Football's the tune in this booth

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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 30, 2001

Good morning, and welcome to the laid-back land of Tight Radio. It's 3 a.m. and all the dull people have gone to bed. I'm halfway through my shift, and it seems like time to play a little Grateful Dead. Because what a long, strange trip it has been. . .

Tight Radio lives. Somewhere in the office, beneath the charts, away from the videotapes, underneath the player files, the voice of the disc jockey waits to speak again. Somewhere in the room, the heart of rock and roll is still beating.

Tim Ruskell leans back in the new chair of his new office and clicks on the CD player, and a song comes softly through the speakers. This is as close as he gets these days to playing music for an audience, but for a man who spends his career chasing other players who make other hits, it is close enough.

This is who he is: Ruskell is the player personnel director of the Tampa Bay Bucs, the man responsible for college and pro scouting. Before the Bucs draft anyone, before they sign any free agent, it first clears Ruskell's office. Here, he is in charge of finding someone to break Gale Sayers' records.

This is who he was: Once, Ruskell's velvet tones drove the Underground Railroad, the campus radio station at USF. He had a rock show, where he played Allman Brothers and Santana and Neil Young. He had a jazz show, where he played Tangerine Dream and Chick Corea and George Duke. There, he was in charge of finding someone to hide Leo Sayer's records.

As professions go, you do not get here from there. The only thing most scouts and disc jockeys have in common is midnight.

"If I saw someone with my resume," Ruskell said, laughing, "I wouldn't even call them back. From time to time, someone will ask how you get to be someone who does my job. I tell them I don't have any idea."

Let's see. You start by spinning records. You end up as possibly the first person ever fired by the Tampa Bay Bucs. You pick up wet towels and dirty jocks. You catch a few passes from Steve Spurrier. You read Shakespeare with O.J. Simpson. You freeze in the Canadian Football League. You sweat in the USFL. You rip up your knee vaulting a fence to look for players at Duke. You time a workout under a street light. You work insane hours for pitiful pay. You watch a million players in a thousand games. You shake hands with the president.

Oh, yeah. And you need a stopwatch.

"I'd rather have Tim Ruskell than a No. 1 draft pick," says Bears general manager Jerry Angelo, who Ruskell replaced as pro personnel director. "He has excellent instincts. He has the ability to cut through all the fluff and get to the core of a player. And he has to do it in one day. Some guys have players for a year and don't figure them out."

So, Jerry. You were a big fan of T.J. the D.J. when you hired Ruskell in '87? Who was your No. 2 choice? Johnny Fever?

Angelo laughs.

"I didn't know anything about it," Angelo said. "Tim was probably smart enough not to put it on his resume. If I had known his background, I probably wouldn't have hired him. I'd rather have a scout with a scar on his knee than one with a tune in his head."

For the sake of the Bucs, it is good everyone didn't think that way. Enter John Herrera, the first scout ever hired by the Bucs. In 1985, Herrera stopped into a store called Budget Tapes and Records, where Ruskell had a part-time job. Herrera, it turns out, was a huge music fan with a huge collection. The two hit it off.

As a youngster, Ruskell had fallen in love with the Dallas Cowboys. He was that kid who always seemed to know a little more about the players than everyone else, the kid who took the radio to bed with him, the kid who charted the plays. He describes himself as "a pretty good player," but he stopped playing after his sophomore season, when his father retired to Tampa.

Herrera told Ruskell he could probably get jobs for Ruskell and his friends at Bucs games as ballboys. Was he interested? Of course Ruskell was interested.

And so began a long, rewarding career that lasted, well, 20 minutes. In his first practice, Ruskell was chased off the field by then-coach John McKay.

"I was holding two balls in each hand," Ruskell said, grinning. "And the play started to come to my side of the field. There was another ball in the way. I wasn't sure of much, but I was sure Coach McKay didn't want his players to break an ankle on an extra ball. So I kicked it out of the way."

