Big Daddy Lipscomb������ by Heske
�Big Daddy Lipscomb drank, screwed and dominated football games.� � Steelers teammate, defensive back Brady Keys.
�The best man I ever saw at knocking people down.� � Steelers head coach Buddy Parker
�He just got better and better.� � Colts (and Jets) head coach Weeb Ewbank
�He cried periodically.� � Colts teammate Luke Owens
�He lived his life in the suburbs of chaos.�� writer William Nack
I first met Big Daddy Lipscomb in a Pittsburgh bar in December of �62. It was right before or right after my 15th birthday. I also can�t remember the exact spot though it might have been The South Park Inn where then Steelers QB, future Hall of Famer, Bobby Layne, also a noted whoremonger and wet sleeve drunk, would hold forth every Tuesday night during the NFL season at what he called a �team meeting.� Layne had instituted these so-called �meetings,�, actually concentrated group assaults on sobriety, in Detroit during the �50s and many who were in Motown at the time acknowledge that the gatherings were a key factor in Detroit�s three NFL championships during that decade. Layne�s coach for most of those seasons and two of the championships, Raymond �Buddy� Parker, had taken over as head coach of the Steelers in �57 with Layne arriving in �58 after leading Detroit to a championship the previous season under George Wilson. Needless to say, Parker�s and Layne�s modest and inconsistent success with the Steelers did not match those Michigan glory years.
�By the time Parker and Layne reached Pittsburgh, the �team meetings,� according to most accounts of the time, had become more about the booze than the �ball. Nonetheless the year I met Big Daddy the Steelers were on their way to a solid second-place 9-5 season (including, unfortunately, two severe ass whippings administered by the hated Browns), creating false promise for the future. Sound familiar?
While Layne probably never confined his imbibing to Tuesday during the season throughout his career, he certainly revved it up once he reached the �burgh. He and his P. Diddy-like entourage of teammates, hangers on, strippers and call girls could be found on any given night in area watering holes, alternately toasting and terrorizing the attendant yokels.
Upon joining the Steelers in �61 when he and center Buzz Nutter (who would also make the Pro Bowl as a Steeler) came to town in a trade that sent star WR Jimmy Orr to Baltimore, Big Daddy�� became the central figure in Layne�s posse. As Pat Livingston of The Pittsburgh Press noted, �. . . Layne would buy everyone except Lipscomb a drink. He would buy Big Daddy an entire fifth of VO.� Another account of this time offers, �In Pittsburgh, with Bobby Layne and other Steelers as his new drinking pals, Big Daddy zealously sated his appetites.�
I had gained tenuous, very temporary entrance to Layne�s partying court via my father, one of the aforementioned yokels, a semi-charming drunkard in his own right and peripheral friends with Steelers linebackers George Tarasovic and John Reger.� Tarasovic, an LSU All-America and fierce as a pro LB, is worthy of his own story as, after his rookie season, he interrupted what would prove to be a fine career with the Steelers to fight in Korea.
A couple of years before my meeting with Big Daddy, I was probably 11 or 12, my father began taking me bar-hopping�Rooster Fleming�s in Hazelwood, The Home Plate Caf�, The Bullpen, owned by Pirates reliever Elroy Face--with him where I�d sit with the old guys and knock back shots of Canadian Club followed by a beer chaser then do parlor tricks involving my freakish memory. In the late �50s and early �60s not every kid over 14 with a fake I.D. was trying to get served. Underage drinking was a cult activity -- no fake I.D. necessary -- enjoyed by a (mis?)fortunate few.
If there were Steelers or Pirates (a far more successful franchise at the time; they�d begun the �60s with a World Series victory) or local collegiate hotshots present, I could, almost without fail, tick off their individual career stats complete with highlights. Back then it wasn�t a big deal to rub shoulders with pro athletes as most were earning no money and worked real jobs in the off season. Lipscomb�s maximum salary as a pro was something like 14 grand. Most college players behaved the same way in the early �60s as they do now, carousing and cadging free drinks their main non-sport activities.
If there were no athletes around but the possibility of free drinks existed, The Giant Book of Baseball Greats (not its actual title, but close enough) would be produced and I would commence to rattling off the entire contents of any one of its hundreds of pages chosen at random by an unsuspecting, soon-to-be-buying barfly.
