To understand Deion Sanders, understand this: He's a defensive football player who would rather not hit people. When it comes to the dirty business of actually tackling a ballcarrier, Sanders admits he avoids it. So in a game that asks its players to use their bodies as blunt instruments, he skips away from even a bruise and explains his caution by saying linebackers are paid to do that stuff. "They pay me to cover and to dance," he says cheerfully. Those are words that must cause real football players to hold Sanders in contempt.


There is this as well: Sanders said during Super Bowl week that never again will he report to a football team's training camp. He says camp is for guys who need to learn to play; it's for guys who need to get in shape. Sanders believes he has no such needs. He says it with a dismissive air, as if any fool should know that two-a-days apply only to mortals, not gods.


Sanders is happy to confirm the truth that he is less a football player in the traditional sense than he is an entertainer in the 1990s sense. "The field is my stage," he says, "and I love to perform." The performances include a drum major's high-stepping prance toward the end zone, after which there's a dance so rich with preening that in another time -- say Dick Butkus' time, Ray Nitschke's or Chuck Bednarik's -- the dance might have earned Sanders a vacation in a full-body cast.


Instead of Sanders being invited to taste a fist sandwich delivered by a broken-nosed tackle whose knees bend both ways, he is invited to be the Feb. 18 host of NBC's "Saturday Night Live." Instead of being fired by his football bosses as prima-donna poison, the 49ers have agreed to pay him $5 million next season -- if he would do them the honor of returning to the locker room at a time of his choice. Pretty please, with sugar on it.


He is a mercenary suffused with greed in a greedy mercenary's business. He has said, "Sports has no loyalty. When you can release guys like Phil Simms and Art Monk, there's no loyalty." So why should that business expect loyalty from its employees? It would be no great surprise if Sanders played for a different football team every fall, following only the money now that he has the Super Bowl champion's ring.


"Sacrifices are over," he says. "Now it's time to visit the bank." He also declares himself a part-time football player and full-time baseball player because in the long run baseball will "take me where I want to go financially."


By way of defining himself, Sanders also says, "I'm not an intimidator, I'm an entertainer. I play to make people have fun." And why not? He works in an entertainment industry. If pro football ever was sport for sport's sake -- a dubious proposition in fact, yet accepted in fantasy -- the fantasy survives only in naive children, the number of which was reduced by the Las Vegas-on-steroids extravaganzas that devalued Super Bowl on Jan. 29.


So while a self-absorbed and mercenary entertainer/cornerback may grate harshly on some sensibilities, we should remember that we, the customers, have created the conditions that make such a persona profitable. We get the athletes we deserve.


It's too bad, really, about that harsh judgment in the case of Deion Sanders. Too bad because there's a suspicion he is a man worth knowing better than we do. That suspicion grows from clubhouse talk. Players in football and baseball have said Sanders is a generous, hard-working, good-for-morale teammate (though Atlanta players changed tunes when Sanders left town, saying he lived by rules unavailable to them, their complaints giving rise to an alternate suspicion: They abided him because he helped them win).


Sanders' manner can be endearing. Even George Seifert, the 49ers head grouch, had to smile when Sanders went high-stepping in violation of orders. "I fined him $100," Seifert says, "and I paid it myself." The trick is, Sanders' performances are celebrations of his victorious self, not tauntings of a beaten opponent.


He calls himself "blessed with talent" and "willing to work my butt off." Raised in "a drug-infested neighborhood," Sanders says he doesn't smoke, drink or do drugs because he wants children to know there are other ways to grow up. When asked what models shaped his career, he locked eyes with his questioner and gave as thoughtful and insightful an answer as you'd hear from any athlete of any time:


"Muhammad Ali, for his brashness. Henry Aaron, because he persevered despite criticism and racism. O.J. Simpson, because he was generous with his teammates. And Julius Erving, because he was always classy on and off the court."