'Just Doing What I Know Best'

A less likely candidate for stardom in Boston than Steven James Grogan would be hard to find. Bostonians, proper or improper, are accustomed to outsize heroes with outsize skills--Ted Williams, Bill Russell, Bobby Orr and, yes, even Jim Plunkett. The quiet, country-bred young man from Ottawa, Kansas (pop. 11,000), resembles none of these demigods; yet he has already begun to exert his own spell on the Hub, its congeries of suburbs and that state of mind known as New England. For beneath his placid exterior, a competitive fire burns. Says Patriot Coach Chuck Fairbanks, who saw it early: "His eyes light up when it's time to play."

Steve Grogan, 23, came into town last year with as much hoopla and advance warning as fog in Boston Harbor, a fifth-round draft pick from Kansas State. He was an all-round athlete back home in Ottawa, but even then he was never with a winner. Says he: "There were four elementary schools in town and each one had a team. One school always had the biggest team, and it wasn't us."

Grogan's standout performance with a dismal Kansas State team tickled pro interest, until he spent his senior season fighting an arm-numbing pinched nerve. Fairbanks remembered his first-class junior year and finally tapped him in the later round. But a cautious examination had proved him medically sound, so he came to the Patriots, with small expectations. Says Grogan:

"I hoped just to hang on, to make the team behind Plunkett and then maybe be traded a couple of years later."

Instead it was Plunkett who was traded and Grogan who inherited a maturing team carefully drafted by Fairbanks. A lanky 6-ft. 4-in. blond string-bean whose 205 Ibs. seem insubstantial until padded by his uniform, Grogan has grown fast. His passing, still occasionally pitched too high, has improved greatly. But it is his timely running that marks him. "When I run some, I get to feel I'm more part of the game," Grogan says. "I was raised running the football. I'm just doing what I know to do best."

Grogan knows little and cares less about the sophisticated Boston scene. He rarely ventures beyond the Patriots' headquarters in suburban Foxboro. Besides, Back Bay is hardly the style of a man whose cowboy boots were scuffed not by walking sidewalks but by trudging over furrows. As he puts it in Grogan plain-style: "We don't have anything like Boston in Kansas."

Nor has Boston ever had a quarterback quite like the Kansan. Against the Steelers, he refused to be intimidated by Dwight White, 50 Ibs. heavier, who mocked him after a play lost yardage. A cool Grogan stuck a warning fist into White's back. "Aw, I wouldn't hit anyone," says Grogan. "They're bigger than I am. But I am a little faster, though." A little faster has made a big difference in Boston.

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