Former Steelers linebacker Jack Lambert loving life

(Editor's note: This story was originally published July 16, 1999)

Jack Lambert leaned back, sipped his lemonade, yes, lemonade, and recited the verse written by Kris Kristofferson and turned to gold by Willie Nelson.

Why me Lord?

What have I done

To deserve even one

Of the pleasures I've known?

"If I had my guitar, I'd sing it for you," he said, laughing some and extending hands belonging to either somebody who caught in the major leagues for 75 years or played linebacker in the National Football League for 10.

Linebacking and guitar playing just don't go well together, he said.

Indeed, if Lambert could have the answer to just one question now and forevermore, he would ask, "Why me, Lord?"

"I look at my life and I realize I could not have written a better script," he said.

He often wonders, more than ever before, why his life has contained such great quantities of unbridled happiness, fame and success.

The days of tending the dairy cows on his grandpa's farm in Mantua. The mayhem on the football field at Crestwood High, Kent State and finally Pittsburgh that secured everlasting fame and a sound financial future.

Now a wife and four healthy children.

Never mind the four Super Bowl victories, the nine consecutive Pro Bowls (more than any other player of his era), the last in 1983, or the induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame seven years later (the mandatory five years after a horribly dislocated big toe forced his retirement).

All of those wonderful things are stowed away in bundles and boxes and they will be staying there, he said.

"It was a great time in my life, but it's over with," Lambert, now 46, explained. "Same with college."

He has attended just one Steelers game since his retirement, that when he was presented his Hall of Fame ring, although he has utmost respect and warmth for the Rooney family, owners of the Steelers.

Truth is, if there's an ice hockey game on TV opposite a pro football game, he'll watch the ice hockey.

* * * * * * * *

TRULY BLESSED

Let us, though, rewind Lambert's life to understand more fully why he is so unabashedly grateful, if sometimes puzzled, when he counts his blessings.

First off, he went to Kent, just down Route 43 from his home, because few colleges were interested in a skinny, bow-legged quarterback/defensive back from a country school.

He did not exactly knock them dead at Kent, primarily because there was no room for him at middle linebacker.

"They had a guy they said was going to be the next Dick Butkus, or something," Lambert said, "but all of a sudden he quit the team and I was moved to linebacker."

In a short while, quarterbacks across the Mid-American Conference were calling in sick on game days and professional scouts were snooping about the Kent practices for a closer look at this unusually intense, gifted athlete for whom football seemed to have been invented. The Natural, really, through and through.

The Steelers so liked what they saw that he was their second-round draft choice for the '74 season and, as Lambert has said, "That ended my 21 years as a Browns fan."

* * * * * * * *

CARRYING HIS WEIGHT

It also made good his lifelong ambition to play professional football -- and he can't remember ever having aspired to do anything else.

So it was off to Pittsburgh, a city with an image similar to the one he would fashion.

That's just a two-hour drive, but a long, long way from home for a country boy.

"I looked at the names above the lockers -- Ham, Russell, Greene -- and said to myself, 'What the heck am I doing here?' " Lambert recalled.

The Steelers, by the way, were wondering the same thing.

"They put me on the scale and when it stopped at 203 they almost died," Lambert said. That's pretty much the bare minimum on a 6-foot-4 1/2-inch frame. For a volleyball or tennis player.

"I explained to them that I had been running a lot and was in the best shape of my life," Lambert said. "I also told them to reserve judgment until we put on the pads."

So now what?

The Steelers had Jack Ham and Andy Russell, excellent players, at outside linebacker and a decent enough middle linebacker in Harry Davis. "The way I figured it at the time, if I could stay healthy for seven, eight years, I might get to play," Lambertsaid.

But then, in a manner only, oh, Kristofferson and Nelson could describe, Davis was injured during the third preseason game, Lambert was chosen to replace him and the rest, as they say, is written in the annals of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

* * * * * * * *

CHARMED, I'M SURE

There is one more chapter to the story of this athlete's charmed life, the most important chapter of all, he will say with no hesitation whatsoever.

"I always wanted to get married and have a family, but I vowed not to do that until I was out of pro football," he said.

The demands of the game, the demands he put on himself. There was no room for a wife and kids and, anyway, "You've got to find the right woman."

He began to suspect that search would go on forever and then some, because he bought 85 acres of heaven, as defined by an outdoorsman, near this community north of Pittsburgh during his playing days and built a "hunting camp."

Yes, he built it, with the help of some friends. Bit by bit and piece by piece, they split barnstones found on the property and built a fine house.

"I love to labor," Lambert said.

Then, one evening, he stopped at a cocktail lounge to subdue his thirst and noticed a vibrant, attractive young woman in the company of, well, an old geezer.

Hmmmmm.

He called upon the international icebreaker, asking the bartender to give the two of them a drink on him, perhaps with the hope the geezer might become anesthetized.

But, lo and behold, the bartender returned and said, "The lady thanks you and so does her father."

"I just quietly pumped my fist and said, 'Yes,' " Lambert said.

* * * * * * * *

CHILD'S PLAY

The marriage to Lisa, a Pittsburgh native who studied and played volleyball at Clemson, has produced four children -- Lauren, 11; Elizabeth, 9; John, 8; and Ty, 5.

The older son was born on Lambert's birthday, July 8, and he has, believe it or not, taken to ice hockey.

"He thinks it's kinda neat that I played pro football and he sometimes brings home cards belonging to his friends at school for me to sign," Lambert said.

