General Mills - Carolina Panthers' linebacker Sam Mills; includes related article on the 1995 Hall of Fame football exhibition game

Sam Mills is out on the practice field for the Carolina Panthers and, man, is he hustling. Need some cones shifted for that linebacker-agility drill? Sam is there two seconds after you ask. Need a water jug refilled? Directions to the training table?

Sam is there for you. And the guy looks good, too - no wonder the Panthers' rookies and free agents seem to gravitate toward him. Sam is quick. Athletic. Young. Young?

Oh, wait a minute. You thought I was talking about Sam Mills Jr., the 36-year-old linebacker for the Panthers. No, I'm talking about Sam Mills III, the 17-year-old training-camp gofer getting paid $4.25 an hour to fold towels at 7:30 a.m. and run errands for any Panther who asks the rest of the day.

"I'm so old that most of our players are closer in age to my son than they are to me," says father Sam, running a hand over his bald head in mock dismay.

That's true. But it doesn't keep Sam Mills Jr. from being the player most likely to save the Panthers from themselves this season. Kerry Collins will generate more headlines and Barry Foster more yards and Lamar Lathon more sacks. But Mills is the Panthers' emotional core. Mills serves as a father figure for the other players, a security blanket for the coaches and a guiding force for the defense.

If Carolina surprises the NFL by winning more than three games this season, no one on the Panthers will be able to claim a larger share of the credit than the 5-foot-9 Mills, a former woodworking teacher at East Orange (N.J.) High School. Mills will start at inside linebacker, will relay defensive signals to his teammates and will lead this expansion team in tackles and respect

"Of all the guys I've been involved with in professional football, this guy best exemplifies what a coach likes to see," Carolina Coach Dom Capers says.

Panthers center Matt Elliott says, "Sam Mills walks into our locker room, and there's this almost regal air about him."

Starting comerback Rod Smith, 25, consults Mills frequently, not only to ask about assignments, but also about how to handle life. "As a young guy trying to figure out what to do with myself, I seek Sam out a lot," Smith says, "He's the real thing - plays straight up, acts straight up, great team leader. I really admire him. If you turn out like Sam Mills, you're doing well."

"Everyone respects him - partly because he doesn't demand respect," says safety Brett Maxie, who also played with Mills in New Orleans.

And he won't always get respect outside the Carolinas this season, because of the strange, honorable choice Mills made in March. A free agent, Mills had the option of playing two more years for New Orleans, where the playoffs were always a possibility and Coach Jim Mora thought Mills was a demigod, for a proposed total of $2.8 million. Or he could go to Carolina, where the money was exactly the same and the team would be much worse. Mills picked the Panthers because Carolina offered him the money first. "New Orleans made no real negotiating effort until Carolina came up with that offer," Mills says. "I didn't agree with the way I was treated." With that decision, made despite Mora's pleadings for him to stay, Mills nailed shut any chance at ever winning a Super Bowl or another division championship. He plans to play two more years, and the Panthers will struggle to win six games during that time.

But Mills is happy. His son, Sam III, lives one floor below him in the Panthers' team dorm at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., and is expected to play comerback for his high school team in Charlotte. His wife, Melanie - "I'm only 5 feet, so I'm the only person in the world who thinks Sam is tall," she says - and their two other children await Sam in Charlotte.

They are eager for Panthers' training camp to end so they can tease Dad about his penchant for renting the same videotape two or three times from Blockbuster without remembering he had seen it before.

"One month - tops - and he's bringing home another comedy with Chevy Chase in it," says Sam III, who is the same height as his dad but 60 pounds lighter at 165. "We're like, `Hey, Dad, don't you remember this part? From last month?'"

Mills, who plays a position designed for much younger - and taller - men, is happy to still be around the NFL. When you see him in street clothes - particularly in suit, tie and tortoise-shell glasses - Mills looks like an ex-high school jock who traded in the cleats for an accountant's calculator about 15 years ago. "I love the challenge of that," Mills says. "I'm guarding backs out of the backfield who may know me from seeing me on TV when they were playing Pop Warneri I'm dodging 300-pound guards who are 22 or 23 years old."

Thirteen years ago, Mills was 23 himself. and teaching high school in New Jersey for $13,600 per year. He already had some style, driving a `69 jaguar. But he had also already been cut by Cleveland - as a free agent at training camp in 1981 - and the Toronto Argonauts.

The Browns loved him, but they couldn't get past the height factor. Jets Coach Rich Kotite, then an assistant with the Browns, says, "I remember being in the personnel meetings every night at training camp, and they'd say, `This guy does everything. Everything. But he's too small.' And that was wrong."

So here was Mills in his teaching job. had already taken one leave of absence to try out for a CFL team, and that failed when Toronto cut him. But then the United States Football League sprang into existence. And Mills was faced with another choice.

"I had a steady job and a wife and son to support," Mills says. "Could I give that up?"

