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New York Post
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Steve Wright, Packers Super Bowl champion whose likeness was used on iconic NFL trophy, dead at 82
Steve Wright, a three-time NFL champion with the Packers whose likeness was used on the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year trophy, died on Sunday in Alabama, the team announced Tuesday. He was 82. Born in Kentucky in 1942, Wright was a tackle at the University of Alabama under legendary coach Paul 'Bear' Bryant from 1961-63, winning a national title during his sophomore year. Robert Brown, Ron Kosteinik and Steve Wright (72) of the Packers look on against the Raiders during Super Bowl II on Jan. 14, 1968 at the Orange Bowl in Miami. Getty Images Even though he did not start a game with the Crimson Tide, Wright was drafted by the Packers in the fifth round of the 1964 NFL Draft and eighth round of the AFL draft by the Jets, ultimately signing with Green Bay. He played 56 games over the next four seasons, starting in 13, as the Packers won the NFL title in 1965 and Super Bowls I and II the following two seasons. He then played two seasons in New York with the Giants before single-season stints with Washington, the Bears and the Cardinals. But it was in 1969 as a member of Big Blue that Wright truly became part of NFL lore forever. That's when he was used by artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz as the model for a statue called 'The Gladiator,' which became the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year trophy. Cam Heyward receives the NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year award before the Chiefs' win over the 49er in Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11, 2024 in Las Vegas. Getty Images Wright's likeness, with the cape around his shoulders, is still used as the trophy for the yearly award. In 1974, two years after his NFL career was over, the lineman came out with a memoir entitled 'I'd rather be Wright: Memoirs of an Itinerant Tackle,' which gave a 'fly-on-the-wall look' at life in the NFL in the 1960s and early '70s. The Packers' social media team succinctly summed up Wright's NFL legacy. 'A quiet legacy, cast in bronze,' the team wrote on X.
NBC Sports
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC Sports
Steve Wright, NFL lineman who modeled Man of the Year trophy, dies at 82
Steve Wright, an NFL lineman whose impressive stature was immortalized in a sculpture that became the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year trophy, has died at the age of 82. The 6-foot-6, 250-pound Wright was a giant for his day and an imposing offensive tackle at Alabama, where he won a national championship in 1961. He was drafted by both the Packers in the NFL and the Jets in the AFL in 1964. Wright chose to play in Green Bay, and he won three championships and played in Super Bowls I and II. He later bounced around the league in four different cities, playing in New York, Washington, Chicago and St. Louis before finishing his professional career in the World Football League in 1974. In an era when football players were expected to follow their coaches' orders, Wright — despite playing for the hard-nosed Bear Bryant in college and Vince Lombardi in the NFL — gained a reputation for questioning everything. At the end of his career he published a memoir, I'd Rather be Wright: Memoirs of an Itinerant Tackle, that gave fans an inside look at life in pro football from an irreverent perspective that had rarely been shared before. But Wright is best known for serving as a model for sculptor Daniel Bennett Schwartz after the NFL commissioned Schwartz to make a distinctive trophy for a new award the league wanted to bestow on a player who epitomized everything that's right about the men who play pro football, both on and off the field. Wright stood in his uniform with a giant cape-like overcoat on his shoulder pads as Schwartz went to work creating a statue he called 'The Gladiator' that the NFL adopted as its Man of the Year Trophy. In 1970, Johnny Unitas became the first player to receive that NFL Man of the Year trophy. Walter Payton got the award in 1977, and after he died in 1999 the league changed the award's name to Walter Payton Man of the Year. The self-deprecating Wright often joked about how amusing he found it that such great players and great men were presented with 'a statue of me.' Wright was the first to admit he wasn't a great NFL player, agreeing in his book with Lombardi's assessment that he had the physical talent to be a bulldozing lineman but was too nice a guy to want to run over the player across the line from him. But Wright will always have a connection to some of the NFL's all-time greats, thanks to the award that bears his likeness.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Bob Long, member of Packers teams that won Super Bowls I and II, dies at 83
