The Boz within

Sporting News, The, June 30, 1997 by Bill Minutaglio

He's waiting, everyone's waiting, for sunlight

And while he waits, he's inside an off-white, railroad-car-shaped portable trailer settled at the side of a narrow road. It's the kind usually found behind flimsy, chain-link fences at construction sites and filled with greasy blueprints, Styrofoam coffee cups and sweaty men punching time clocks. But this trailer is sinking into some soupy grass and is mired under spindly palm trees that sashay out from pastel Miami mansions.

The kamikaze remains of a hundred swamp bugs that blindly lumbered through the humidity have formed a miniature Jackson Pollock painting on the outside of his trailer. And inside, instead of blueprints, there are movie magazines, videotapes and piles of photographs. And instead of construction workers, there are leathery hairdressers who comb Brian Bosworth's lank, dirty-blonde hair -- and chainsmokers who dab dollops of makeup on Brian Bosworth's hubcap face with the surprisingly tiny dents for eyes.

When they're through, Bosworth slowly settles into a soiled couch inside his very narrow trailer. There is an annoying, dull thudding from the weak air conditioning. He points me to a spot at the other end of the couch. "You know, look at where Dennis Rodman is taking it," he says in a barely audible voice.

Bosworth, thick and muscled, puts his large head in his soft hands. He is thinking about how once he might have opened the door for the Rodmans of the world. "I can't imagine Rodman being a really fulfilled, happy soul," he says.

Bosworth is waiting for The Knock. The little rap that will tell him it's time to walk a few yards across the road in Coconut Grove and onto the set of Lawless, the private-eye Fox TV show his agent and the network have concocted for him. The one with the grunts and Ninja kicks, the tasty nymphets in wham-bam bikinis and a relentless traffic jam of monosyllables.

It's the show where 32-year-old Brian Bosworth is forced to summon forth the beast. The sine qua non of arrested adolescence. The heavy-attitude, steroid-sampling, chopper-riding beast from so very, very long ago. The smash-mouth, heavy-metal, buffed-up sire of Beavis and Butthead. The Bad Boy From Oz.

THE BOZ.

On a little table are scraps of paper with lines for his Boz-based character, John Lawless. "Guess what fellas? It's not your lucky day" were the first words he uttered in the first script. They're like all the other sentences he has uttered in every show and B-movie he has done since he picked up his phone and heard the best doctor money could buy saying that the bones in his shoulders were grinding, sawing, into each other. That football was over. That the big Sunday show was completely dead for Brian Bosworth.

That call, forever more, became The Call. And now, what he does instead, is wait, with The Boz, for The Knock.

He picks up today's lines, reads them and puts them down. He can't stop thinking about last night:

Bosworth was in his suite in the coolly austere Doubletree Grand Hotel, where he has been living during filming. Bosworth, away from his nice Malibu house and his wife and two little girls for three straight months, was watching the evening news. Suddenly, he heard the sports reporter saying: "Boz couldn't play. Why should he be able to act?"

Bosworth, who worries about everything and feels horribly misunderstood, felt the twin-headed virus of doubt and anger. It wasn't so much the acting critique. It was the football.

It was the same thing he has heard since he took his $11 million contract in 1989, after only 24 NFL games, and never played again. It was the same thing that has made him think how easy it would be to full-throttle his Harley right off that windy, intense, half-mile straightaway not far from his California home.

How hard could it be to lower his shoulder, like when Bo Jackson came over the middle, out of the blur of bodies? There'd be, like there was when he was playing, that instant, electric pain of contact. But maybe, when he met pavement, the instant pain would finally erase the big pain.

"How hard could it be? Is it really going to hurt? You get into that deep well of emotion if you are by yourself," offers Bosworth, not looking at me. "Why am I here? What's the point of going on? If I can't do what I want to do, then what's the point?"

He picks up a stack of black-and-white photos of the Boz as the middle-aged private eye trying to be bold in his black, lacquered-on pants. It's The Boz as an aging Chippendale dancer. The Boz, the reckless '80s dude with the party-on persona, has the anachronistic whiff of a behind-the-beat lounge singer hanging on for a '90s ride.

Gary Wichard, Bosworth's agent and best friend, is now in the trailer and has given him a fist of strangers who will get those signed photos. Wichard punches numbers on his cell phone and calls Packers tight end Keith Jackson -- also represented by Wichard -- who is announcing his retirement today. Bosworth listens as Wichard reminds Jackson of the highlights he should mention. The awards. The Super Bowl ring.