By Ron Cook, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
December 8, 1975
Are we getting old or what?
They're starting to die off a little more frequently, you know? The Super Steelers. It's frightening, really.
Ernie Holmes, who died Thursday night in a one-car accident in Texas, makes it nine from the Super Bowl teams of the 1970s who have died, joining Mike Webster, Ray Mansfield, Steve Furness, Jim Clack, Joe Gilliam, Steve Courson, Theo Bell and Ray Oldham. Holmes was 59, right around the same age, hard as it is to believe, as the many Hall of Famers -- Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Jack Lambert, etc. -- from that fabulous era.
Has it really been 33 years since they handed Steelers owner Art Rooney Sr. the first of the four Super Bowl trophies that his team won in a glorious six-year period?
It just doesn't seem possible.
If the passing of Iron Mike Webster at 50 in 2002 from complications after a heart attack was shocking, so, too, was the death of Holmes. This was a man who was much too tough to go out so quickly, without so much as a good fight. He was pronounced dead at the scene after his car went off the road and rolled several times in Lumberton, Texas, about 80 miles from Houston.
Holmes wasn't just a charter member of the Steel Curtain defense, he might have been its most ferocious player. As nicknames go, "Fats" might not have been as terrifying as "Mean Joe" and "Jack Splat," but Holmes was every bit as intimidating as Greene and Lambert in the mid-1970s, before his eating and drinking eventually drove him out of the NFL after the 1978 season.
The only thing Holmes ate up in the 1974 AFC championship game was Oakland Raiders Hall of Fame guard Gene Upshaw. Holmes was immovable; think Casey Hampton from today's team. The Steelers won, 24-13, on a day they limited the Raiders to 29 rushing yards. Holmes was back at it two weeks later in Super Bowl IX, when the Steelers beat the Minnesota Vikings, 16-6, holding them to 17 rushing yards and 119 total yards.
It helped that opposing players considered Holmes to be nuts, a maniac if you will. He scared them before he even got down in his stance. It wasn't so much the shape of an arrow that he had cut into his scalp, although that was truly bizarre, at least for that kinder, gentler, pre-Dennis Rodman, pre-Mike Tyson era. That was just good fun.
"It points me to the quarterback," he often said.
It was an incident before the 1973 season that earned Holmes his unstable reputation. He snapped while driving on the Ohio Turnpike -- allegedly because of the breakup of his marriage -- and fired shots at trucks and then a hovering police helicopter. That was during a time when the Steelers were able to get him off with five years' probation and the promise that he would get help. He was admitted to Pittsburgh's Western Psychiatric Hospital.
"How long I got to stay here?" team broadcaster Myron Cope quotes Holmes in his book, "Double Yoi!" "All the people here are crazy."
A lot of people around the NFL back then would tell you Holmes fit right in. So, too, probably would Cope, who frequently told the story on the banquet circuit how Holmes, during the night before a road game, asked him to join him in the hotel bar for a Courvoisier.
"If Fats had said to me, 'Cope, let's go down to the bar and have an enema,' I'd be down there having an enema," Cope would say.
But if you could ask Cope, who's hospitalized in intensive care and battling serious health issues of his own, to rank his favorite Steelers, Holmes surely would be high on the list. The man was more a gentle giant than a menace, extremely popular among his teammates. Although they were wary at times of his mood swings and many feared him because of his brute strength, they grew to love him because they knew he had that soft side. Certainly, they weren't afraid to tease him.
The story from training camp not long after the helicopter shooting is legendary. One day at Latrobe, the players and coaches noticed a helicopter hovering nearby. The silence was deafening until linebacker Andy Russell piped up, "Easy, Fats. Easy."
It's a good thing for Russell that Holmes had a sense of humor. Holmes could have snapped him in two with his bare hands. Russell will tell you that.
It's safe to say Russell, Holmes and the other players laughed at that tale many times over during their many reunions. News of Holmes' death had to hit his teammates especially hard because he seemed happy and looked good -- he had lost weight -- when he returned to Pittsburgh this season for the Steelers' 75th anniversary celebration, even if he was disappointed that he wasn't named to their all-time team. He was an ordained minister in Texas.
The news reports said Holmes wasn't wearing a seat belt and was thrown from his vehicle. Who knows? At one point, he weighed well over 400 pounds. Maybe he stopped wearing a seat belt because he couldn't get one around him. He was such an enormous man, a giant both in girth and on the football field.
Now, Holmes is gone, and the rest of us are left to feel just a little bit older than we did before we heard the sad news.
Ron Cook can be reached at rcook@post-gazette.com.
First published on January 19, 2008 at 12:00 am
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