He's been home 15 minutes and he hasn't screamed at the kids, strangled the dog, thrown his wife down the stairs or even put an axe through the door yet. Here's Billlllly! Which is what all the folks in his sprawling house, deep within the gated confines of suburban Littleton, Colo., call him. "Don't you listen to all those awful things people say about Billy," says his mother-in-law. "Why, Billy wouldn't hurt a flea. He makes the best apple pie." Sure enough, here's Billy, flopped down in the den, barefoot, cooing to his 19-month-old daughter, Alexandra, something about her being his "little angel."

It's true. Bill Romanowski's children manifest no visible evidence of horns or tails or other signs of being progeny of the Devil. Dalton, 4, in fact, insists his favorite players are "Elway," followed by "Ed" (McCaffrey), followed by "Steve Russ"—that's Second Lt. Steve Russ, formerly a program manager for the Aeronautical Systems Center Contracting Directorate and currently on injured reserve for the Denver Broncos -- "because he lives in my old house." And what about Dalton's dad -- the heart and soul of the Broncos' defense, the maniac-savant linebacker, the infamous, dangerous, intensely reviled "Romo"? "Yeah," says Dalton, grudgingly. "He's in there."

Granted, Romanowski is renowned for his fearsome kamikazian forays on the field ("Hey, the guy's a paid assassin. He's supposed to knock people out and try to hurt them," says Broncos wideout McCaffrey, who's given to waxing outrageous about his outrageous friend). But outside the lines, the 6'4", 245-pound native of tiny Vernon, Conn., is quiet and even-tempered, mild and measured, so soft-spoken that sometimes you have to strain even to hear him.

"Of course, the noisy ones who go around saying they're so tough usually aren't," says Denver head coach Mike Shanahan. "It's those silent guys you aren't expecting it from who'll sneak up and crack you."

Not that Larry Centers of the Cardinals wasn't expecting it when Romanowski, then with the Eagles, kicked him in the head and got thrown out of the game. Not that 49er Bubba Paris wasn't when Romanowski, then a teammate, attacked him and got thrown out of practice. Not that then-Carolina QB Kerry Collins wasn't when Romo broke his jaw in a 1997 preseason game. Not that Steve Young and Jerry Rice weren't when they took exception to what they perceived as cheap shots from Romanowski several years ago in training camp -- when they were also teammates. Jerry Rice? Yeah. The entire 49er offense had to be restrained from tearing Romanowski apart after he pummeled their all-time, All-Pro friend into Rice-aroni.

Surely, Kordell Stewart had to be anticipating something sinister when, in last season's playoffs, after another errant pass by the Steeler QB was intercepted, Romanowski got in his face, slapped his own helmet in the ancient sign of self-stupidity and called him a "dumb s--" for good measure. And another Boston College product, Mark Chmura, must have been forewarned when Romo sought out the Packer tight end at the Super Bowl to inform him that he was the "biggest idiot who ever came out of BC."

Then there was J.J. Stokes -- uh-oh, another 49er -- who certainly should have been wary when Romo grabbed him in the groin in a pileup, then actually spit in his face. Yes, goobered him, Alomared him -- smack! splat! -- right there on Monday Night Football. Well, maybe J.J. didn't expect the expectoration, because who could ever anticipate such a disgusting thing -- other than a few million baseball fans of an earlier generation, who were sitting within aim of the mortal hocking of the immortal Ted Williams. Not to mention anybody who has seen football close-up and remembers the gridiron greats of yesteryear exchanging weekly spittle (and worse) in the days of linebacking legends such as Sam Huff and Dick Butkus, Ray Nitschke and Jack Lambert. Think the Eagles' Tim Rossovich, who used to eat glass and set himself on fire for laughs, might have unloaded a bit of saliva in his tempestuous time?

"Guys have been spit on in the NFL for 50 years," says Dan Dierdorf, the old lineman who watched and rewatched Romanowski's spurt on instant re-loogie-play from the safety of the TV booth. "Romo just got caught."

