The stories about Larry Allen will never be retired

So this kid, a freshman defensive end with an attitude, heard about Larry Allen and wanted a piece of Larry Allen. It was all the rage in the fall of 1992. Everyone on the Sonoma State football team had to take a shot at Allen. If nothing else, testosterone, which saturates football players in large amounts, demanded it.

"So the kid comes flying at Larry, said Frank Scalercio", an assistant coach at the time, "and Larry launches this kid through space. I mean it. The kid was flying. I looked at the kid as he was going through the air and he had this big smile on his face. I'll never forget what he said when he landed."

"I just got flat-backed by a future Hall of Famer!" he said with glee.

Now, 16 years later, that kid-turned-adult can say he once reached zero gravity playing football, courtesy of the best offensive lineman in NFL history.

A lot of adults are saying that now with pride, said Scalercio, an SSU assistant football coach Allen's junior year and SSU's head coach for Allen's senior season.

Allen, 6-foot-3, 325 pounds, recently retired from the 49ers and the NFL, but the stories about Allen will not, can not. They beg to be disbelieved as well as mocked and dismissed. Human beings just don't do those sorts of things, but Allen did, and it's Allen's two years at SSU that provide the most jaw-dropping examples.

On an NFL field, it's difficult oftentimes to truly appreciate great athletic ability; the talent is so bunched together that even the league's worst player is at least extraordinary. But not so in 1992 and 1993, when Allen was a man against boys, when a guaranteed-to-be NFL Hall of Famer played Division II football, and if that sounds like a mismatch made in heaven, or in an ambulance, it was.

Like the time Allen, blocking on a run against UC Davis, knocked to the ground and unconscious a defensive tackle, a linebacker and a safety - all on the same play.

I told Scalercio I didn't believe him.

Larry didn't even break his stride,? Scalercio said.

Sonoma State was playing at Humboldt State and the night before the game SSU's players were in their Eureka hotel room watching the local news. A sports segment showed Humboldt coaches and their best player and NFL prospect, Scotty Reagan, a 6-foot-5, 260-pound defensive end, predicting they would make a laughingstock of Allen the next afternoon. Overrated, is what Scalercio remembered.

The next day on a pass play the defensive end threw the Cossacks' tight end to the ground and was steaming toward Allen.

"The guy had an eight-yard running head start on Larry," Scalercio said.

When they met Allen hit him in the chest.

He lost consciousness before he hit the ground,? Scalercio said. 'His legs had gone limp while he was still in the air, and so when he hit the ground Reagan tore the ACL in his knee. He missed the rest of the season.'

Skepticism, however, followed Allen at SSU. If he was so good, why was he at a Division II school that couldn't give scholarships' The answer wasn't simple. Allen grew up in Compton in the Los Angeles area, nasty and violent as almost any city in the country. At the age of 10, Allen was stabbed eight times in the head, neck and shoulders trying to stop a beating of his younger brother. His dad had little influence in his life. He went to four high schools in four years, in Compton, Stockton, Fairfield and in Napa at Vintage.

His grades suffered, not to mention his self-esteem, and if it wasn't for the influence of his mother, Vera, Allen might have been lost forever in the flotsam of Compton. Allen went to Butte College, a junior college in Oroville, attracted the attention of every major football university in the country, but left there with poor grades and no associate of arts degree.

But Scalercio had seen Allen play at Santa Rosa Junior College while Allen was still at Butte. His very first vision of Allen was Allen body slamming an SRJC player to the ground. Scalercio was hooked and ended up talking with Vera four or five times a week. Scalercio was told by then-head coach Tim Walsh that he was spending too much time recruiting Allen. His grades were poor and even if they improved, Allen would be going to some place like USC or Oklahoma or Alabama.

Allen sat out a season and went to SRJC to improve his grades. By that time Scalercio had developed such a relationship with Vera - 'She was going to decide where Larry went' - that mom would send her son to SSU provided Scalercio kept his promise to take care of him on and off the field.

Still, Walsh had to be convinced. So when Allen walked into the Sonoma State gym for the first time, the snickering began immediately.

'It was all going to be a big joke, that's what people thought,' said Scalercio, 48, now director of Blue Chip Football Camps and an assistant line coach at Montgomery High School.

It was spring1992, and the university's basketball team was on the court. Players stepped aside. They knew what was coming. Walsh liked to take recruits - either from football or basketball - into the gym to test their athleticism ... or embarrass themselves.

There stood Allen, 6-foot-3, 340 pounds, dressed in white shirt, white pants, white shoes. He looked like a big dollop of vanilla ice cream.

"So I hear you can dunk the basketball," Walsh said in a loud voice. "OK. Let's see."

The giggles picked up then. Watch this oaf. Walsh has another chump out there. Thanks, coach, for giving us another break from practice. Allen looked like he could dunk a doughnut, not a basketball.

"And remember,' Scalercio said, 'Larry had just driven eight hours from Los Angeles, had just pulled into our parking lot. Allen took two steps in street shoes and hit a thunderous two-hand dunk that sucked all the air in the building through the hoop.

'Everyone went quiet,' Scalercio said. 'All you could hear was the ball bouncing on the floor before it stopped.' Something that big that moves that fast, it's usually Big Foot.

'So, Larry, here's where you are going to be staying tonight,' a grinning Walsh said a minute later to Allen.

By the time he was an SSU senior, Allen was the conference player of the year - as an offensive lineman. Scalercio campaigned for Allen to be named to the 1994 East-West Shrine Game but Shrine officials shrugged. No one wanted to take a risk on a Division II player. Scalercio asked the Shriners to see Allen in action, against Hayward State. They reluctantly agreed.

'Hayward had a giant defensive tackle, 6-foot-10, 300 pounds,' Scalercio said. 'On one play our right guard blows a knee. He screams back to Larry in the huddle, 'Larry, he did it on purpose!? The Hayward guy points to Larry and says, 'You're next!' Scalercio will never forget what he did next.

"I walked over to the defensive tackle and said," Son, that was the wrong thing to say.? A couple of plays later, Allen hit the Hayward player so hard, he was taken from the field unconscious.

"The Shrine officials came up to me after the game," Scalercio said," and said, "Yeah, I think we'll be able to find a spot on the West roster." The rest of it, well, it was a fast track to history. Allen was taken in the second round by Dallas. The 1994 NFL draft had some future stars in it, like Marshall Faulk, Bryant Young, Isaac Bruce, Rodney Harrison and Jamal Anderson. But as time has shown, Allen was the best player taken that year. He would be named All-Pro eight times, to the Pro Bowl 11 times. His physical feats: a 700-pound bench press, 43 repetitions of 225 pounds, 30-inch vertical leap, a 4.85 40-yard dash from a 340-pounder are the stuff of NFL legend.

"His story would be a great movie," Scalercio said.

Larry Allen would have to play himself. Sorry, Will Smith could play Ali but he couldn't pull this one off. Smith couldn't deliver a line the way Allen can.

'Larry was speaking to my football camp one year,' Scalercio said. 'He's not a great conversationalist but it's just a bunch of 9-year-olds. How scared could he be? Well, I give him this great introduction. He just stands there. He freezes. Then he says, 'Just say no.' That was it. He walked away. That was his whole speech.'

Just say no to drugs, Scalercio guessed. Or just say no to defensive linemen. Or to linebackers. Or to safeties. When it came to saying no, no one in NFL history said it any better.

You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5490 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.