Picture McKay, watching the play, and suddenly seeing a ballboy kick a ball in the middle of it. So he fired him on the spot. Of course, McKay hired him back. Then he fired him again. This time, Ruskell was supposed to lean in the huddle, get the play called by the quarterback, and relay it to the coaches. But McKay moved to the side. Ruskell kept telling the play to the other coaches, but McKay couldn't hear it. So he canned him again. That day, when he came off the field, McKay saw Ruskell standing to the side, repentant. McKay yelled, "There's the son of a b---- who won't tell the head coach what the play is!!"

Yes, McKay hired him again. And fired him again. Eventually, however, Ruskell became a regular. He remembers running patterns for then-quarterback Steve Spurrier, who liked extra warmup times.

Eventually, Ruskell was in charge of the visiting team. Which is when a running back named O.J. Simpson walked in with a script. It was Othello. Ruskell asked the ball boys to read the lines of certain roles so he could rehearse. (Note: In the play, Othello kills his wife. Just thought you'd like to know.)

Another time, Ruskell had to leave in the middle of a game. Jack Youngblood, the ex-Rams player, had shot a turkey while on a hunting trip the previous day, but had left it in his hotel room. So while the Bucs were playing, Ruskell was hauling a dead bird from the Hilton.

"Nothing was too hard for him, and nothing was too low for him to do," said Joe Sidell, a buddy of Ruskell's who was also a ballboy.

Ruskell also worked with Herrera at breaking down films. One day, Herrera asked Ruskell if he had any interest in scouting if he (Herrera) ever became a general manager. Sure, Ruskell said, almost dismissively.

Sure enough, Herrera became a general manager and hired Ruskell. The bad news: It was in Saskatchewan of the CFL. You know where Saskatchewan is? Go to North Dakota and take an up. Ruskell has toes that haven't thawed out yet from the trip.

He was there for three seasons, and when the staff was fired he had two words to say: Thank you. Ruskell came home, and his old buddy Spurrier was looking for a scout with the Bandits. Ruskell was hired.

But the USFL folded two years later and, once again, Ruskell was a free agent. Meanwhile, Ray Perkins was the new coach of the Bucs, and he brought Angelo with him. Angelo was looking to fill a part-time scouting position.

Ruskell was one of 100 applicants. Angelo remembers sitting him in a film room and asking him to evaluate two players. One was Jerry Ball, the nose tackle. The other was Rod Jones, who had just been drafted by the Bucs.

Despite his lack of height and propensity for weight gain, Ruskell liked Ball's explosiveness and footwork. He didn't like Jones' instincts, even though Jones had been a No. 1 draft pick. Neither were particularly easy reads.

"It was uncanny," Angelo said.

So the Bucs hired Ruskell to what was, frankly, a lousy job. It paid $15,000 with no benefits, no insurance and, it seemed, no future.

"I knew he was going to be celibate based on how I worked him," Angelo said, laughing. "He worked like a horse. The job was part-time only in terms of money. He did everything, plus he set up our training camp."

Ruskell sums it up: "I made no money, and I had no life."

It wasn't the best of times to be a Bucs scout. The Bucs kept drafting players such as Shawn Lee, Ruben Davis, Rhett Hall, all who became successful ... somewhere else. "We were like the guys in the white lab coats," Ruskell said. "We kept doing our experiments, and everyone ignored us."

As the team changed ownership, however, and the record improved, it became obvious that scouting really wasn't the team's problem area. When the Bears came after Angelo, Ruskell's promotion was a simple one. This time, the McKay in charge didn't fire him 20 minutes later.

He has had his successes. More than anyone at One Buc, Ruskell believed in John Lynch. He was an advocate for Marcus Jones, for Warrick Dunn, for Kenyatta Walker. (For the record, he missed wildly on Charles McRae and Eric Curry.)

Still, there are times he misses the airwaves. There are times he'd love to return to Tight Radio, where T.J. the D.J. could live again.

"Maybe when football's over," he said. "I'd love to get a little show on a podunk station where I could play what I want and say what I want."

If that happens, who is going to replace Ruskell with the Bucs?

Depends. Does anyone know who does the midnight to 6 a.m. show on the USF campus station?

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