Says the perp: "Sometimes I wish I was able to play way back then, when being mean and nasty and dirty or whatever they call me was praised rather than criticized. I get old players coming up to me all the time saying, 'Keep playing just the way you are, Romo, we love it.' I say, 'Great. As long as you pay my fines.' I keep playing like this, I'm going to end up in the poorhouse."

The other day, when Billy and his wife were at home clicking around the Internet, they found a poll asking readers to name the NFL's "dirtiest player" -- and he was far in the lead, with 6,500 votes. "They talk about throwback this, throwback that," says the former Julie Lagrand, as feisty off the field as her husband is on. "They don't have a clue. What he's a throwback to is the Roman era, when people paid to see blood and guts and violence. What's the big change now? I grew up in Fresno, a Rams fan. You think anybody went up to the Youngbloods and asked them why they went around playing so hard and slugging people? I'm Billy's biggest fan. I love the way he plays."

To understand the Romanowski family passion for football, it's enough to know that when Julie met Billy in a Fresno sports bar -- she didn't know him even though he was already a double Super Bowl ring-bearer (from his first two years with the 49ers) -- with one look she kind of already knew, uh, of him.

He: I'm a linebacker. She: Inside or outside?

Julie had been a high school cheerleader and a Ms. California Bowl Queen. "Bowling Green versus Fresno State, the MAC versus the Big West," she rattles off. "Love at first sight," says Romo. "Without Julie, who knows where I'd be."

Undoubtedly, at 6,499 on the Internet vote. But probably also trying to get some other, less-understanding woman to figure out why he needs his daily regimen of pills -- vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements, creatine among them -- not to mention a staff of body-enhancing advisers ranging from a high-performance coach to a yoga expert to not one but two massage therapists to a biomechanics guy, whatever that is. All this for only $100,000-plus per year out of Romo's bulging pockets.

"Romo's got a guy for his head, his shoulders, his knees, his feet, his butt," says Broncos tight end Shannon Sharpe. "He's got to get his eight hours sleep, his naps, his pills every hour on the hour. In practice, if it's pill time, he pulls 'em out of his jock or wherever. Then there's that trance he goes into before the games. His skin goes chalky. His eyes get as big as silver dollars. Now that's scary. At first I thought he was crazy. No. I still think he's crazy."

Those "EAS" logo caps that Sharpe and other high-profile Broncos used to wear every waking moment they appeared on camera until the NFL cracked down? They didn't stand for "Elway And Sharpe," but for a Golden, Colo., company named Experimental and Applied Sciences, Inc., whose nutritional supplements Romanowski tested and which he now has most of the Broncos ingesting as if they were Viagra-laced tacos.

"I used to kid him about his supplement milk shakes," says Bubby Brister, the veteran quarterback whom Romanowski befriended when the two were in Philadelphia and then recommended to Shanahan as Elway's backup. "But look at the guy. He gets better and better every year. Romo got EAS to stock the locker room here. Now we all have that stuff for breakfast."

Brister, both as opponent and teammate, has withstood several Romo experiences, none more unsettling than his first encounter with Romanowski's game face: "In Philly, we'd become close friends. Spent a lot of time together, wives, kids, everything. First preseason game, I'm laughing it up, slapping Romo in the pads. He looks up, real slow. He's got the eye black on. He's sweating, breathing hard, shaking, working up the rage. I go 'Oh, s--. What in hell is this?' We're talkin' weird, bro. Lunatic time. Jekyll-Hyde stuff."

"Different players prepare for games differently," Shanahan says. "Some do music. Some want quiet. I see Romo's eyes glaze over, I know he wants to whack anybody walking down the street. You can see he's making up stuff that opponents have done real bad to him or his family."

"I guess Bubby didn't know yet to stay out of my face," says Romo. To some degree, all players engage in a pregame zombie-like routine that freezes out the rest of the world -- including teammates. Romo just tiptoes a lot closer to the fine line separating sanity from the far side. "Don't talk to me. Don't touch me. I'm getting ready for war."

Romanowski sometimes spends up to six hours a day simply working on his body, much of it with trainer Randy Huntington, who also has worked with Wayne Gretzky and Mike Powell, the long jumper who broke Bob Beamon's unbreakable record. This does not include the 24 hours daily it takes Romo to open up his medicine bottles and get his pills down. He uses a huge tackle box, its compartments packed with different pills. "Billy's got to have the most expensive urine in the world," Julie says. "He's going to make a great old guy. I'll never have to remind him how to separate his medications."

