'Dirty-Dirty' Landry: Just What the Redskins Need

But during a photo shoot along the Mississippi levees, Landry doesn't smile his mother's smile: slow in forming, quickly incandescent. Nor does he exude his father's boyish energy. He stares through the lens, now in game mode, the fiery player his high school coaches say took something of an odd joy in crushing even his own teammates during practice.

"I just don't smile," he says. "Sometimes, I'll give a smirk. That's as close as I get."

Smiling goes against the image. After all, it is kind of hard to be a fearsome, intimidating football machine while smiling like Magic Johnson.

Much of his edge is the cover of youth. In the days following the draft, Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott has called to congratulate him, perhaps as many as five times.

Yet days have passed, and Landry, perhaps not wanting to seem too eager, hasn't returned the phone call from the man he has called his idol. But just as much of his outward persona is a continuation of what his people say he always has been: the most fearless kid most of them have ever met. Along his right wrist are two teardrop-shaped lumps of skin lighter than the rest of his arm, scars from a basketball game against Terrebonne High when he leaped through a glass door diving for a loose ball.

Little time is required for the people of Ama to conjure images of Landry the football player. Barbara Fuselier, the principal of Hahnville, remembers the tense game against South Lafourche when, playing quarterback, Landry was ejected after kneeing a defender he believed hit him with one cheap shot too many. Landry still knows the sequence.

"It was the only time," he says, "I ever let a player make me lose my control. I still hate that."

Valdin, a stocky man with an energetic voice and a face that resembles the comedian Lewis Black, sips a soft drink and considers Landry with enthusiasm.

"He loved to run down the field on the kickoff. He would be the end guy on a kickoff and we would tell the guy on the other team that we going to kick the ball to him," Valdin says with a laugh. "The kids on the sideline, they would point at LaRon and say to the guy, 'We're kicking the ball to you, and he's coming. He's coming to kill you.' "

There was the story of Landry being tested at safety as a sophomore and during practice putting Hahnville's best receiver in the hospital.

"We had one of the top receivers in the South being recruited everywhere and one of the first plays of training camp, LaRon puts him in the hospital. Put his feet over his head, and so, we found a safety.

"Now, I let him have it after that. 'Do you realize that's the best receiver we've got? He's one of our starters!' I said. And then when the kid walked off, I said to the coaches, 'Did you see that hit? Boom!' and that was it. He was our safety."