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LOOK, MA, GREAT HANDS! L.A. receivers Flipper Anderson and Henry Ellard are mama’s boys
by RICHARD HOFFER
Originally Posted: September 10, 1990
HENRY Ellard and Willie (Flipper) Anderson may produce more
electricity than the Hoover Dam when it comes to catching a football.
But off the field, these two Los Angeles Rams don’t generate enough
juice to jump-start a toaster. Low voltage? Anderson, who at least
has a nickname, is so far out of touch with his celebrity that on the
rare occasions when he indulges in nightlife he sallies forth to
sleepy San Bernardino, not Los Angeles. Mostly he hangs out in Chino
Hills — a development so thoroughly suburban it could be from the
Nick at Nite lineup — and trades Nintendo games with the
neighborhood kids. Ellard, who once had a tag (he was known as
Grasshopper at Fresno State), likes to cap a perfect day with a stop
at a fast-food restaurant. Actually, a perfect day for Ellard would
be making a fast-food pickup without stopping, as he speeds home to
Fresno, Calif., in his fast car.
Flipper and Grasshopper. Remember when players were known by their
urban street names? Apparently, these are less flamboyant times in
the NFL. Now our heroes are likened to helpful porpoises and athletic
insects. But forgive these two guys for their astonishing
ordinariness. They are, by their own admission, both mama’s boys;
Anderson is as likely to check with ”Mom-Mom” on the relative
merits of Bible translations (”Just stick with the King James,
baby,” she tells him) as Ellard is to surprise his mother with an
Eldorado. There is not much that can be done with mama’s boys. Nor,
in this case, much that needs to be.
”Mama did good,” says Rams quarterback Jim Everett. ”Besides,
they’ve got great hands.”
They’ve got great hands, legs, feet, hearts — all the parts
necessary for world-class pass catching. Last season, Anderson’s
second and Ellard’s seventh with the team, they combined for 2,528
yards receiving. The idea that two Ram wideouts could have topped
1,000 yards in the same season, first time ever on this club, ought
to alarm the rest of the league, which had its hands full when L.A.
coach John Robinson was doing his Woody Hayes impression. But now,
Ellard and Anderson give a team long known for Eric Dickerson running
off tackle — about 38 times a game — a quick-strike offense.
Anderson, who caught 44 passes for 1,146 yards, led the NFL with an
average of 26 yards per catch in ’89. Ellard, with 70 receptions for
1,382 yards, ranked second with a 19.7 average, a career high.
These numbers do not suggest blandness to opposing cornerbacks.
San Francisco 49er Ronnie Lott, one of the best at defending the
likes of Anderson and Ellard, knows what he’s going to do if Anderson
ever appears to be duplicating his performance against the New
Orleans Saints last season, when he caught 15 passes for an
NFL-record 336 yards. ”I’m going to call timeout, walk off the
field, out of the stadium and into the parking lot,” says Lott.
That Ellard and Anderson are causing such excitement in the league
is not entirely their doing. Robinson, who was known as ”28-sweep”
when he was producing tailbacks at Southern Cal, and as ”47-gap”
when he was calling Dickerson’s number at Anaheim, had long ago
decided the Rams needed to pass in order to win. He just didn’t have
the passer.
So Robinson landed Everett — he was the third player chosen in
the ’86 draft but couldn’t come to terms with the Houston Oilers —
in one of the biggest trades in club history. And in ’87 he hired
offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese from San Diego to update the
Rams’ passing game. Soon the 5 ft. 11 in., 182-pound Ellard, who made
All-Pro in ’84 as a punt returner, began getting reminders from
Zampese that he had entered the league as a wide receiver.
”This Coach Zampese came into the film room one day,” Ellard
recalls, ”and said, ‘Henry, you’re an All-Pro receiver. You got a
chance to catch 60, 70, 80 balls.’ ” In reply, Ellard did his Travis
Bickle impersonation (”You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Cause
there’s no one else in the room.”) and finally said, as gently as he
could, ”I don’t know, Coach. I just don’t see how that can be
done.”
