Shuler’s running game

WAYNESVILLE, N.C. — Heath Shuler, though no longer a pro quarterback, doesn’t shy from changing the play.

Mr. Shuler, a Democrat running for Congress here in North Carolina’s 11th District, navigates his white Ford pickup through a driving rainstorm on a recent Friday morning en route to tour a local business. Heading down Main Street from his campaign headquarters, though, he realizes he is going the wrong way.

So Mr. Shuler call an audible and turns the truck around. His deputy campaign manager and communications director, Andrew Whelan, riding shotgun in the front seat, gets on the cell phone to seek directions.

Mr. Shuler pulls up minutes later at the sprawling complex of Haywood Vocational Opportunities, a not-for-profit company that trains workers with disabilities and manufactures medical and hospital supplies, among other products.

It is the start of another day on the campaign trail for Mr. Shuler, a trail he hopes leads him back to Washington, back to where his pro football career began and quickly fizzled out.

“Being a quarterback is certainly an important job,” he says. “But you know what? It has nothing to do with getting children health care.”

Taken by the Redskins with the third pick in the 1994 NFL draft as a junior from the University of Tennessee, Heath Shuler was supposed to be the strong-armed, limber-legged quarterback who would rescue a franchise that had fallen on hard times since the departure of head coach Joe Gibbs two years earlier.

As Redskins fans sadly note, nothing like that remotely happened.

Mr. Shuler, 34, is expected to easily defeat Michael Morgan in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Mr. Morgan is an avowed liberal who, among other causes, supports the legalization of marijuana. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 1980s and served six years in prison, although he consistently has proclaimed his innocence.

A primary win officially would begin Mr. Shuler’s uphill attempt to unseat Rep. Charles H. Taylor, the eight-term Republican incumbent, in November and go on to represent the state’s westernmost congressional district, which includes Asheville.

But politics isn’t the reason Mr. Shuler’s name has featured in the news lately. It is an annual rite of spring to dust him off as an example of how NFL teams, despite painstaking, exhaustive preparation, can make mistakes in the draft. Mentions of his name usually are accompanied by the word “bust.”

Short NFL career

Installed as the Redskins’ first rookie starter at quarterback in 33 years, Mr. Shuler played in 11 games in ‘94, seven games the next year and one the following season before he was released and picked up by New Orleans. He managed one season with the Saints and that was it, his career prematurely ended by injuries and what some described as a failure to grasp the intricacies of the position.

None of that matters now. Among Mr. Shuler’s current concerns are employment, fiscal responsibility, the environment and what he calls the “corruption” of power.

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