The End of the Line: The rise and fall and rise again of Lionel Aldridge

The Rise, Fall and Rise of Lionel Aldridge

As a powerful and intimidating defensive end for the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers (1963-1973), the 6’5” 235-pound Lionel Aldridge had a message for National Football League running backs: If you come at me, I’ll be ready for you.

When I visited with him at his apartment in Milwaukee over two days in the late 1980s, he was a recovered – but not cured – victim of paranoid schizophrenia who had some different messages as we talked about his NFL career and life after football.

Born February 14, 1941, in Evergreen, Louisiana, Lionel Aldridge was raised by his grandparents until his grandfather’s death. He then moved with other relatives to Pittsburg, California, where he played two years of high school football.

When his coach, Tony Knapp, joined Utah State University as an assistant to head coach John Ralston, Aldridge went with him.

Of the school’s 5,500 students, five were black – all boys. In his senior year, after his football eligibility had expired, Aldridge was thrown out of school for dating white girls, although he had been doing so throughout his time at the university.

“At the time there were some problems,” Aldridge recalls. “But trying to look back to see where my troubles started, I’d say that’s really reaching. It’s over 20 years ago. There isn’t much substance to that.”

He was drafted by the Packers in 1962 as an offensive guard. Green Bay was loaded with talent at that position, however, and when an opening at defensive end became available, Aldridge asked to try out for it.

“Veterans didn’t talk to rookies in those days,” he says. “The Packers had won two straight championships. They knew who they were.

They only wanted people coming in who could make them even better. Nobody would talk to me until I proved myself, except Henry Jordan. He helped me make the transition from newcomer to regular.

“In the game against the college All-Stars in August, I divided time at end with Urban Henry, a veteran they had obtained from Los Angeles.

During the week, we were having a little scrimmage and [head coach Vince] Lombardi stopped the play and took Urban out and put me in.

Norm Masters, playing offensive tackle, came up to the line on the next play and said, ‘Okay, you got the job; let’s see you keep it.’

“I kept it nine years.”

Aldridge was the first rookie to make a starting lineup under Lombardi, the Packers’ legendary head coach. He was consistently where the chalkboard Xs and Os said he was supposed to be.

Hall of Fame defensive end Willie Davis recalled, “Some rookies are cocky know-it-alls. Some say little and work hard. That was Lionel. He asked a lot of questions and was a quick learner. But he seemed to be under pressure.

You could see an anxiousness about him in the huddle, from his body language and expressions. Maybe it was just normal rookie jitters.

“On the field, he handled the pressure well. Other teams will run at a new guy, try to make him cautious about rushing, give him three or four different patterns to confuse and subdue him early.

A veteran will go out there knowing he’s going to be wrong and make mistakes on some plays, but he knows he’ll make them pay when he’s right.

A rookie is worried about making mistakes. Mistakes you’d pay for with Lombardi; watching him chew out a veteran on a mistake would stay with a rookie.”

Said former tackle Ron Kostelnik, “Lionel’s strength was his ability to play every play. Some players rest a little, especially after a big play. Lionel never did.”

Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke recalled, “What I remember most about him was his intensity. He was a complete player, tough against the run and a better-than-average pass rusher, a real team player and a classy guy.”

Aldridge himself says that in his rookie year he concentrated so hard on what he had to do, he didn’t hear the opposing quarterback’s signals.

“In my second year I could hear him, and by the third year I could tell when he was checking off. That’s how much more relaxed you become when you know your assignment.”

By that second year he felt like part of the team, yet a sense of insecurity persisted.

From the outset, Jerry Kramer, the great Packer guard, had been a vocal Aldridge booster, delivering pregame pep talks and shouting encouragement on the field. But once Aldridge had a good season under his belt.

Kramer’s boosterism subsided. In his book Distant Replay, Kramer describes a delayed reaction by Aldridge: “Several years later,” Kramer writes “when both our football careers were over, when Lionel was working as a broadcaster, he said to me, ‘Why’d you dump me, J. K.?’

“I said, ‘What?’

“He said, ‘Why’d you dump me? Why’d you drop me after my first year?’

“’Lionel, I didn’t dump you,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t think you needed me anymore.’”

Aldridge agrees with Kramer’s account. “In all my jobs, I had a need to be accepted and approved of. But that was then.

“Willie Davis was our leader. One day he came to me during practice and said, ‘You know, between the two of us, this team has the best pair of defensive ends in professional football.’ It was his way of saying you’re part of the group now.”

