Bengals’ rookie Palmer low-key leader

GEORGETOWN, Ky. (AP) – By the time he was a freshman at a California high school, Carson Palmer was on the fast track.

The coaches at Santa Margarita High School could tell they had a special quarterback. They liked his polish and loved his arm.

One thing gave them pause.

A freshman coach tried to find a polite way to put it.

“He said, ‘Carson, you’ll probably be our quarterback, but there’s one thing you could maybe help us with,”‘ Palmer’s father, Bill, recalled. “‘Could you be a little more outgoing and slap guys on the back?”‘

Sorry. It’s not in his makeup.

The quarterback with the Broadway Joe arm doesn’t like to make a production out of things. He stayed low-key as a high school state champion in California, as the Heisman Trophy winner at Southern California and as the top overall draft pick by the Cincinnati Bengals.

Cincinnati hasn’t had a winning record since 1990, when Boomer Esiason was running the team and turning himself into the measuring stick for all future Bengals quarterbacks.

Esiason was outspoken and charismatic as he took his team to a Super Bowl. He welcomed the cameras and the microphones. The spotlight was as comfortable as the playbook.

“I’m definitely not like Boomer at all,” Palmer said. “We’re two completely different people. I’m definitely the more quiet type.”

That’s fine with Bengals fans, who don’t care if their next franchise quarterback is a good talker. They just want a winner.

David Klingler was a quiet, reserved replacement for Esiason, but never panned out after he was rushed into the lineup and got knocked around. Akili Smith was much more brash – he even taunted the Dawg Pound in Cleveland – but even more of a bust.

It’s up to first-year coach Marvin Lewis to get the NFL’s worst franchise headed in the right direction. It’s up to Palmer to get up to speed as fast as possible so he can take a leading role in the anticipated renewal.

Lewis is letting him learn at his own pace. While Jon Kitna runs the offense as the unchallenged starter in training camp, Palmer is quietly getting accustomed to a new level of competition.

“Just the length of everything – the length of practice, the length of the meetings,” Palmer said. “There’s so much studying and meeting time, going over players, how each play unfolds. There’s so many different things going on, whereas in college, you only have to worry about one or two things.”

It’s too early to tell what he’s going to do as a pro, but his new coaches and teammates have gotten a pretty good idea of how he’s going to do it.

“I wouldn’t say he’s an extremely vocal leader,” offensive coordinator Bob Bratkowski said. “Part of that is because he’s with new teammates in a new environment. His demeanor stays the same.

“He doesn’t get flustered. He keeps it consistent. When guys look at his eyes in the huddle, the feeling they get from him is that they have confidence in him. They don’t see a guy that when something goes bad, you can look in his eyes and tell, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s fazed.”‘

One of the few times he got fazed by football was after his freshman year in high school. His father was moving to a job on the East Coast, with the family set to come along and settle down in Connecticut.

Palmer went to a summer football camp for his new school and came away glum.

“He said it was awful,” Bill Palmer said. “It just broke my heart. He was crestfallen. He said they don’t even have a weight training program. He was the biggest and strongest kid on the field, and they were going to make him an offensive lineman.

“I called my wife and said, ‘This just isn’t right.”‘

The family stayed in California, and Bill Palmer flew home every weekend, getting on a plane in Newark, N.J., at 1 p.m. on Fridays and returning around midnight on Sundays.

He made sure he got to watch his son develop into one of California’s top prep passers, then become only the second true freshman to start at quarterback in USC history. Palmer topped out at 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds – an ideal size for his ideal job.

“I always wanted to be a quarterback,” Palmer said. “It’s the only position I could play. I definitely don’t have the build for anything else. I’m too slow for anything else.”

AP-ES-08-09-03 1454EDT