At 32, Romanowski is in his 11th season as an NFL regular, working on 1,000 tackles and a streak of 172 straight games, a run that ties him for fifth among active players. He's never missed a regular-season game and only one exhibition game. Teammates have to think hard to remember when he's missed a practice. "Romo is our Cal Ripken," says fellow Bronco linebacker John Mobley, 25. "I can't imagine playing at his level in seven years. He's way better than he was when he got here."

"With the 49ers, I learned my work ethic from guys like Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig," says Romanowski. "Some of the 49ers were into massage therapy as a way to save your body. I just took it from there. I'm quicker, faster than I've ever been [he tries to break his personal 4.5 40-yard dash record every summer]. I'm stronger [he benches 400 pounds]. I've always given 100%, in practice, games, whenever. The game as war may seem like a cliché. It's not. I focus like it's a war. I have to be a warrior to survive."

"Romo's reinvented himself several times over," says Denver defensive coordinator Greg Robinson. "He's got enthusiasm, seriousness, dedication, toughness. He can run all day. He diagnoses the game. He plays with his hands extremely well. He really delivers a blow. Nobody wants to go against us around that strong side. Romo is some package."

A throwback? "Sure, he's a throwback," says Robinson, incurring the potential wrath of Julie. "He's a real roughneck. He gets so emotional on the field, he sometimes loses it, and everybody realizes that spitting thing was a result of that. Big game. Monday night. Former team. Romo was very vulnerable. He was just whacked. But a dirty player? I don't think so."

Romanowski's reputation as a cheap-shot artist -- "a classless punk," in the words of Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin -- and his astonishing longevity have sometimes overshadowed what a good player he is. The rep undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that he's made only one Pro Bowl, in '96, and that as an alternate. But he has always been a winner.

Romanowski was a callow college freshman on the BC team that invented Doug Flutie -- or was it the other way around? -- and defensive MVP of the '85 Cotton Bowl. As a senior, he won BC's scholar-athlete award and earned a management degree. In 1988, he was drafted by the 49ers in the third round and earned a game ball in his first pro game. He picked off a Boomer Esiason pass in his first Super Bowl, San Francisco's thrilling 20-16 win over Cincinnati. He is one of 30 players in history to play on two different Super Bowl-winning teams, one of only 13 to play on a Supe winner from each conference.

Romo's finest year as a 49er was 1993, when he led the team in tackles for the third time with a then-career-high 105. But, after losing to Dallas in the playoffs, San Francisco cleared out its entire corps of 'backers. Traded to Philly, Romo was crushed. "I missed surfing," the reconstructed, laid-back, now neo-Californian says. Swallowing his pride as well as opposing running backs, he put in two terrific years for the Eagles -- in the second, under former 49er pal Ray Rhodes, he hit double figures in tackles in five games, including a 15-tackle show against Dallas. Such performances led to a five-year, $9 million free agent contract with the Broncos in 1996. The John Elway Broncos. The guys-next-door, finesse-minded, never-went-all-the-way Broncos. The Broncos who needed toughening up, needed an edge, needed an attitude adjustment.

"I knew what kind of guy I was getting. Romo eats and breathes the game. Football's his way of life," says Shanahan, who as a 49ers offensive coordinator was more than familiar with Romanowski's over-the-top intensity even in team practices. "As a coach, you don't want to see your own guys get hurt fighting. But Romo goes all out, all the time, and if you aren't doing the same, you're getting popped. That's all there is to it. If you're Young, Rice, whoever, great player or not. It doesn't make any difference to Romo. He's going after you."

Which led to Elway's Broncos becoming Shanahan's Broncos and taking on a whole new image. Sure, the offense benefitted from Terrell Davis maturing into Jim Brown. Sure, the defense always had the head-hunting Steve Atwater. But in Romanowski, Denver got constant emotional peaking, instant brutality, down-in-the-trenches automatic nasty. The Anti-Elway.