"If you don't take this chance, you'll never know for sure what could have happened," Melanie told him.

So Mills quit his job and went to Philadelphia in the fall of 1982 to try out for the Stars. There, waiting for him, was Joe Pendry - then an assistant for the Stars, now Carolina's offensive coordinator.

"We watched everyone work out on this high school field in Philadelphia," Pendry says. "Sam looked good, real good. He was one of the chosen."

The chosen got to walk one at a time across the field to Pendry's beige Chevrolet conversion van, where the Stars had set up a makeshift office by taking out a few of the chairs. Mills didn't even have to duck to get into the van. He went in smiling and came out with a $25,000 contract.

Mora was the bead coach of the Stars, and in 1984 be brought aboard a young assistant named Dom Capers to help out with the defense. Also on that coaching staff was Vic Fangio, now Carolina's defensive coordinator.

Mills led the Stars, who would later move to Baltimore, in tackles for three consecutive seasons. "Because of my lack of height, I've always been driven toward being the best in the things I could control," Mills says.

"He's always been extremely intelligent and intense," Fangio says, "There is not a guy in the NFL who has reached his potential like Sam Mills has. He has gotten everything that there is to get out of his body."

When the league dissolved, Mills moved with Mora to New Orleans for the 1986 season. Could a short linebacker with less-than-ideal eyesight make it in the NFL? It is n unusual to see Mills down on all fours, running his hands over the practice-field grass in search of a contact lens.

But Mills has been a sight to behold, making the Pro Bowl four times in his first nine NFL seasons. During his second appearance, after the 1988 season, Lawrence Taylor looked at Mills across a room in Hawaii. "Just once I'd like to get a hit like he does," Taylor said. "It has to be better than sex."

Mills outlasted all of the Saints' hot linebackers. Remember the quartet of Rickey Jackson, Vaughan Johnson, Pat Swilling and Sam Mills? They made an unprecedented group appearance at the Pro Bowl after the '92 season. (Mills still wears the gold "Pro Bowl 1992" watch he got in Honolulu.) By 1994, however, all of them were out of New Orleans except for Mills.

Mills kept on going. "What the mind conceives, the body can ultimately achieve," says Carlton Bailey, a Panthers teammate who admired Mills for years while in Buffalo and New York. "Sam is a perfect example of that."

Coming off the only major ailment of his career - a staph infection that forced him to miss seven games in 1993 - Mills led the Saints for the fifth time in tackles in 1994 with a career-high 155. No other Saint even had 100. "I've said many times that Sam is the best football player I've ever coached or will coach," Mora says. "I'm not talking about pure footbar ability. I'm talking about everything you look for in a player."

Although New Orleans switched from a 3-4 alignment to a 4-3 this season, Mills says that didn't affect his decision to leave. He says he likes the middle-linebacker position in the 4-3, but he felt comfortable with Carolina, one of only three teams using the 3-4 this season. And he felt wanted.

So Mills made his choice, one that will be second-guessed for a while, just as his decision to leave teaching once was.

He feels his life is close to perfect now. Mills' one chief regret is the health of his mother, Juanita. She had a vicious stroke two years ago and is paralyzed on one side.

Mills measures his words when asked about her. He pauses twice, trying not to choke up. His voice, normally so controlled, wavers. His lip trembles.

"I'm a lot like my mother," he says. "She's such a strong, caring person, and I try to be, too. She used to watch me play football. A lot of times she would close her eyes. She always thought that her baby was going to get hurt. She'd yell out sometimes: `Don't hurt my baby!'

But when I started playing in the pros, I'd call her at night, and she'd say, `You didn't hurt those other boys now, did you Sam?"'

"Mom, whose side are you on?" Sam would ask.

"I just don't want anyone to get hurt out there," she said. "Not my boy, or anyone else's."

Juanita didn't need to worry much. Her Sam has done well for himself. He owns three houses - in New Orleans, New Jersey and Charlotte. The one in New Jersey has a 65-foot basketball court, where Sam Jr. and Sam III go at it constantly.

"I can't beat Dad very often yet," Sam III says. "But I'm getting awfully close."

The two sometimes go to local recreation centers in Charlotte to pick up a game. Recently, Sam III called a foul on an older player. The older man started jawing at him.

"My dad came out of nowhere," Sam says. "He said, `Yell at me all you want, although I'm not going to listen to you. But don't yell at my son."'

No fists. No long argument. And no more problem.

Because of his natural ability to defuse and inspire, Mills is thought to have great possibilities as a coach. Kotite, for one, thinks Mills has the best coaching potential among current players, but Mills hasn't decided for sure whether he wants to pursue that. "I think he will, though," Melanie Mills says.

With the young and impressionable Panthers, he is almost doing it already. "I've never seen him give a pregame speech," Maxie says. "He's not a pregame kind of guy. He's a huddle kind of guy."

A huddle kind of guy. There is nothing an expansion team like Carolina needs more than that.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group