There’s No Question That’s Too Difficult for the Answer Man

Dear Answer Man . . .

When Eric Dickerson hinted that his attitude might be as deficient as his salary, Ram Coach John Robinson said he would be keeping a close watch on Dickerson every day, in order to make a judgment on whether to bench Eric or play him. Exactly how will Robinson do this?

Scrutinizing Dickerson’s every move in practice, looking for clues to the man’s inner feelings, would be a full-time job for Robinson. He has more important things to do, such as trying to make everyone forget that bogus strikebreaker list he sent to the league office.

Therefore, the Rams will fit Dickerson with a small electronic device known as a “ ‘Tude-o-Meter� (Pat. Pending). The device will register Dickerson’s attitude at any given time, on the following scale: Rambo Gung-Ho; Win one for the Gipper; Workin’ hard; Hardly workin’; Workin’ in a coal mine; Take this job and shove it.

Manager Tom Kelly of the Minnesota Twins is growing impatient with the national media’s “stupid questions� and suggests that reporters take the time to read the Twins’ media guide while on airline flights. Let’s hope you’re not among the embarrassingly unread media masses, Answer Man.

Look, I’m no Evelyn Wood. But I intend to read the Twins’ guide just as soon as I whip through the works of Shakespeare and the autobiography of Mickey Mantle.

However, I make it a personal policy never to read team media guides on airplane flights. I have a dread fear that my plane will lose a wing over Omaha and the last words I ever read will be, “Tom Kelly’s hobbies are whittling and wearing his baseball cap at a cockeyed angle.�

Tuesday night, Twin starter Les Straker looked like a child of destiny, a rookie who spent 10 years in the minors and was reaching out for one moment of greatness, the kind of rare, surpassing clutchness of which champions are made.

“I never felt like this, this good, my whole career,� Straker said later. Yet, Kelly yanked Straker after the sixth, because that’s the way the Twins usually do it. Wasn’t this a situation that cried out for insight and daring, something beyond SOP (standard operating procedure)? Can’t Kelly read a situation?

Maybe not, but he can read a media guide.

The NFL preferred that the non-union games be called “replacement games.� How do you feel about that term?

Slightly nauseated. I prefer this more descriptive and dignified term: NFL Mid-Season All-Comers Tryout Camps Intersquad Games (Pat. Pending).

Wasn’t that a stroke of genius, the owners staging replacement games to force the players back to work?

Genius? Hey, the owners didn’t pull off a coup, they blew a potential bonanza. Do you realize the owners paid those non-union strikebreakers to live out their dreams?

The owners could have run a desperate situation into a lucrative chain of NFL Fantasy Kamps (Pat. Pending), charging the kampers a fat fee to play some ball. Each kamper would get a daily lunch, a souvenir team-logo jockstrap and a Polaroid of himself shaking hands with either the head coach or a member of the coach’s immediate family.

Uh, Answer Man, after the first strike game, you wrote that the Raiders would be marching back en masse the following week. Supposedly you based that on Al Davis’ telling you on the QT, “I could have had the whole team back last week. They wanted to come back, but I told them to stay out another week. I didn’t think it would be fair to these guys (the scabs) not to get to play one game.�

Did you get sucked in by a lie?

I prefer to think of it as a replacement truth.

Chicago Bears Coach Mike Ditka took a vote of his regular players on whether or not to keep 16 non-union players. The vote was 44-1 against keeping the players. Ditka kept ‘em anyway, saying, “I thought (the voters) would be realistic.� Were they realistic?

Obviously not. Had the union players been realistic, the vote would have been 45-0.

Eric Dickerson will earn $682,000 this season and the same next season, then his salary for 1989 jumps to $686,000. Why is that? Cost-of-living raise.