Holdouts Beathard’s First Test

Early reports from the Chargers’ training camp at UCSD would lead me to believe that this team is coming off a Super Bowl season.

No, I don’t get this impression from anything happening at the training camp. This conclusion is reached because of the number of players who are not in camp.

As Tuesday dawned, Bobby Beathard, the new general manager, had to be astounded that nine players were missing because of contractual disagreements.

Nine players?

This team must be coming off a pretty big year to cause such a large group of athletes to think their services are that much more valuable than what management was offering.

Right?

Maybe it wasn’t a Super Bowl team, but surely it made it to the AFC championship game . . . or at least the playoffs.

No?

The 1989 Chargers were 6-10 and finished last in their division? This franchise hasn’t had a whiff of the playoffs since Ronald Reagan had his memory . . . or Roseanne Barr weighed less than an H-back?

Did these guys actually believe the highlight film? Didn’t any of them notice it was only six minutes long?

Didn’t any of these guys realize that 1989 season ticket sales were more than 18,000 below 1984’s high, and that attendance ran more than 13,000 below capacity?

This surely was a franchise far below par in terms of artistic and financial success. Trying to squeeze this franchise for extra bucks has to be a little like a union striking the S&L; industry.

And yet there were those nine empty beds in UCSD’s dormitories and nine empty uniforms in the locker room. Beathard, the architect of four Super Bowl champions, had to be perplexed that so many players were missing from so pedestrian a club.

Gill Byrd, the veteran of the bunch and perhaps the wisest, signed his contract later Tuesday and checked in to both his suite and uniform.

Another holdout, Cedric Figaro, was expected today.

So then there would be seven.

Of the remaining seven, four were not exactly operating with safety nets. Defensive backs Sam Seale and Vencie Glenn and offensive linemen Broderick Thompson and David Richards all occupy areas feared to be weak, which obviously makes them vulnerable to takeovers by enthusiastic children or wily Plan B-style veterans.

Their bargaining power is such that they should not consider backing Beathard into a corner, lest he trigger trap doors at their feet.

The other three, however, are totally different and yet totally intertwined.

Two of them, Leslie O’Neal and Lee Williams, were stalwarts in the one area in which the Chargers already are populated by Super Bowl-caliber players . . . the defensive front seven. The defense was No. 6 in the National Football League in 1989, and these guys were the heart of it.

Indeed, if the offense had merely been average (or slightly below), the 1989 Chargers would have been in the playoffs, could have made the AFC championship game and might actually have stumbled into the Super Bowl. If the Chargers had scored a mere 21 points in each of those 10 losses, the regular-season record would have been 13-3.

They didn’t. The offense stunk.

So O’Neal and Williams have leverage, though their circumstances are different. Whereas O’Neal is not under contract, Williams is scheduled to labor for $725,000, plus a possible $100,000 in incentives.

It might have seemed Williams is being adequately remunerated, even given back-to-back Pro Bowl starts, except . . .

Williams picks up the newspaper and sees that the Chargers and Junior Seau, their No. 1 pick in the college draft, are said to be $900,000 a year apart in their contractual conversations.

Williams was already in camp, but this gets his attention. O’Neal, though unsigned and therefore not in camp, undoubtedly was already keeping a watchful eye on what an untried kid might command.

Thus Junior Seau, who has never played a down in the NFL, is the key to financial comfort for the two key players in the one area in which the Chargers figured they didn’t have a worry in the world.

Seau, you understand, was drafted immediately after Keith McCants, whom Tampa Bay reportedly signed for five years at $1.2 million per. Not surprisingly, Seau’s agent suggests his client get at least what McCants got.

What we’re talking here is a dominoes . . . solid gold dominoes.

You think Leslie O’Neal will sign for less than Seau?

Not a chance.

Consequently, there is no way O’Neal will sign before Seau.

Then there is Lee Williams and his demand for renegotiation. That’s a dirty word. No one does it . . . or admits they do.

This little dilemma represents Bobby Beathard’s first big test as Charger general manager.

If he makes Junior Seau happy, he has to make the unsigned O’Neal happier. And then he must find a way to salve the ego . . . read that bank account . . . of Lee Williams.