Jim Everett Has Fellow Rams in His Pocket

There was nothing more exciting to do, one quiet night at a Midwestern university, than to speak to a certain comely co-ed. So football player Jim Everett stealthily made his way to the roof of her sorority house, then convinced her to come to the window.

Suddenly, he fell. Everett slid from the roof, reached to save himself and latched onto the rain gutter. He cut his fingers, damaging nerve endings. There was no way he could hold a football adequately after that.

Everett had to turn to something else. But he had become accustomed to handling hard-luck situations by then. He had been working at various jobs from a very young age, and did not expect help from either his father or any of his three former stepfathers. He would continue to be self-reliant.

Eventually, Everett left the school that he had been attending, Eastern Illinois, where he had been a tight end on the football team, for the school where he is now a professor specializing in social education, the University of New Mexico.

He is married to another educator, a woman who works with special-ed students and kids with reading disabilities in the Albuquerque school system. They have a daughter, Jackie. And they have a son, James Samuel Everett III.

The son plays some football, too. He is the starting quarterback for the Rams. He will start for them tonight at Anaheim against the Dallas Cowboys, the team he followed most closely as a boy.

This Jim Everett takes care of his fingers. He has to. He has to treat those hands as though they were made of crystal. His football team’s plans are in those hands.

He was sitting on a picnic table after practice the other day, reminiscing about his childhood, recalling how his dad had started taking odd jobs from the age of 12. “He did everything from making Popsicles to being a ham-boner,” Everett said.

Ham-boner?

“Yeah, slicing the ham from the bone. As a matter of fact, I did that myself, last summer. Frankfort, Indiana. In a meat-processing plant. I didn’t work with the knives part of it, though. I didn’t want to cut my fingers off. I worked in that meat locker, 38 degrees, every day, stuffing those hams into big bags. But I steered clear of the knives.”

Had to. After having passed for 3,651 yards and having led the nation in total offense, the Purdue quarterback had a fortune riding on those fingers. He was to become the No. 3 player chosen in the NFL draft, behind Bo Jackson and Tony Casillas, and would be worth a whole lot to the team that eventually signed him.

The Rams had to give up more than hams. They had to give an All-Pro guard, a defensive end, two first-round draft picks and a fifth-round pick when they acquired Everett’s rights from the Houston Oilers Sept. 18. And they had to give Everett a four-year, $2.55-million deal a week later.

But quid pro quo . What Everett has given the Rams is, at last, a quarterback of quality, a leader, one so mature beyond his years that people are wondering if it is really possible that a rookie could quarterback a team to a Super Bowl championship, without even having gone to training camp.

Everett has fit in nicely. Nobody cares that he is 23. Nobody cares that he has been with the team 10 weeks. Nobody cares that in his first NFL start, he completed 7 of 20 passes for 56 yards and threw 2 interceptions in the first quarter.

Nobody cares because the Rams already have seen what they wanted to see: That Everett can play in this company, that he can get along with this company, and that in the huddle he is a man, not a mouse.

Finding someone who does not like Everett is about as easy as finding an out-of-state license plate in Hawaii. Cornerback LeRoy Irvin likes to kid around and call him Savior. Defensive end Gary Jeter says the Rams “were just sort of ho-humming along until he came into the picture.” Guard Dennis Harrah keeps coining nicknames for the kid, who in turn refers to the 33-year-old Harrah as Pappy.

Last week, Everett was invited to accompany Harrah, Carl Ekern, Irv Pankey, Tom Newberry and Mike Schad to a local hunt club, where they paired off to see who could bag the most pheasants. They later introduced the quarterback to skeet shooting.

“I did the worst of anybody, but that was my first time,” Everett said. He was a rookie, see, but willing to learn.

At practice last Thursday, veterans Eric Dickerson and David Hill killed time on an adjacent field playing catch with Everett. They clowned around like guys who had been acquainted all their lives.

Everett sent Hill on various pass patterns, and Dickerson, the All-Pro running back, played defensive back. Time and again, Hill beat him, until Dickerson, face-down on the ground, pulled a white handkerchief from his back pocket and threw it, surrendering.