He smiled the warmest of smiles and added: "Ty thinks it's kinda neat that I can drive a tractor. When he gets up in the morning, he checks to see what I have on, puts on the same thing and then asks if we can go drive the tractor."

The girls are coming along just fine in athletics, one having been chosen a fast-pitch all-star this summer.

"I want the children to play sports," Lambert said. "I want them to understand the value of working together and I want them to understand about getting the dickens beat out of you and having to come back from it."

He also wants to be there, he emphasized, for every minute of their games, every minute of their lives.

"I can get more enjoyment out of watching these children for 11 seconds than I got out of 11 years of pro football," he concluded.

* * * * * * * *

REMEMBERING THE BROWNS

"Year after year, my favorite game was against the Browns in Cleveland," Lambert said.

"You'd start down that rickety, musty, old walkway to the field and you could smell the mustard and the hot dogs, you could feel and hear the cold wind whipping in from the lake and there, right before you, was a real football field, a grass field. It was great," Lambert said.

He had some memorable days, some image-enhancers, against the Browns -- twice darn near slaying their gutsy-to-a-fault quarterback, Brian Sipe.

"The time in Cleveland," Lambert said, "Sipe had a chance to get out of bounds but, for whatever reason, chose not to so I hit him."

The two of them went sprawling, and right in the midst of the wild-eyed players on Cleveland's sideline who didn't much like Lambert in the first place.

"They started stomping and kicking me," said Lambert, who assumed the fetal position and waited for help to arrive.

Once order was restored, he made his way to the sideline and, after one play, deemed himself ready to resume contact with the boys in the pumpkin-colored pants.

"Oh, you can't go back in," he was told, "because you've been kicked out of the game."

He was fined $150 by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, "and when I asked him what he did to the people who kicked and stomped me, he said he'd given them a reprimand," Lambert snorted, notably a tad upset about it to this day.

Then there was the other notable run-in, so to speak, with Sipe -- this time in Pittsburgh.

Lambert came through clean on a passing down and was bearing down on Sipe as a bald eagle might track a trout.

"He knew he was going to get it, so he could have ducked or gone down," Lambert said, the tone of his voice suggesting that his love of quarterbacks remains no thicker than a coat of varnish.

Lambert delivered an awful wallop "and Sipe went down like a sniper had shot him."

He smiled a linebacker's smile and added: "Dieken and those guys were screaming and cursing and saying they were going to kill me, but I just looked at Sam (Browns coach Sam Rutigliano) and said that was a clean hit. He just looked at me. Never changed his expression. Never said a word."

Fans were prone to assume that Lambert, who constantly seemed to be in a barely controlled rage on the field, had a 22-ounce, medium-raw porterhouse with a side of firecrackers before the games in Cleveland, but that was not remotely the case.

"I always had dinner the night before those games with my dad at the Iron Gate Restaurant and I always had two bowls of turtle soup and a duck dish that was a house specialty," Lambert revealed. It took 10 years of begging to get the chefs to give him the turtle soup recipe, which he now considers one of his prized possessions.

* * * * * * * *

A FIGHTING CHANCE

"The only fight I didn't participate in was in Cleveland when I was a rookie," Lambert said, confessing that he was far too busy spectating to be punching.

"(Defensive end) L.C. Greenwood drop-kicked some guy under the chin and I said to myself: 'Man, this is great. I'm going to love pro football.' "

In practice, though, he had his daily tussles with Mike

Webster, the Steelers' All-Pro center and now a member of the Hall of Fame.

"We'd be rolling around on the ground. It was pretty much part of the practice-day routine," Lambert said. "I didn't say two words that first year, but I did have lots of fights."

Just a couple of competitive boys doing what comes naturally when a center with the hands of a pickpocket locks up on a linebacker who does not appreciate being deterred as he goes about his appointed rounds.

* * * * * * * *

STEROID TEMPTATION

"Sure, I was tempted to try them," he said.

"All I wanted in life when I went to Kent was to become a professional football player -- and here were all of these people telling me I had excellent skills but not enough weight. I had to gain 30 pounds," he said.

"There, right before me, was a way to gain the weight I couldn't put on no matter how much I ate. (His playing weight, even in the pros, rarely exceeded 220 pounds.) I just decided I wouldn't do it. I'd do my best and what happened happened," Lambert said.

He did not name names, but he mentioned that those of his time who did take steroids are now enduring heart problems, other physical and mental problems as well.

* * * * * * * *

TODAY'S NFL

"The people who really know, the locker room guys, for instance, have told me I wouldn't want to be playing these days," Lambert said.

He noted how strange it seemed to him when he learned that today's players play the game, do the interviews and then disperse as quickly as possible.

"Sometimes, we'd sit around in the locker room and talk until midnight and beyond," Lambert said. "I just don't think they're having as much fun today as we had."

Certainly, they are not as successful.

"The Steelers headed down -hill when they started drafting guys who looked like Greek gods rather than guys who could play football," Lambert said.

He laughed and recalled that he and Ham always wore long-sleeved shirts, even in the sticky, unmerciful heat of a Pennsylvania summer, "because we didn't want our opponents to know we had such skinny arms."

They could, though, play the game as well as anybody ever played it.

"The Steelers drafted guys who were bigger, stronger and faster than I," Lambert said, "but they never found one who could take my job away from me."

He is not lavish in his praise of Coach Chuck Noll, one of his Hall of Fame brethren.

"He had great assistants and he had great players," Lambert said, pausing and then adding, "Just how much coaching do you suppose Jack Ham, Andy Russell and I needed?"