And on one such night when athletes were definitely present, here was Big Daddy Lipscomb in a size 56, mustard yellow suit, resembling a gracefully moving, very larg building. My father approached in his typically part reckless/part smooth fashion and then, as was standard, the old man sent me into my Hoppin� Monkey act:
�No college, signed by Pete Rozelle for the Rams while in the Marines. Three� seasons with the Rams, then five seasons Colts, two-time world champs, played in first overtime game in the NFL, two-time Pro Bowler, part of the legendary Marchetti, Donovan, Joyce line . . .�
Big Daddy was on the way to making his third (63) Pro Bowl as well. A few months after that game, he was dead at 31.
When meeting lesser Steelers lights like Tarasovic or Reger (not that they weren�t both tough players and imposing figures) my data delivery couldn�t have been smoother, but in the overwhelming presence of Big Daddy Lipscomb I had stuttered and stammered and by the end of my brief, incomplete recitation I may even have been on the verge of blubbering, not to mention pissing myself.
In retrospect I now realize that my pop gained some kind of grisly, perverse comfort via my public humiliations large and small, but Big Daddy, on this night, couldn�t have been nicer. Towering over me at 6-6 and filling up the room at about 300 muscular pounds, Lipscomb leaned down, gazed at me through heavy lidded, rheumy eyes and rumbled, �How you doin� Little Daddy?�
I later learned that he called everyone that except for guys he leveled on the field. Them he called �Sweet Pea� as he was helping them up. �I don�t want children to think I�m mean,� was the explanation. Indeed, he soon referred to my own boozy father also as �Little Daddy.� But over 40 years later the thrill for me over those first words from him remains intact. What happened next placed me squarely into an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Emboldened by his initial gracious response I caught a second wind and was able to rattle off a few more obscure highlights of his amazing (and what proved to be all too brief) career. As an interior defensive lineman he�d led the championship Colts in tackles one year. His defensive coordinator, Charlie Winner, had wanted to shift him to linebacker. I was on a roll. Then he growled something else roughly in my direction.
�I think he said, �Wait here,�� slurred my dad.
Somehow Big Daddy�s massive frame had disappeared from right in front of me. My head had been down during my second recitation. Just as stealthily Big Daddy� returned, an oversized Steelers helmet (they were sickly gold w/ a black stripe, I�m pretty sure,� back then) with lineman�s cage, in his mammoth paw that was now extending toward me like the boom on a crane gripping something that appeared to be about the size of a peanut..
�Here you go Little Daddy.�
Now comes the part where I�m supposed to tell you that battered, obviously played-in helmet remains in my possession, occupying a shrine of honor in my home and so on. But you know how it goes. Things that were important then and maybe important now weren�t so important in between. In fact, I don�t much remember what happened to the helmet after that night. Don�t forget I was 14 or 15 at the time and had been knocking back shots with my dad for most of that night and he was a guy who, along with Lipscomb, Layne and more than a few of their Steelers teammates, had made the Lifetime All World Drinking Team many years prior.
�My dad and I ran into Big Daddy again a couple of weeks later under much the same circumstances except this time he was possessed of a baleful, far away glare, equal parts malice and non-recognition. For just a second my dad plunged ahead blindly until he too realized that he was endeavoring to interact with a truly scary, very huge presence, whiskey fumes and rancor in equal parts emanating from that massive presence.
Many years later, after reading a few things about him, I realized that Big Daddy, among his many other issues with alcohol, violence and women often in combination, was probably manic depressive, one of the most debilitating of mental illnesses. The constant drinking may have been a primitive form of self-medication. Back then everyone knew that Lipscomb, Layne and many of their teammates were too often either hungover or drunk during games. But you can read about Big Daddy�s drunken shenanigans and about his off field violence against civilians, his brutal womanizing, his oversized shoes, his custom-made jocks, the off season pro wrestling, and the orgies, elsewhere.
And while you�re there you can also read more about his mysterious death from a smack overdose in May of �63 in Baltimore after an astounding performance in the Pro Bowl (11 tackles, two forced fumbles, one pass batted down) back before that game wasn�t a combination of flag football and Battle of the Network Stars and the best in the league really got after it.
