Yarber--Tales of the Dark Side : Kick Returner Dodged the Perils of His L.A. Neighborhood but Recent Misfortune Serves as Reminder of His Mortality

CARLISLE, Pa. — The dangerous world of Eric Yarber, now in its 25th year, has taken a turn for the worse. In the past 10 months, his childhood running mate, Hadji, was shot and killed; an ex-girlfriend was raped and murdered in Virginia; the Washington Redskins drafted Mike Oliphant to take his job; and he was placed on injured reserve Aug. 23 after suffering a knee injury.

The 5-foot-8 Yarber’s enduring, buck-toothed smile defies it all, not to mention his daily, leaping, mighty-mite catches over the middle during practice.

The NFL’s second-lightest man at 150 pounds (Cleveland’s 5-7 Gerald McNeil weighs 147), Yarber, who played at Valley College in 1982 and ‘83, bears a heavier burden than people know--the realization that death is only one “drive-by” gunshot away and that playing for the Redskins is clearly a time “to smell the roses.”

For instance, his mother Dorothy is only 46, yet he fears she could die anytime. Her home (and his birthplace) is South Central Los Angeles--the drug-, gang- and gun-infested neighborhood made well-known by the movie “Colors.”

Anyway, before she’s gone, Yarber swears he’s going to buy Dorothy her dream house. “But not in South Central L. A.,” he said.

The other day, Yarber sat on a couch here chewing his daily toothpick, his heels protruding from his sneakers, his floral shorts clashing with a King of Hearts T-shirt. His baseball cap read, “Wrecking Crew.” At his size, he couldn’t wreck a fly, but the cap was a gift from defensive end Charles Mann, who wrecks ballcarriers.

As he sat there, children climbed up to him in droves, handing him dollar bills to autograph. “Now, they’ll never spend those dollars,” an observer said.

Yarber: “They’ll spend them. I used to do the same thing.”

Before he dodged tacklers, he dodged bullets. “I’ve been shot at five times,” said Yarber, sparing the gory details rather than scaring the Redskins’ front office. Before he hooked up with Joe Gibbs’ gang, he roamed with a gang called the Crips, a group of Crenshaw High students who wore blue khakis or blue bandannas to signify their power. Crips apparently had the know-how to cripple you.

The rival gang was the Bloods, who apparently knew how to draw it. They wore red bandannas and so on.

If a Crips member at Crenshaw High discovered a Blood in his school, that Blood wouldn’t be in biology class very long. “A Blood wouldn’t want to go to a Crip school,” Yarber said.

Yarber explained he wasn’t an active Crip but stuck up for his gang friends when they’d get hassled by a Blood.

“We’ve had a couple of fights in our time,” he said.

How this prepared him for the NFL is unclear, but running to daylight is a lot simpler than running from thugs. Yarber always has been as darting as a gnat, so football was the more gratifying of the two. After earning All-State honors at Valley in 1983, a scholarship and airplane ticket out of town (to the University of Idaho, where there are only gangs of potatoes) were his rewards.

An NCAA Division I-AA all-America at Idaho, he might have been a mid-round NFL pick, but a leg injury kept away scouts, all except Bobby Beathard, who plucked him in the 12th round in 1986. Since then, Yarber has spent two seasons making daredevil punt returns, for a while refusing to fair-catch.

Soon, mother Dorothy didn’t think it was fair that bigger boys were picking her son up, tossing him down. So, he fair-caught a couple. Last season, Dallas’ Jesse Penn threw Yarber head over heels on one return, but Yarber is so flexible, he avoided a neck injury and bounced right up just to spite Penn.

At this point, Dorothy refused to watch Redskins games. Instead, she tapes them, calls Eric to see if he’s still in one piece and, if so, watches on the VCR.

She was this way in high school, like the time he was thrown on his head and she left the stands for the ladies’ room. Twenty minutes later, she had not heard an ambulance, so she returned to her seat.

Coincidentally, she wanted to telephone Penn after that Dallas game to complain about the brutality.

But is it any safer off the field? Every off-season, Yarber returns to Los Angeles, where friends warn him of the “drive-by” shootings and order him inside. Bloods still are gunning down Crips. And vice versa. So, usually, he stays home two weeks or so, and leaves the war.

“Sometimes, I look back and say, ‘Why didn’t I hate that type of life growing up?’ ” Yarber said. “I hate it now, but I didn’t then. I guess I saw it then as survival. I saw the dope dealing, but guys needed the money.”

Hadji Mims, his best friend from way back, never made it out of the neighborhood. He witnessed a drug crime last October, and the conspirators thought he’d talk, so they shot him four times in the head. Yarber heard the news several days before the Redskins played the Buffalo Bills, and Gibbs gave him leave the following week to attend the funeral. As for his ex-girlfriend, he said her rape and murder were reported in all the newspapers, but it hurt him to even rethink it in his mind.

Yarber: “Hadji was (with the wrong crowd), but he was still my friend, and I loved him to death. When he died, that broke my heart. Like I’d lost a part of me.”

That he might lose his job to Oliphant, then, is relatively inconsequential, although Yarber had a stupendous training camp before being injured. And he certainly roams with the right crowd now.

He said quarterback Doug Williams is his uncle of sorts, a philosopher-in-tow. Williams tells him to live the life style now that he plans to live after football. He tells him to live now as if he’s earning $30,000 a year when he’s actually making $82,000. This way, transition to 9-to-5 is easier.