Bob Long, a wide receiver who was on the Packers' teams that won the first two Super Bowls, has died at the age of 83. Long went to Wichita State to play basketball, but after finishing his basketball eligibility he decided to give football a try, and in one year of college football he led the NCAA in touchdown catches. That two-sport athletic talent caught Vince Lombardi's eye, and the Packers took him with the 44th overall pick in the 1964 NFL draft. Long played four seasons in Green Bay and the Packers won the championship in three of them, winning the NFL Championship Game after the 1965 season and then winning Super Bowls I and II in the 1966 and 1967 seasons. After Super Bowl II the Packers traded Long to the Falcons, where he was the team's leading receiver through nine games in 1968 before his season ended because of injuries sustained in a car accident. The following offseason, Lombardi became the head coach and general manager in Washington, and he called Long to tell him he'd be trading for him to bring him to Washington. "Vince had Bobby Mitchell and Charley Taylor in Washington, but he called me up and said, 'Do you still have your basketball hands?'" Long recalled years later in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "I said, 'yes, but I'm not as fast after I was in a bad car wreck in Atlanta.' He said, 'You still don't make mental mistakes, do you?' I said, 'No.' "He said, 'Bobby Mitchell is retiring, and I need a veteran.' You don't turn down Vince Lombardi, so I went to Washington." Long started all 14 games in Washington that season. Lombardi died the following offseason, and Long's tenure in Washington ended as well. Long concluded his NFL career with a brief stint playing for the Rams. In retirement, Long returned to Wisconsin and lived there the rest of his life, saying he loved being around Packers fans.
NBC Sports
19-03-2025
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Bob Long, member of Packers teams that won Super Bowls I and II, dies at 83
Bob Long, a wide receiver who was on the Packers' teams that won the first two Super Bowls, has died at the age of 83. Long went to Wichita State to play basketball, but after finishing his basketball eligibility he decided to give football a try, and in one year of college football he led the NCAA in touchdown catches. That two-sport athletic talent caught Vince Lombardi's eye, and the Packers took him with the 44th overall pick in the 1964 NFL draft. Long played four seasons in Green Bay and the Packers won the championship in three of them, winning the NFL Championship Game after the 1965 season and then winning Super Bowls I and II in the 1966 and 1967 seasons. After Super Bowl II the Packers traded Long to the Falcons, where he was the team's leading receiver through nine games in 1968 before his season ended because of injuries sustained in a car accident. The following offseason, Lombardi became the head coach and general manager in Washington, and he called Long to tell him he'd be trading for him to bring him to Washington. 'Vince had Bobby Mitchell and Charley Taylor in Washington, but he called me up and said, 'Do you still have your basketball hands?'' Long recalled years later in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. 'I said, 'yes, but I'm not as fast after I was in a bad car wreck in Atlanta.' He said, 'You still don't make mental mistakes, do you?' I said, 'No.' 'He said, 'Bobby Mitchell is retiring, and I need a veteran.' You don't turn down Vince Lombardi, so I went to Washington.' Long started all 14 games in Washington that season. Lombardi died the following offseason, and Long's tenure in Washington ended as well. Long concluded his NFL career with a brief stint playing for the Rams. In retirement, Long returned to Wisconsin and lived there the rest of his life, saying he loved being around Packers fans.