By the ’88 season — with Zampese’s system in place, with
Everett’s beginning to flower and with Dickerson’s carrying the ball
for the Indianapolis Colts — Ellard caught a team-record 86 passes.
The Rams were forever changed, but Robinson is not without a
lingering regret. ”Part of me still wants Henry returning punts,”
he says.
Ellard was 1988’s surprise. Anderson was 1989’s. Although he had
caught Troy Aikman’s passes at UCLA, which should have qualified him
for some extra attention in the ’88 draft, Anderson was not
considered to be much of a pro prospect. One service that rated
college players for the draft had him 16th among wide receivers,
behind even Don McPherson, who was a quarterback at Syracuse.
Robinson claims to have coveted Anderson all along, but the fact is,
Anderson was the Rams’ fourth pick — and their second at wide
receiver. ”We thought he’d slide,” Robinson says. ”We didn’t think
Aaron Cox would.” All the same, Cox, a first-round pick out of
Arizona State, started ahead of Anderson their rookie year.
Anderson didn’t much care, though. ”I was in the NFL, just kind
of amazed to be a professional,” he says. ”Practice every day, no
school, money in your pocket.” Do you have the picture of a guy
wandering around Anaheim with a goofy grin on his face? Everett
remembers Anderson in his rookie year this way: ”A guy learning to
talk and chew gum at the same time.”
Last year Anderson worked so hard in the preseason that Zampese
was using him as an example of team dedication. It was embarrassing,
of course, but Anderson was well prepared when Cox hurt his hamstring
in a preseason practice and Flipper became a starter opposite
Ellard. Still, it was Ellard’s show and Anderson didn’t figure to
catch too many more balls than the 11 he had pulled in the year
before. ”Henry was having a great year,” Anderson says, ”and I was
only catching two, three balls a game.” All the same, he allows,
”Most were for big yardage, leading to scoring drives.”
Anderson certainly wasn’t as reliable as Ellard, whose precision
routes, in a passing offense where timing is prized, remain a marvel.
”Every step has a purpose,” says Everett of Ellard. Anderson is six
feet and 172 pounds, and his gift seemed to be speed, although it’s a
speed nobody can agree on. Everett calls it ”a gangly speed.” Steve
Axman, who was UCLA’s offensive coordinator, says, ”It’s a stiff
kind of speed.” Lott says: ”Well, it’s speed, but not burner-burner
speed.”
Whatever kind of speed, it was not a speed particularly impressive
to Anderson’s coaches or quarterbacks. And the fact that he was never
exactly where he should be when he should be did not increase
anybody’s confidence in him. Yet Everett discovered that Anderson
somehow got to the ball before anyone else. ”He’s got a Charles
Barkley attitude,” Everett says. ”Every ball belongs to him.”
Robinson was impressed with ”the enormous number of catches he made
with the guy right on him. He has the speed to threaten the defensive
back but more than that, he can time the ball and go up and get it.”
The rest of the league got a good example of Anderson’s timing
last November, when the Rams played the Saints at the Superdome. The
Friday before, Ellard had injured his hamstring, and the entire
offense was plunged into doubt. ”I mean, I’d been having some big
games with Henry,” Everett says. Ellard was, in fact, on a 100-catch
pace. ”So I’m wondering, Who’s going to pick up the slack. But then
we got into this rhythm.”
There hasn’t been so much syncopation in New Orleans since the
arrival of Dixieland. Anderson, who had caught only 19 passes in the
first 12 games of the season, says, ”I felt like Michael Jordan
scoring 60 points out there.”
Late in the game, Ellard, an interested bystander, came by to tell
Anderson he was approaching the NFL record for yardage in a game,
which happened to be held by Henry’s best friend and Fresno neighbor,
Stephone Paige of the Kansas City Chiefs. ”Some best friend,”
sniffs Paige, managing a laugh now.
”It’s funny,” says Everett, ”but on the final play before the
winning field goal, Aaron Cox and Flipper are running the exact
same pattern. I throw to Flipper, he catches. Yet when I looked back
at film of that game, I see that Aaron was 10 steps ahead of his man
and Flipper was double-covered. Sometimes you feel like you’re
throwing a football through the tire of a Hyundai, but that day, with
Flipper, it felt like throwing a ball through the tire of a John
Deere tractor.”
This is no longer the surprising development it once was. Both
Ellard and Anderson are now, according to the hard-to-please Zampese,
”legitimate,” high praise indeed from Zampese. Everett, if he was
skeptical at first, can now imagine himself throwing the ball into
the Grand Canyon. Neither Ellard nor Anderson doubted their
particular destinies. Both were raised to believe they were special,
although Ellard has fallen somewhat short of the U.S. presidency his
mother had predicted back in Fresno.
”Well, that’s what she says she wanted,” Ellard says, ”but she
always sensed something about me, always knew I’d end up doing
something different. She picked up on that and kept me in line, kept
me levelheaded, as if for a purpose.”
Perhaps his mother, Margaret, didn’t truly believe Henry would be
president, but she was positive he wasn’t going to play football.
None of her boys — there were five (and three sisters) before Henry
came along — were allowed to play any sports. Sam Lane, Henry’s half
brother, says his mother’s involvement in The Church of God and
Christ, ”a holiness church, very strict,” prohibited fun and games.
”But when Henry was seven, I saw him do a gainer off this truck
inner tube we used for a trampoline. I figured he had some athletic
talent.”
Lane, 15 years older, began working out with Henry, throwing a
football to him in the street. Henry definitely had talent. Lane
talked their mother into letting Henry play a little Pop Warner.
Margaret, who had divorced Henry’s father, Jeremiah, years before,
worked a late-night shift as a registered nurse to hold the family
together, and because she could not rule her kids the way she liked,
it was successfully argued that Henry’s reckless energy might be more
safely harnessed at football practice. ”She began to see the sense
of it,” Lane says.
Still, it was slow going. Henry remained so small that when the
neighborhood kids saw him come home from practice, they assumed he
was the equipment manager. He cried to his mother every day, certain
he was going to be ”a shrimp” all his life. In fact, though he
did grow, he wasn’t a starter on a team until his junior year in high
school.
Track seemed the more likely sport for him. By the eighth grade he
could jump his height (5 ft. 6 in.) and long-jump 17 ft. 2 in.. At
Fresno State, where he specialized in the triple jump, he bounded to
a world record of 56 ft. 5 1/2 in. into the wind — now do you know
why he was called Grasshopper? — only to be topped a few days later
by Willie Banks. Ellard still wonders what he could have achieved if
he had devoted himself to the event. On the other hand, ever since he
watched Bob Hayes fly down a sideline, he knew which sport was more
important to him.
At the time, hardly anyone who dreamed of playing for the Dallas
Cowboys thought of going to Fresno State. But it was important to
Ellard to stay close to his mother. ”Just hooked on my mama,” he
says. He lived at home, though he tried dormitory life for one
semester. ”Too crazy,” he says. Fresno State was a wide receiver’s
delight, and Ellard got all the balls and attention and home cooking
he needed to ensure his being drafted in 1983 by the pros.
And once he collected on his first NFL contract, Ellard tried to
buy his mother a new house. She resisted, so he refurbished the old
one. (He later talked his mother into moving into the first house he
bought in Fresno.) Then he bought a new Eldorado and put it into her
garage. ”Her eyes lit up,” he says happily. (Of course, he owed her
a car; as a junior at Fresno State he had pointed out a 1972 Gran
Torino and she had quickly produced the financing for his first
automobile.) And all the while, he and the rest of Margaret’s
children conspired to marry their mother off to — guess who? —
Jeremiah. ”Storybook ending,” Ellard says of the recent remarriage.
Henry and his wife, Lenora, have a five-year-old son, Henry Jr.,
and a three-year-old daughter, Whitney, but he has never really left
his mother. He built a 5,000-square-foot house near his mother’s
house in Fresno, and during the season he travels the 250 miles
between there and Anaheim in his customized Mercedes as if it were a
local commute. He likes fast food and fast cars, his only weaknesses.
”Three and a half hours,” he says, of a drive that should take
longer. ”But I know where the patrol cars hide.” When he’s running
his routes, nobody can touch him.
Anderson at least has moved away from home in Paulsboro, N.J. But
he is no more removed from the influence of ”Mom-Mom” — Helen
Hamilton, the maternal grandmother who, with her husband, Robert,
raised him — than Ellard is from his mother. ”She worries about me
out here,” says Anderson, almost embarrassed. ”She tells me to
watch out for the women, and when I’m in a bar, to watch my drink.
It’s still funny when she talks to me about drinking. And Saturday
nights it’s always, ‘You’re going to be in church tomorrow?’ ”
Hamilton might well worry about any environment less holy than her
household, or her Faith Tabernacle Church, where she is pastor to
”100 faithfuls.” Imagine her anxiety with Flipper in L.A. ”You do
hear so much of what goes on out there,” she says.
But Anderson can adjust to any environment; just check out his
childhood. Anderson’s mother, Verna, was just 15 when he was born,
and she had ambitions of going to college. As she pursued them, the
family settled into an unusual arrangement: Flipper and Verna were
closer to being brother and sister, while Helen, even then a pastor,
assumed the role of mother. (Verna is now a devoted fan, who, through
her job at an airline, has been able to travel to most of Flipper’s
games.) Anderson’s father, Willie Anderson Sr., who is now a minister
in nearby Camden, N.J., remains in close contact with the family. And
Flipper, raised by grandparents in a stew of seven uncles, considers
it all to be as ordinary as Ozzie and Harriet. For the record, none
of these people nicknamed him Flipper. That was done by Aunt Pearl, a
distant cousin of Flipper’s, who thought his crying sounded just like
the critter then popular on TV.
Church was less a problem for Anderson than it was for Ellard. His
grandmother’s charismatic faith allowed sports, providing they could
be played in the few hours when Sunday school, church services or
revival meetings weren’t going on. At Paulsboro High, Anderson
somehow fitted in wrestling, sprinting, basketball and, of course,
football.
Anderson has tried to recreate this environment in a subdivision
of starter homes well beyond the L.A. glamour that his grandmother
worries about. There isn’t so much church, and only his
three-year-old daughter, Shardae, by a former girlfriend, visits
regularly. Otherwise, his life is as wholesome as his grandmother
could hope for. After workouts, Anderson blocks out the hours from
noon to two for All My Children and One Life to Live (”Got to see my
stories,” he says), naps and then plays golf, a sport he has become
addicted to in just three months. He returns home to cook, using
recipes he learned in his grandmother’s kitchen.
Reports of this modest life, relayed back to Paulsboro, reassure
his grandmother, who can’t help worrying whenever the kids are out of
sight. And there are so many to keep track of. Hamilton is the
natural mother of 13 and has raised nine other children who were
family or somehow wandered into her care. A boy with a ”bad break”
had dropped by that morning. He may or may not stay; it’s up to him.
”I wish I had a house with 20 rooms,” she says. One ”bad boy” she
took in is now a youth minister. Others, from broken homes, ”kids
nobody cared about,” have come and gone on to college or become
successes in one way or another.
For example, Flipper. ”All my children made me proud,” she says.
Mama’s boys always do.
http://www.si.com/vault/1990/09/10/122612/look-ma-great-hands-la-receivers-flipper-anderson-and-henry-ellard-are-mamas-boys
