Free Boz Character That Was The Boz Replaced By Calm Family Man

Five more days. The anticipation hangs in the air like the calm before a much-needed storm.

Five more days until the NFL marches into lunch rooms and living rooms. Five more days until America gathers for a five-month date with its favorite action heroes.

Five more days until Brian Bosworth needs to clip new coupons.

“You betcha,” he said. “Big time.”

Bosworth is still smarting from that last trip to the grocery store for his family, where he laid out $7.50 worth of coupons.

“The checkout lady ran them through the scanner and every coupon was expired,” he said. “I have never been more embarrassed… . ” Tsk, tsk.

“But wait a minute,” he said. “I bought two boxes of Cascade, so I got 75 cents off. That was good.”

Unlike this meeting with football’s former poster boy for bad.

In preparation for Sunday’s NFL openers, a visitor drove to Malibu for some man talk from “the Boz.” The visitor wanted to talk kidney bruises, lacerated spleens and sack dances.

He departed thinking about dishwasher detergent.

And church nurseries.

And about how Bosworth described something as, “That restaurant, that ‘Hollywood’ thing.

“Planet Hollywood?”

Yeah, that place.

Brian Bosworth, once the hippest athlete on the planet, no longer knows the name of one of the hippest places?

‘Sorry,” he said. “But I don’t remember if I’ve ever even been.”

Heaven help us.

Four days until the start of the NFL, and the Boz is as dead as the run and shoot.

“I never was that guy,” Bosworth said. “Most of it was faked.”

Yet it is this that doesn’t seem real. This neatly cut blond hair, this body that does not abnormally bulge from a cotton shirt, this soft voice and … well, those ears.

As a middle linebacker for the University of Oklahoma and Seattle Seahawks in the late 1980s, Bosworth was the first man to achieve sports marketing’s triple crown - rainbow colored Mohawk, shiny earrings, and a best-selling book that revealed and ripped.

“Let’s see now, where did my earrings used to go?” Bosworth said, grabbing his right ear, then his left. “Oh yeah, over here.”

This does not seem real, this normality that Bosworth exudes as he describes his life as a husband, father of two young girls, and aspiring actor.

He used to reveal his desire about literally separating a player from his snot. Today, he lowers his voice and shares this:

“We go to the 9 a.m. church services in Malibu every Sunday because they offer child care. You got to have that child care.”

He used to talk about watching in delight as Oklahoma teammates threw cats from windows. Now he owns one.

“Back then, I wish I could have realized that maybe I was stepping on some people’s toes,” he said.

But then, he wouldn’t have been a pioneer. Bosworth played in only 25 NFL games because of a degenerative shoulder condition, but he will be forever remembered as one of the first to transcend the athletic field and become a mainstream cult hero.

Before Rodman, before Shaq, before Deion … there was the Boz.

Correction, says the Malibu agent who wrote a game plan that would bring the Boz here from Norman, Okla.

“There was Brian, there was me, and there was this third person known as the Boz,” said Gary Wichard. “It was just an idea I had to market him. It was supposed to be fun. It was going to get us to Hollywood.

“But then Brian ended up with his persona that he didn’t know what to do with.”

Bosworth, now 31, said he played along with it for a while. Insulted opponents, cursed at interviews, strutted.

“I was going with the flow,” he said. “I never thought it would explode like it did.”

Soon strangers were saying they hated him, and friends were wondering what was wrong with him, and people all over the country were claiming they had fought him in bars, when he didn’t really like bars or fights.

When his career ended sometime after Bo Jackson ran over him into the end zone - on a play that is shown about once a week on ESPN Bosworth decided to leave the image behind.

He says it was because he wanted to find himself again. A skeptic might say that the Boz was real, and that Bosworth divorced him only because he couldn’t make him any more money.

After all, who would hire an actor who calls rivals “Horse Face,” as Bosworth once did John Elway?

“Look at me away from football,” Bosworth said. “I think I’ve been pretty consistent.”

A check of that record shows the absence of one. If Bosworth really was the bad boy that he once proclaimed, wouldn’t there have stories about jail (not), drugs other than steroids (not), domestic disputes (not), drunk driving (not), or any of the other plagues of the modern cult heroes?

“You take away the hair and the earrings, and the guy has always been a nerd,” Wichard said.

He doesn’t go to nightclubs. He doesn’t party outside of his home. He doesn’t hit anybody except during a stunt. He does all of his family’s grocery shopping.

“I live in a small, obscure world,” Bosworth said. “I like to walk around my house in my underwear.”

In his four action films - only the forgettable “Stone Cold” was a nationwide big-screen release - he comes across not as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but as a sort of Patrick Swayze.

“I have always been a performer, that’s why I’m here,” Bosworth said. “I don’t want to be a star. I’ve been a star. I just want to do good work on the screen.”

These days, he even apologizes for being late for interviews. This time his wife was running errands, so he was watching his two girls, 4-1/2 and 13 months.

Reading them stories before nap time, perhaps? “No, actually, I was flipping them,” Bosworth said. “I want these girls to be absolutely fearless, so I flip them in the air and catch them.”

Bosworth paused. “We also have this swing in the house. I like to put them on the swing and push it to the max. It makes my daughter’s friends throw up.

Thank you, said the visitor, who felt so much better.