Jared Allen played out of his mind, all the way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame

Jared Allen was 8 years old when he set his young calf-roping sights on playing in the NFL.

“Jared, of course, wanted to be and do everything,” said Jared’s dad, Ron, who will present the former Viking, the second oldest of his four boys, for enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday (noon, NFL Network) in Canton, Ohio.

A hyper kid bursting with all sorts of big dreams, Jared grew up outgoing and unafraid with fists sometimes a-flying, mouth a-running and that long body growing by the hour into one of the greatest and most competitive edge rushers in NFL history.

“Jared’s 8, playing T-ball,” Ron said. “He’d get so mad unless he hit a home run. There’s a kid on first. Jared smashes the ball, thinks he’s hit a home run, but he ran past the kid on first. Jared wasn’t happy.”

“The kid was too slow and they sent me back to like second base,” Jared remembered.

Ron’s next earliest sports memory?

“Soccer,” he said. “The coach benched him. He’s 7 or 8. He kept stealing the ball from teammates.”

A football memory?

“Pop Warner,” Ron said. “We’re getting killed. The other team’s quarterback is cocky. I tell our head coach the kid needs to be put in the dirt.”

Even at 8 years old, Ron Allen’s son – currently 12th on the NFL’s official career sack list with 136 – was the man, or boy, for the job of planting a quarterback in the dirt.

“It was a cheap shot,” Ron said. “But it worked.”

“Probably not the best coaching by my dad,” Jared said. “I purposely jumped offsides, smashed the center into the quarterback. Got a penalty. But next play, they fumbled the center-quarterback exchange. We fall on it. Our ball.”

“Jared was one of the funniest trash-talkers I ever played against,” Favre said. “He’d elbow bump my head, slap me in the back.

“He finally got me [on a half sack] and I remember thinking, ‘This guy is out of his freaking mind.’ Then I played with him and realized he really was out of his freaking mind. In a good way.”

Born a wild child on April 3, 1982, in Dallas, Allen said pushing the limits of sanity on the field helped him compile four first-team All-Pro honors, including three with the Vikings; and lead the league in sacks twice, including a Vikings franchise-record 22.

“I was at my best having fun,” Allen said. “Everyone knew I was going to keep coming, keep talking. If you thought I was nuts, great.”

Ron Allen raised four rambunctious boys — Brian, Jared, Scott and Colton — on a horse ranch in Morgan Hill, Calif. Each played football, like dad, a 6-5, 252-pound tight end who stood out enough at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota to get an invite to Vikings training camp in 1978 and an open tryout a couple years later with the Chiefs.

The first prominent outsiders to take notice of Ron’s Canton-bound son were at the University of Washington. Jared was elated until the Huskies dumped him when he was expelled from Live Oak High School and forced to transfer to Los Gatos his senior year.

“Jared and a couple guys stole 60 yearbooks that sold for $90,” Ron said. “In California, when you steal something worth $3,500 or more, it’s a felony. Jared wouldn’t rat out the guys who helped him. The school dropped the felony charge but told Jared he had to leave.”

Said Jared, “Just dumb kid stuff I thought was funny, but ended up not being so funny.”

Fortunately for Allen, Idaho State pounced. He went on to become the best defensive player in Division I-AA, but NFL teams were leery of the competition. Leery of Allen’s loose-cannon reputation. Leery of the fighting and the police reports.

“I had to bail Jared out a few times,” Ron said. “My dad [Ray] was a 24-year Marine. Very highly decorated. ...He taught his boys, ‘You don’t start the fight, but you’re allowed to finish them.’ That’s how I raised my boys.”

“To me,” Jared said, “the definition of ‘starting a fight’ was up to the attorneys to figure out.”

“If anyone got in Jared’s face, he was going to ‘finish’ it,” Ron said. “Jared has always had a big heart. Just don’t get in his face, I guess.”

Hall of Fame coach Dick Vermeil was Allen’s choice to put his gold jacket on him during Friday’s gold jacket dinner in Canton. It was Vermeil, while coach of the Chiefs in 2004, who saw Allen as a fourth-round bargain during the draft.

