Steve Wright, a hulking early 1960s lineman at Alabama and the only man to play on teams coached by Paul “Bear” Bryant and Vince Lombardi, has died. He was 82.
Wright, who played tackle at Alabama from 1961-63 and in the NFL from 1964-71, was living at a care facility in Augusta, Ga., at the time of his death on Sunday. He spent many years in pharmaceutical sales and in the insurance business following his football career.
Wright’s passing was announced Tuesday by the Packers:
Enormous for his era at 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds, Wright was a sophomore on Alabama’s 1961 national championship team and lettered for the Crimson Tide in 1962 and 1963. He was drafted in the fifth round by the Green Bay Packers in 1964, and won three championship rings as a member of the pre-Super Bowl 1965 NFL title team and the first two Super Bowl winners after the 1966 and 1967 seasons.
In addition, Wright was the model from the NFL’s Man of the Year award trophy, given annually to the player who best exemplifies a commitment to community service. The award was renamed after Walter Payton in 1999, but the trophy still bears Wright’s likeness.
Wright grew up in Louisville, Ky., where he played for future Alabama assistant (and former Bryant player) Dude Hennessey in high school. He told Bryant biographer Allen Barra it was that connection that led him to Tuscaloosa in the fall of 1960.
Wright was well-known as an iconoclastic, an easygoing free spirit who didn’t get along with the famously hard-driving Bryant. He never started a game with the Crimson Tide, and after his NFL career spoke out often about his former coaches, including in his 1974 book “I’d Rather Be Wright: Memoirs of an Itinerant Tackle.”
Wright never saw eye to eye with Bryant or his staff, notably defensive line coach Pat James. While other players responded to — and thrived under — Bryant’s intense “tough love” style on and off the practice field, Wright did not.
“He just couldn’t take Coach Bryant’s brand of discipline,” teammate Darwin Holt told Barra. “Coach Bryant thought he was challenging Wright; Steve just didn’t see it that way. It was like they talked in different languages.”
Wright appeared to have similar issues in Green Bay with the also highly intense Lombardi.
“Coach Lombardi was tough and wanted perfection, but unfortunately I wasn’t perfect,” Wright told Martin Hendricks of Packers Plus in 2015. “He’d chew me up and down one minute and 15 minutes later tell me to ‘do what I tell you to do and you’ll be OK.’”
Wright was traded away by the Packers in 1968, and played two years with the New York Giants and one each in Washington, Chicago and St. Louis before finishing his career as part of the short-lived Chicago Fire of the World Football League in 1974. He was with the Giants in 1969 when the team sent him to artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz to serve as the model for the now-famous sculpture that was originally entitled “The Gladiator.”
“All these great players have a trophy with me on their mantle,” Wright joked in 2015. “Remember, I was a tackle and they are tall and good looking. Guards are short and ugly. One day Aaron Rodgers may have me on his mantle.”