Said Davis, “Lionel was always tough against runners. By the time I said what I did to him, he had started to rush the passer.

Our philosophy was, ‘Quarterbacks, you can run but you can’t hide.’ That was my way of reaching out to him. I complimented him many times. He responded openly; you could see him beaming, inside and out.”

Among the many superb running backs of the 1960s, Aldridge rated Jim Brown and Gale Sayers as the toughest to stop. “Our attitude going in was, if we do things right we can stop them.

We had to be fundamentally sound, and play the game on the field just like it was on the chalkboard. Against the top runners you have to abandon personal style and stick to basics.

There’s no room for thinking or improvising or doing your own thing. One thing you don’t want is to be embarrassed. It was pro versus pro.

We were expected to stop them. Elusiveness is harder to stop than power. Sayers was elusive. We had to gang up on him, and we stopped him most of the time.”

Although the Packers were a close-knit team, and race relations among them were generally good, Aldridge sometimes projected an uneasiness in the locker room, says Davis.

“Players will tell you there was always something they felt was on Lionel’s mind that he never expressed. They were uncertain how to relate to him.

Lionel expressed concern to me sometimes about what was being said and felt by white players, while some of them were wondering what was going on in his mind.

They didn’t know his feelings, and were hesitant to approach him. There was a sensitivity in him – joking statements caused a ‘What’s he saying? What’s going on?’ reaction in him.”

The Packers’ world also was intensely competitive, with a new adversary to conquer every week.

“Vince Lombardi was the greatest competitor I’ve ever encountered,” Aldridge says. “He would have been a fearsome foe for anyone.

He was a warrior who practiced what he preached, and that made him believable. He was also a great teacher and had great compassion as well; he would have to turn away at times because he was overcome by his feelings.

If he had a flaw, it was the fact that he could teach stern and staunch competition, but he could not explain or reconcile his compassion, not even to himself.

“He once outlined his order of priorities to us: ‘Number one is God, number two is your family and number three is Green Bay Packer football, and that’s all you need to think about.’”

The Packers took that third priority to heart, winning the NFL championship in 1965 and history’s first two Super Bowls following the 1966 and ’67 seasons.

Aldridge enjoyed his best season in 1968. Lombardi had become the team’s general manager, and Phil Bengsten succeeded him as coach.

“The team was older, some of our stars were gone, and I felt I had to work harder.”

In terms of individual recognition, Aldridge had been overshadowed at defensive end by Willie Davis, who says today, “Lionel would have been recognized more if we were not on the same team.”

Nevertheless, by 1970 Aldridge was an established, respected veteran. It was now up to him to set an example for the team’s younger players. He took his role seriously.

“Henry Jordan used to say, ‘Show me, don’t tell me.’ Nobody was going to find me breaking curfew. When I asked a question in a meeting, I wanted to know the answer.”

In 1972 Aldridge was traded to San Diego. He realized that his playing days were numbered and his skills were waning, but that season he was credited with 48 tackles -- 35 of them unassisted, and led the team with eight sacks. 

“The Chargers were mostly a team of players traded from other teams. They called us the malcontents and misfits. We needed control to perform at our best, but we got too much freedom instead.

I knew it was time to hang it up in 1973, when it gradually got later in the week and I still ached from the previous game. When it got to be Thursday and the shoulder, hip and ankle were still aching from Sunday, that did it.”

Being traded by the Packers had felt like being disowned by one’s family. At Green Bay in the Lombardi era, a premium was placed on loyalty and togetherness.

“There is great mutual love that is very hard to express – it makes you sound sort of pansy-like – but there is great love that exists between players, and tremendous respect in that locker-room setting,” says Aldridge.

“You don’t experience anything like that at any other time in your life, and it’s that feeling – not what’s being said, but what’s felt – that makes it difficult to give up the game. You look for that fix in a lot of places, and you don’t find it.”

Aldridge had already begun an offseason career with WTMJ, a radio and television station in Milwaukee. Working as a TV color commentator and analyst on Packer games, it took him a full season to stop thinking of himself as a player. “It was so hard, I made myself physically ill that year.”

The transition from player to non-player is difficult for many, perhaps most, professional athletes; relinquishing the spotlight and accepting anonymity can be like hitting an air pocket.

At the outset, Lionel Aldridge felt his experience was a bit rougher than most, but something he should be able to handle, the way others did.

