that they talk about me like I’m God. Which I am.”

Summed up Herald writer Gary Long: “Deion doesn’t straddle the line between confidence and cockiness.”

Nor, as a football player, does he straddle the line between competence and excellence.

“Deion is the best defensive back in America and probably the best athlete,” said Pro Football Weekly’s Joel Buchsbaum, an expert on college players.

After Deion won the national punt return championship this season with a 15.2-yard average--10 or 11 is considered good for a pro back--a Florida State teammate, free safety LeRoy Butler, described Prime Time’s ball-carrying style succinctly: “He moves like a ghost.”

How did Deion get this way?

From early boyhood in a fatherless family at Ft. Myers, he played games from morning to night. At the same time, his mother worked from morning to night--on two clerical jobs at a school and a hospital--to support him and a sister, who is now 12.

Idolizing his self-sacrificing mother--Mrs. Constance Knight, who has remarried--he said he once asked her why she called him Deion. “It has a nice ring to it,” she said.

At 12, Deion was a batboy for the Ft. Myers Royals (a minor league affiliate of the Kansas City Royals), and in high school he matured into a three-sport star.

He got to be so adept at baseball--not to mention the rest of his sports life as a basketball player, sprinter, quarterback, receiver and defensive back--that on the day he is drafted by the National Football League this spring, he plans to be playing baseball somewhere in the New York Yankees’ organization.

As he did last year.

“His athletic skills will keep him from getting embarrassed at any level (of organized baseball),” his manager at Ft. Lauderdale, Buck Showalter, said last summer, predicting a big league future for Deion.

“I wouldn’t put any limitations on what he is capable of doing.”

A center fielder, Deion earned $10,000 a week during 6 weeks on various 1988 Yankee farm teams, hitting .280 in the Rookie League and warming up to .429 at Class-A Ft. Lauderdale before tailing off to .150 for a few games at triple-A Columbus, where his swiftness on the basepaths was admired.

In 13 Rookie League tries, he stole 11 bases in his first bid to emulate two-sport star Bo Jackson.

There have been some disputes as to Prime Time’s speed.

Florida State’s defensive coordinator, Mickey Andrews, talks about the day last year that a group of NFL scouts came down to time him in the 40-yard sprint. After Deion was clocked in 4.25, one scout noticed that he was wearing track cleats.

“So they asked him to change into jogging shoes,” Andrews said.

He did. And ran a 4.21.

Encouraged to go out for the Florida State track team last spring--although he had never run track even in high school--Deion placed first in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes at the conference meet, then ran on the winning 400-meter relay team. He was voted meet MVP.

Deion’s 10.26 was one of the season’s five fastest 100 meters, according to Track and Field News. And he hit that in his third race.

“I don’t know any other instance, by anybody, of a time that good, the third time they ever ran 100 meters,” Florida State track coach Dick Roberts said.

Yet Deion’s best and favorite sport is basketball--as it is for almost every other all-around athlete--although as a 190-pound 6-footer, he may not have a National Basketball Assn. future.

He does carry himself like a pro. And dress like one. A poised, comfortable presence in any group, Deion is usually seen in a stylish warmup suit--all-white, perhaps, or all-black, or red and black.

He was in a different outfit every day this week.

Explaining why he’d rather be drafted by Tampa Bay than Green Bay, he said: “I’d sure hate to hide my alligator shoes in snow boots.”

Deion’s hair resembles Eric Dickerson’s. He also wears dark glasses and a wide mustache as thin as the gold bracelets he wears on both wrists.

To see him in New Orleans is to realize that the most ironic thing about his Christmas Eve arrest is that the incident began with a disagreement over a $25 earring.

For the most conspicuous thing about Deion Sanders is his jewelry. On his chest one day, one of his heavy gold medallions dangled grandly from gold chains, and he wore heavy square-topped gold rings on both hands.

“When I shop, money is no object,” he said.

He remarked that in his 21 years he has had six cars, of which, he said, his mother paid for the first five.

No. 6, which the Yankees paid for, is a new convertible.

The car, the rings, the suits--all of it--add up to a personal statement, Deion said. He added--in what at first seemed to be an irrelevant aside--that he has never used tobacco, drugs or alcohol--not even a beer.

“A lot of guys who show gold and drive a big car are dope dealers,” he said. “I want people, kids especially, to know you can have nice things and be successful without selling drugs.”

He once told a Florida interviewer, Rob Wilson, “I don’t ever want anyone to see me with drugs or with a drink in my hand.”

That’s one side of Prime Time, the personal, or serene, side.

“When I’m at a party (where people) don’t know who I am, they always remark about how quiet I am,” he said.

“I don’t like fast music. I like mellow music. I’m really a mellow kind of guy.”

Before each game he always showers twice--at home and again at the stadium. “I want to go into the ballgame feeling clean,” he said.

His public or celebrity side is something else. It’s on display when, for example, he drives up in his convertible with the prominent, personalized one-word license plate, DEION, and steps out, gold chains jingling.

A week after he got the license plate last year, it was stolen. Distraught, he advertised to get it back, promising two things--amnesty and one of his Florida State football jerseys complete with his uniform number, 2.

Goaded into the exchange, the thief wrote a poem and left it on the front seat:

For the best in the state

Here is your plate

It was merely a gag

I’m returning your tag.

Please don’t be upset

It was only a bet

So forgive and forget

Dammit, no more bets!

Deion chuckled, and put the license plate back on his car. Two days later it was gone again. In less than a year, it has been filched 6 or 7 times, costing the Florida State equipment people their entire wardrobe of No. 2 jerseys.

“Sell the car,” they advised.

Bobby Bowden wouldn’t approve of that.

“Deion is a role model,” the Florida State coach said. “And a very important one.

“On my vacation last summer, when I had to drive on the German Autobahn--where they go 100-and-up--I just asked myself, what would Deion do? So I rented a BMW. Finally got a car as good as Deion’s.”