Fox Sports
07-02-2025
- Sport
- Fox Sports
Room for two GOATs? How Tom Brady would feel if Patrick Mahomes ‘three-peats'
Patrick Mahomes probably still has a few more rings to earn before anyone anoints him as the greatest quarterback of all time. For now, that honor still belongs to Tom Brady, with his 10 Super Bowl appearances and seven championship rings. But on Sunday night, in Super Bowl LIX, the 29-year-old Mahomes might force his way into a seat at that "GOAT" table. If he becomes the first quarterback to achieve the Super Bowl three-peat, he'll have done something that even Brady couldn't do. And when Brady sat down with Mahomes on Wednesday morning for an interview that will air on FOX's Super Bowl pregame show, he told the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback that a three-peat is something he'd love to see. "I said 'Look, nobody would be more happy for you than me if you go out and do something that no other team in history has ever done — that no other quarterback's ever done,'" Brady said on a FOX Sports conference call this week. "Because I love seeing other people achieve great things." It's not that Brady is rooting for Mahomes and the Chiefs to beat the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday night. It's more about a great player recognizing greatness in others and giving him the respect he deserves. It didn't even seem to bother him that some think that if Mahomes completes this run — which would include four championships in six years, something only Terry Bradshaw and the Pittsburgh Steelers have ever done — he might be on the verge of surpassing Brady and everybody else. If that happens, Brady said, he doesn't care. "I think it's natural for everybody to compare teams to teams of the past, players to players of past — and none of it surprises me," Brady said. "It's been happening since I started as a young player. It's not how I view things, though. "Anything that Patrick does, to me, I don't believe will ever detract from what I accomplished in my career. And there's going to be another player beyond Patrick, years from now, that will be compared (to us). We all have our own individual journeys, our own football careers and lives, and those are made up ultimately by what we do as individuals and how we are motivated every day to go out and achieve our team goals." Brady, of course, achieved plenty during his remarkable, 23-year NFL career. The first-year TV analyst — who'll be calling his first Super Bowl for FOX on Sunday alongside play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt — won an unprecedented seven Super Bowl championships. Six of those came in New England and one in Tampa Bay. But he never could achieve the elusive three-peat — something that has never been done in the Super Bowl era. The only team that came close was the Green Bay Packers, who won the NFL championship in 1965, and then won Super Bowls I and II over the next two seasons. The only other team to win three straight NFL championships was the Packers in 1929-31. Brady had one shot at it. The Patriots won Super Bowls XXXVIII and XXXIX, which sent them into the 2005 season as the two-time defending champions. But they were wiped out in the playoffs that season, losing 27-13 to the Denver Broncos in the divisional round. He also played in three straight Super Bowls from 2016-18, winning two. But he and the Patriots lost the middle one — Super Bowl LII — to quarterback Nick Foles and the Philadelphia Eagles, ending the three-peat chance before he even had a shot. That doesn't mean it will hurt Brady to watch Mahomes do what he couldn't, though. In fact, Brady made it clear that he's one of Mahomes' biggest fans. "I love Patrick as a player and as a person," he said. "Since he came onto the scene I couldn't think any more highly of a player in that position, knowing that all that he's going through and gone through and will continue to go through to try to accomplish things at the highest level." "Not just physically," Brady added. "I appreciate the mental and emotional aspects that he brings to the game as well. He's a really great student of the game. He prepares hard. And he doesn't have an emotional volatility to the way that he plays. He's a competitor. He's driven to succeed. He approaches that in practice and in the offseason as well as the games. And that's what it takes to be truly great at what you do. He's displayed that over the first eight years of his career." It really has been a spectacular start for Mahomes to his NFL career. In seven years as the starter in Kansas City, he's led the Chiefs to the playoffs and the AFC Championship seven times, reaching the Super Bowl in five of those seasons. He's thrown for 32,352 yards and 245 touchdowns. He's won NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP twice each. He's played less than a third of the time that Brady did in his career, though. And while he's on a pace to surpass the current "GOAT" in most categories, he still has a long way to go. If he wins this Super Bowl, though, the debate — however premature — will surely soon begin. "Where that puts him in historical context and perspective is, again, that's not something that I considered that against other players that played previously, like Joe Montana, John Elway and Dan Marino," Brady said. "That's for a different type of media. For me I just appreciate what we're really witnessing on the field—someone who is just incredibly gifted at what he's asked to do." And if he does what Brady couldn't, and completes that three-peat, don't expect Brady to sound jealous at all. "It's hard to win one Super Bowl," Brady said. "You talk about Dan Marino and you can look at a lot of great quarterbacks that never won one. To win back-to-back is extremely difficult. There's a lot of things that need to go your way. And the fact that a three-peat has never happened in the history of the NFL tells you how hard it is to do. "So I am incredibly excited to see this game because no team has ever been this close." Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano. recommended Get more from National Football League Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