"How do I put this?" says Glenn Cadrez, another Denver linebacker. "When we look at game film, we just laugh at the stuff Romo's doing on the field. Like, when the Redskins ran a draw play against us this season: I get the running back by the legs, another guy has his arms. The runner is down, motion stopped, he's leaning, protecting the ball, and I look over and Romo is just whaling away, pounding the guy. Amazing! Playing against him, you've got to hate him. But when you're his teammate, you just love him. If he's in pass coverage and the ball sails 50 yards downfield, he'll blast you anyway. There are certain unwritten rules in this league -- Romo just doesn't play by them."

"I have my own style," Romo replies. "It's the way I've always played. The spitting incident was awful. I can do something about spitting. It won't happen again. But I can't -- won't -- change how I attack the game."

The jaw-breaker on Collins? "That was all about the angle I hit him at. Kerry turned his head just as I nailed him. Look, I'm sorry he was hurt. But I'm not sorry the way I did it." The self-helmet slap against Stewart? "Come on! I whacked my own head. I felt like he couldn't believe the stupid pass himself."

And when he took out Troy Aikman this season, breaking the quarterback's collarbone and causing him to miss the next five games? "People were upset I didn't show enough sorrow for Troy getting injured," says Romanowski. "What I said was I couldn't believe he didn't slide out of bounds. I was heading for the sideline and he cut back on me. Look, my first two years in the league I watched teammates get their necks broken and their careers ended. I don't like to see anybody hurt. But it's the nature of the business. To sit there and wallow in remorse? I don't think so. I'm not a dirty player."

Irony of ironies. Amid the Chiefs' incredible, personal fouls-filled Monday Night Meltdown on Nov. 16, did anybody notice who must have been laughing his innocent butt off on the Broncos' sideline? Yeah, the "dirty player" who's caught a flag only once all season -- holding against the Bengals -- and the penalty was declined. People who grab face masks in glass houses ... To TV viewers decorating the tree 10 days before Christmas last year, Romo unloading his mouth practically into their eggnog dropped his popularity just below Grinch level. "We were getting beat, and I was fired up, hitting anything that moved," Romo says of that night, when he had 15 tackles in the 34-17 loss to the 49ers. "Still, no excuse. It was a terrible thing to do. The guy was in my face and instead of punching him, I spit. But I never knew the spit actually hit him until I saw the tape the next day. I still don't know why I did it. I've been apologizing to Stokes and everybody else ever since."

A couple of Romo's own teammates questioned his explanation. Sharpe said the act looked "planned." Willie Green recalled that his forebears had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and been spat on. A spokeswoman for the Denver branch of the NAACP described the act as "the ultimate form of degradation, fairly close to cross burning." The Broncos received letters threatening Romo's family; his son was asked at nursery school why his "daddy was so mean."

Romanowski met alone with Sharpe to explain himself. The Broncos held a team gathering where Elway declared that Romo "has done everything but get down on his knees and ask forgiveness. Let's put this to rest and play some football." Julie apologized to a gathering of mostly African-American Bronco wives and girlfriends at a Christmas luncheon at her home. "I've never seen color in my life," says her husband. "Anybody who thinks this was a black-white thing doesn't know me." Brister agrees: "With his mind-set that night, Romo would have spit if Stokes had been green."

"This was the first real adversity I'd faced in my career," Romanowski says, "and I tried my best to take it face-on. If I hadn't been caught on national TV? I'd still have felt sorry afterward. I'd still call Stokes to apologize."

Even Littwin, Romanowski's most vigorous local critic, confirms that "Romo keeps his Neanderthal stuff between the white lines. He's always cooperative and cordial. He understands our job and his. Of course, if I had a helmet on, I'd probably be dead and buried."

Meanwhile, Romo warriors on. "The people I care about know the kind of person I am," he says. "I couldn't ask for more support and loyalty than Denver has shown me through all this. If I'm only remembered for bad things, I can't change that. I'm just trying to be the best football player I can be. More important, the best husband and father. I don't go home to those other people. I don't have to kiss them good night."

Memo to Julie, Dalton and Alexandra: Guys, don't mess with Billy -- keep your helmets in the closet.

This article appears in the December 14, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine.