Seahawks' Krieg: A Blue-Collar Quarterback In A Caviar League

Sunday evening, like millions of other couch potatoes, I watched the Seahawks defeat San Diego, 13-10, a game in which Mr. David Krieg, the Seahawk quarterback, fumbled five times.

This is not a personal record. Krieg has fumbled more than that.

His artistry in creating up-for-grabs footballs even includes what sportswriters call his ``soap dish'' pass. Indeed, the ball in Krieg's hands seems to be as slippery as a cake of Ivory.

But forget all that. This is one glorious football player.

He gets hit, thumped, blindsided, mauled, betrayed by blockers, and overwhelmed by ill fortune. Sometimes he just drops the ball.

Krieg gets knocked on his keister time and again, yet he always comes up spitting nails. Then he sets about finding a way to win.

``This guy is a breadwinner,'' I thought, after David's fourth or fifth fumble in San Diego. ``He won't take any food stamps from anybody.''

The blue-collar quarterback.

In non-football civilian life, he'd be a dock walloper, a longshoreman, an over-the-road rig driver; he'd be somebody's hard hat somewhere. He never quits working to win, no matter how dangerous it gets or how many times he comes up three bricks shy of a load.

This is an interesting theory I've developed about Krieg. Hear me out.

NFL quarterbacks come in all sizes, shapes and chemistry. I suppose handsome Dan Marino, at Miami, would be the yuppies' quarterback. John Elway at Denver is the intellectuals' quarterback. Warren Moon, down at Houston, is the liberals' quarterback. And so on.

But Krieg . . . well, David is different. He's the kind of guy Studs Terkel had in mind when he wrote ``Working.'' He'd be a John Steinbeck hero, maybe Tom Joad in ``The Grapes of Wrath.'' Jack London would adore Krieg.

He is the stuff of proletarian novels.

One visualizes Krieg in his current habitat, running for his life from 285-pound assassins, holding the ball out, precariously, then dropping it.

It is just as easy to visualize David punching a time clock, hurrying to work, carrying his lunch bucket. The problem with this vision is that he might drop the lunch bucket.

Yet he would give you an honest day's work. Day after day, fair and foul weather, he would support his family by working hard. He would grit his teeth through setbacks, overdue bills, layoffs and other working-class disasters. But he would keep on fighting, so his family could win.

David's problem in the violent world of pro football is principally one of survival. The Seahawks are half good, but being half good is not half good enough.

His offensive line, employed to protect David, sometimes behaves as though there is an NFL rule against pass blocking.

I know several lawyers who'd love to take his case if David chose to sue his teammates for non-support.

Or look at it this way. If you put picture-perfect Joe Montana, the 49ers' quarterback wizard, behind Seattle's offensive line he'd quickly become an endangered species.

All of Joe's lovely, breathtaking statistics would go down the tube and fans would be wondering aloud, ``Is Montana the kind of quarterback who can take you to the Super Bowl?''

They've always wondered this about Dave Krieg. Yet when I hear it, I think about what Lincoln said when somebody wondered if Ulysses S. Grant (a blue-collar general) was really the man to lead Union troops. ``I can't spare this man,'' Lincoln said. ``He fights.''

Montana came from Notre Dame. Marino came from Pittsburgh. Moon came from Washington. Elway came from Stanford. All glamour schools. But Krieg came from a college that nobody ever heard of, a school that dropped football altogether, and later went out of business itself.

The blue-collar quarterback in a caviar league.

Like any blue-collar worker with no supportive tools at hand David has to scratch for it. He has to improvise.

So now we see David, now we don't. He is in there somewhere, dodging and ducking, squirming, twisting, running just to stay alive - before he gets crushed, as in a mine cave-in, by 1,200 pounds of malevolent livestock.

And every time he comes up barking. He bawls at an official, yaps at his teammates, exhorts, cajoles, encourages, exuding optimism and good cheer. C'mon, guys, there must be SOME way to win!

There you have him. The blue-collar quarterback, the guy who makes an ordinary team just a little special. How about a few beers after work, fellas? We've earned it.

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.