A Crash Course In Life -- Bad Breaks Aside, Kralik Leaves UW With Spirit Intact

Joe Kralik got caught. One of his coaches, Dick Baird, held up the evidence, a can of chewing tobacco.

"I'm confiscating this," Baird said, after finding Kralik's stash near his locker yesterday.

"You know it's not going to make me stop," Kralik answered. "It's just going to hurt me financially because I'm going to go out and buy another can."

Kralik was right. Baird knew it. Baird knows Kralik.

"He's a little bit like me," Baird said. "Spirit-wise we're similar. We have a bond that would probably last the rest of our lives."

Kralik doesn't have vices, just habits he enjoys.

"It's something I do," Kralik said of his chewing habit. "The coaches don't like it. My folks don't like it either. It's one of the team rules. But I break it."

Team rules. Fashion rules. Health rules. Kralik makes his own. It's part of being the toughest guy on the Washington football team. Suspensions and concussions have kept Kralik out but not down.

This week the senior wide receiver will play his last game for the Huskies. It is a courtship that has lasted most of Kralik's life, one that started the first time he saw Paul Skansi (1979-82) catch a pass at Husky Stadium.

The Apple Cup will be the last day of a career that has seemed like 10 years instead of five.

"Someone asked me the other day, `Did it fly by?' " Kralik said. "Hell no. I've been through so much between the injuries, Billy Joe (Hobert) getting kicked off the team, winning a national championship and being put on probation. It's so many different situations, it's like a lifetime.

"I'm sure I'll remember these years the most. Of course, my brain is so scrambled from all the concussions that it's hard to remember my childhood."

Talk of the last game of his last season rolls right off Kralik, who seems unmoved by sentiment. This week is like any other, he said. He has no great expectations of a career that has declined for various reasons.

Saturday's game against Washington State is just a chance to settle a score with the Cougars, who beat Washington last year in Pullman.

The winter will be time to rest and visit Hobert in Los Angeles. Kralik said he will finish his degree by June, that he is prepared to cut his long hair and wear a tie to get a job, even if the thought agonizes him.

"I'm not a big planner," Kralik said. "I am from the area and I have a good personality. I'm not a bonehead."

Kralik also talked cautiously about a career in the Canadian Football League, though he is not banking on it.

"It's not like I have all the tools in the world," Kralik said. "I think I'm faster than people give me credit for. But I'm not a franchise player and I know that."

Kralik, one of three Huskies recruited from Puyallup High School in 1989, has seen the dawn and dusk of Husky football and everything in between. He was Hobert's favorite target and one of the Pac-10 Conference's top receivers. And he watched Hobert, one of his closest friends, become everyone else's favorite target.

Kralik has never stopped diving after impossible passes, whether in a game or in a practice, and has paid the price. His X-ray file at Washington is the work of a madman or a masochist. The team's trainer has a see-through picture of nearly every part of Kralik's body.

"A couple weeks after I'm done maybe I won't wake up in the middle of the night aching," Kralik said. "But I'm used to it. Diving on cement will do that to you. I've given every bone and muscle to this university. I've never complained about it.

"Coaches can say I didn't reach my potential, but I know I gave everything I had. I fumbled once in five years and I've never been carried off the field."

It angers Kralik to see a player lying on the field as trainers attend to him, and to see that player get up and jog off the field after a brief rest.

"If I broke my leg, I'd find a way to crawl off myself," Kralik said. "I know it sounds cheesy. Maybe it's stupid, but it's the way I was raised. It's the way I am."

Fearless. Except for small, enclosed spaces, Kralik has no fears.

As soon as Kralik was old enough to walk, he was jumping off the high dive at his neighborhood pool in Chicago. His parents still have film of it. Women dived in after him, thinking the little boy was drowning.

Today, Kralik jumps off bridges. And not because his friends all do it. One of Kralik's hobbies is bungee jumping.

Kralik leaped off a 180-foot bridge near the Cascade Mountains over a small stream and a bunch of rocks. He and quarterback Eric Bjornson were going to try a 360-foot bridge near Los Angeles after the UCLA game, but "didn't feel like rewarding ourselves" after the loss to the Bruins.

He has done most of his aging in the past year. He began the season by sitting out the Stanford game for receiving what the NCAA deemed extra benefits from a booster during a summer job. Kralik was also ordered to pay back $850 worth of extra wages and free food.

Kralik watched Hobert fall from grace and saw his own career dwindle. Hobert's departure was part of it.

"He and Billy go way back," said Baird, who recruited both players out of Puyallup. "They have a friendship, timing, confidence in each other. That probably gave Joe better numbers."

Baird discussed other factors in Kralik's drop in productivity - injuries, and a dedication to Napoleon Kaufman and a running game.

"Joe understands that," Baird said. "He's committed to the team concept."

This is one way Kralik goes with the crowd. Yet he has been labeled a hardheaded rebel, a lover of heavy metal, chewer of tobacco and a devotee of hockey who best expresses himself with expletives.

Every other sentence contains one of Kralik's favorite four-letter words that serves as noun, adjective and adverb.

Mainly, Kralik is a person without pretense which is why Dave Janoski was drawn to him. Janoski, a freshman receiver and one of Kralik's closest friends, likes to think he is the team's next Kralik. He aspires to Kralik's style and attitude.

"He doesn't care what people think about him," Janoski said.

NOTES

-- Coach Jim Lambright said he will begin recruiting tailback Napoleon Kaufman for a second time. This time, Husky coaches will attempt to convince Kaufman to stay instead of enter the NFL draft.

"He has to be back on the field in order for us to succeed," Lambright said. "We hope to convince him staying is best for his future."

Said Kaufman: "I have no intention of leaving at this point. We have another game, and I'm concentrating on what we have to do to beat Washington State. That's the only thing on my mind. I'm not saying things won't change, but right now that's what I think."