Big Daddy, who by all accounts drank constantly, wasn�t a druggie and was deathly afraid of needles and to this day his family members bristle when confronted with the official cause of his death:� accidental heroin overdose. The ironic thing is that when an autopsy was performed it revealed that Lipscomb suffered from a fatty liver from the chronic boozing and more than likely didn�t have long to live anyhow.
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Aside from meeting him and getting the helmet, I also remember Big Daddy changing the way the pro game was played. No one describes some of the things Lipscomb did better than he does:
�If a player starts holding, I smack my hand flat against the earhole of his helmet. When he complains about dirty playing, I tell him to stop holding and I�ll stop slapping. That�s what I call working out a problem.�
�I just reach out and grab an armful of players from the other team and peel them off until I find the one with the ball. Him, I keep.�
Reading about this is one thing; seeing it happen took me a place where mere words can�t even begin to do justice. When Big Daddy joined the Steelers I was already a regular at the games at Forbes Field and Pitt Stadium and there was just no way not to hone in on Number 76, his gigantic (for the time) frame (he also had about a 7-foot wingspan) ranging sideline to sideline and north and south, wreaking havoc wherever he and those he was pursuing stopped, and I mean stopped dead.� His presence on the field was as captivating and dominating as any Steeler I saw before him and any who have played since.
I�m not one to yammer about �team identity�; in fact, I don�t believe there is any such thing or at least there shouldn�t be. Look what over-reliance in a so-called �identity� (i.e. telegraphing your punches) has cost the Steelers in recent seasons. But what Lipscomb and Layne and Tarasovic and a few of their other Steelers teammates of the �60s instilled in me were a few important ideas:� 1. The Steelers and their coaches are people, given to human frailty, the pitfalls of emotion, not always up to the challenges of real life, in most important ways just people like you and me; 2. People, despite their best efforts and amazing abilities often fail and, more importantly, they die. My dad, an unrepentant drunk who had also taken to pill popping, just into his �50s, joined Big Daddy in �70, and 3. Pittsburgh was and is a place where great athletes had come and would come to play. Big Daddy predicted Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, Lambert, and Ham. He combined the best of all of them and all the others you�ve known and loved. Lipscomb, more than any other Steeler from the �60s, made me realize that one day Pittsburgh would be a place where an entire team of champions could perform, not just those possessed of individual greatness and championships they�d won before they got to Pittsburgh.
Bobby Layne is in The Hall of Fame, as a Lion, but Big Daddy Lipscomb is not and will never be considered, due entirely to the now-realized-to-be questionable circumstances of his death. But he�s in my Hall of Fame, the best Steeler of them all, partly because I met him, but mostly because now I realize that watching him play was the same as sitting right next to a virtuoso in any of the arts, in any sport and I was somehow close enough to have lived his performances, to absorb them and maybe even make them part of me.
I�ve been crazy for Steelers football since 1955 when we were 4-8 under Walt Kiesling with the redoubtable Jim Finks at QB � 10 TDs 26 interceptions, a baseball catcher�s mask affixed to his helmet due to a broken jaw administered by the Eagles Wild Man Willey, and Fran Rogel beginning every game with a plunge up the middle while the fans chanted, �Hey diddle diddle/Rogel up the middle.�
I�ve enjoyed the Steelers in a way that I haven�t enjoyed say my favorite baseball team or my favorite rock and roll bands or my favorite-anything-else (except for one thing),� and the intensity only increased when Big Daddy came to town and the hard wiring between me and the Steelers was finalized..
If you look at the big picture, the ultimate championship which so many younger fans now clamor for, my Steelers fandom has been defined by a 92% failure rate (not that I look at it in such a manner), no league championships (before there was an AFL or before the leagues combined), four Super Bowl wins in almost 50 years of listening and watching. But because of the so-called failure, my passion burned all the hotter when I was lucky enough to be at the two Super Bowl wins over Dallas in the �70s and it was burning last month in Heinz where I screamed as loudly as I could for as long as I could until the Steelers all got on the same page against the Jets. I don�t know if the molten intensity, my pure enjoyment of the Steelers, would be quite the same if I�d never met Big Daddy and held that helmet in my hands.� At least for a little while.