It’s also Vermeil who says that tales of the Chiefs drafting Allen for his NFL-caliber ability as a long snapper – a craft Ron had been drilling into his son since second grade – have been overblown.

Vermeil compared Allen to Grant Wistrom, whom Vermeil drafted sixth overall in 1998, only bigger and more flexible. So uniquely flexible that Allen’s camp nickname was “Gumby.”

The Chiefs sent Allen to mandatory alcohol-abuse classes, but according to him, a phone call from his grandfather was the “reality check” that changed and perhaps saved Allen’s life, not to mention his career path toward the Hall of Fame.

“My dad saw Jared’s second DUI on ESPN,” Ron said. “He tells Jared, ‘You know that name on the back of your jersey is a really good name. And you’re trashing it on a national level.’ My dad was barely 6 feet tall, but tough as they come. And he says, ‘Do you want to be the town drunk or do you want to be the best player in the NFL?’”

“Grandpa Ray passed away a few years ago,” said Allen, now 43. “I think he’d be so proud of me today. More proud of the husband [to Amy] and father [to two girls, Brinley, 13, and Lakelyn, 10] I became.”

Allen’s arrests cost him a two-game league suspension to open the 2007 season. He still led the league with 15½ sacks, including two against the Vikings.

By early 2008, Allen wanted to become the highest-paid defender in NFL history, topping the six-year, $72 million deal Dwight Freeney got from the Colts. The Chiefs said no, citing the possibility that another off-field misstep would lead to a year-long suspension or more.

“Jared was just different,” Spielman said. “You just knew talking to him that he was an excellent person who was not going to screw up again and burn us.”

Allen remembers the trade almost falling through and sitting down with Rob Brzezinski, the Vikings vice president and salary cap manager, who wanted to know why it was so important that Allen be paid more than Freeney.

“I said because I’ve proven I’m the best and my numbers were always better than Freeney’s,” Allen said.

“I said I’m coming from a franchise where, yeah, I made a mistake. But I owned my mistake and it was behind me. Two years later, they want to treat me like a kid. Put your money where your mouth is. I told him, ‘I’m going to bleed purple and gold, but you got to have my back, too.’”

Spielman sent a first-rounder and two-third rounders to the Chiefs. Allen got a six-year deal worth $72,260,069, the last two figures an ode to Allen’s jersey number.

Spielman laughed when asked if the Vikings ever had any character problems with Allen.

“None,” he said. “Jared was the ultimate football character. I don’t think I’ve ever been around a guy with that much heart and that much love for the game.”

Allen also was notoriously good at keeping the team’s enthusiasm high, the mood light and the pranks funny at Winter Park.

“Jared was just larger than life,” Vikings safety Harrison Smith said.

“I don’t think you should underestimate what Jared’s ability to bring levity to a tense situation did for our team,” former Vikings coach Brad Childress said.

Oct. 5, 2009, is remembered as the night Favre got his Green Bay revenge by beating the Packers 30-23 at the Metrodome in the first meeting against his former team.

“It always kind of bothered me that all the attention was on me,” Favre said. “Especially when that was the best game of Jared’s Hall of Fame career.”

Favre completed 77.4% of his passes with three touchdowns and no turnovers. Allen had a career-high 4½ sacks and a safety against Aaron Rodgers, Favre’s Hall of Fame-bound successor.

“Jared was all over the place,” Rodgers said. “He was always a game-wrecker. An absolute game-wrecker.”

Said Favre: “Jared said all week he’d have my back. Boy did he ever.”

The following summer, Favre said he was “beat up physically and exhausted mentally” from the NFC title game loss at New Orleans. Childress sent Steve Hutchinson, Ryan Longwell and Allen to Hattiesburg, Miss., on the Wilf family’s private jet during training camp to coax Favre to come back.

“Jared wouldn’t shut up,” Favre said. “I had reservations. They’re saying, ‘You come back, we go to the Super Bowl.’ I’m like, ‘But what if we don’t?’ I guess I knew when they showed up in my living room, I had no choice.

“And, honestly,” Favre added, “I feel there’s a very good chance that if I had said no, Jared would have picked me up and wrestled me onto that plane. Like I said, Jared was out of his freaking mind.”

In a good way. A Hall of Fame way.