“Oh, Eric’s a great guy. He just can’t cover,” Everett said later, laughing, teasing Dickerson the way a veteran is supposed to haze a rookie. “And he’s out there covering David Hill, who’s I don’t know how many 10ths slower than Eric is.”

Imagine 10 weeks ago, if a man with zero minutes in the NFL had tried to tease his teammates, affectionately or otherwise. You knew the Rams were apprehensive when the trade was made. They had lost a lot, including a friend, All-Pro guard Kent Hill, to get this guy.

Dickerson, more than most, disapproved of the move, insisting that without Hill’s blocking, the sluggish Ram offense would slog along even worse.

Now, Everett is clearly one of the guys. From the moment he entered the huddle in the second period of the New England game, when Harrah told him, “It’s your huddle, kid,” to the end of the game, by which time Everett had amassed 193 yards in the air and 3 touchdown passes, everyone sensed that the Rams had found their man. Including the crowd, with its chant of “Ev-rett! Ev-rett!”

Merlin Olsen, a former Ram, called it “the best first-game performance I’ve ever seen by any quarterback.”

Help had finally arrived for a leaderless team. Anyone concerned that Everett would kneel in the huddle and ask the veterans for permission to speak was soon being treated to a gung-ho, agreeably arrogant guy who spoke up loud and lewd. Anyone concerned that Everett would shy away from the older players’ companionship was soon ordering a round on the $50 bill the kid had just slapped on the counter.

Even Coach John Robinson admitted that he had been worried about some college hotshot swaggering into camp as “Mr. Slick” and instantly alienating half the squad. No such thing happened.

Nor did Everett need consolation when the New Orleans Saints pilfered two of his passes. When Robinson went over to comfort him in this time of sadness and self-doubt, he found Everett sharpening the horns on his helmet and dying to get back in there. Three quarters later, the kid had his first NFL win.

Demure, Jim Everett ain’t. As a teen-ager in New Mexico, he was good at everything. All-State quarterback and safety on a state championship team that went 13-0. Captain of the golf team. Letterman in wrestling and basketball. National Honor Society. “I was voted student of the year,” he remembers.

An All-American boy in every respect, every minute of every day? Not exactly.

“There were probably quite a few times that I was on the edge (of going bad),” he says. “Either I didn’t get caught or I got out just in time, that sort of thing. There’s always that curiosity in every kid when they want to see what they can get away with. I wasn’t always the good kid on the block.”

He is laughing, thinking about it.

“I never needed professional help, or anything like that,” he says.

Sometimes he and his friends went off into a nearby mesa for privacy and built bonfires. “There might be some beverages out there, and we might not have been of the proper age to be drinking them, if you know what I mean. You know. Just a few cold ones.”

He did turn into Mr. Slick in some people’s eyes. His Purdue coaches found him immature at first--”a goofball,” former offensive coordinator Jim Colletto described him--and considered moving him to positions of less responsibility. By the end of his fifth year there, though, Everett was successful, poised and an Academic All-Big Ten.

“All college really is for is to show that you are coachable,” Everett says. “ ‘Yes, I can do a certain job. Yes, I can get a degree. Just show me the way. Give me a chance.’ ”

Everett felt the same way about quarterbacking in the pros. He waited for Houston to sign him. He waited to see if it would be Green Bay or San Francisco or one of the Los Angeles teams that would trade for him. Until a contract snag came along, Everett was, as he now puts it, “15 minutes away from Green Bay,” where he would have been a pigskin Packer without even going into a meat locker.

The way it worked out made him very happy. The first thing he did was buy a satellite dish for his parents’ house in New Mexico, so they could see him play. He will spend some time with them after the season, but first he has to be best man at the wedding of his friend, Buffalo fullback Bruce King, in Puerto Rico.

“It’s Feb. 7,” Everett says. “So, hopefully, our season will only be over at that point for a week or two.”

He is taking care of his fingers. He is keeping them crossed.