“Actually, it began before I stopped playing. During the offseason, I’d get very depressed. Whenever I started working out, getting ready for the next season, I would start to lighten up.

During the season I had no problems, but soon after it ended I’d be back down again. I blamed Milwaukee, said this is a bad town for me. But that wasn’t it.”

In addition to his job with the Milwaukee radio/TV stations, Aldridge was working as a commentator on NFL games for NBC.  He had a wife and two daughters.

During his third year with the network, he began to feel tremendous pressure. At times, his thoughts suddenly stopped and he was speechless.

He seemed unable to do what he knew he could do. Meanwhile, the pressure to continue working remained intense.

Mike McCormick, the president of WTMJ at the time, said of Aldridge, “When he was right, he was the best in the business. But it was unpredictable, whether he would be good or helplessly in a trance.”

Sometimes Aldridge didn’t know what was happening to him. Sometimes he knew but couldn’t do anything about it.

And then Lionel Aldridge did something that made him realize he had more of a problem than just giving up the game of football.

On August 31, 1977, the Milwaukee Journal published the following report: “Lionel Aldridge, 36, was taken to County General Hospitals’ psychiatric emergency ward Tuesday night after he injured the couple’s poodle outside the home of his estranged wife, Vicki, 33.

About 11:15 p.m., a neighbor reported to police that Aldridge was mistreating the dog. At least once, he picked it up and slammed it against the sidewalk. The dog was injured but not killed. Aldridge had missed his 5:15 and 6:15 radio shows.”

“When I did that,” Aldridge recalled, “it was something I thought I needed to do, because I was listening to voices.”

Aldridge knew he was in trouble, but he left the hospital after a week and returned to work. Things went badly. He took many leaves from WTMJ and had many relapses.

As a player, he never drank or used drugs of any kind, but now he was hearing voices unheard by others, and the best way to drown them out was to drug them into silence.

On a fall weekend in 1978 the Packers were in San Diego for a game against the Chargers.

The night before the game, well past midnight, Milwaukee Journal writer Dave Begel was startled by a thunderous banging on his door. “I opened it,” said Begel, “and there was Lionel, holding a bottle of Scotch and a handful of pills.

He walked through the room, out to the balcony, and sat there drinking and taking pills.

“When he said anything, it was just gibberish, like some foreign language. He wasn’t talking to me. Then he came in and sat on the bed and watched TV. I sat there and waited and waited.

“The sun was coming up when he got up and said, ‘I’m going now,’ and left. I saw him an hour before game time and he was okay and did his job. But he was obviously very disturbed.”

Aldridge hung on to his job for a while, but by 1981 he was down and out, having plummeted from the heights of the Super Bowl to the depths of the gutter.

One night on a nondescript city street, he carefully removed his three-diamond Super Bowl ring, put it in his pocket and went to sleep. The ring was the most valuable possession he owned. In the morning it was gone.

He checked himself in and out of hospitals. A suicide attempt failed. He hitch-hiked across the country, looking for work and sometimes finding it.

There was a counseling job at a Utah prison; he couldn’t handle it. Arriving after the football season started at his Alma Mater Utah State, he was given a job as an assistant coach.

It lasted only until the season ended. He continued to drift, doing odd jobs when they came his way.

His wife had divorced him and taken the children to California. That was all right with him. He wanted some distance between them and him as long as he was in this condition. He did not know how long that would be.

One day he showed up at Willie Davis’s door in California. “I didn’t know what to do,” said Davis. “I got him a place to stay and a few things he needed. But he checked out right away and disappeared again.”

Along his meandering way, Aldridge tried various medications and therapists. Any benefits were always short-lived. “One of the things that exist in a low state of mind is competition. If there’s one thing I know, it’s competition.

I was trained in it by the best. I was competing on every play in football. We were told, ‘Play this game for as long as you can, because this game mirrors life.’ And I bought that, one hundred percent.

So, I came off the field still playing football in my daily life. I’m 47 years old now. I’ve wasted a lot of time.”

“Now I know that anything adversarial is an undesirable state of mind for me.  I’m not completely out of it yet; it takes time.

“Another thing that lives in a low state of mind is prejudice – prejudice held by me, not against me. Each of us lives in a separate reality. I can’t impose mine on you.

Just to know that prejudice exists in a low state of mind was a load off my back. I don’t have to live that way. I can control my own thoughts.

I lived in Milwaukee when I thought this was one of the most prejudiced places I had ever been. I don’t find a lot of prejudice here now, and I believe it’s because my belief system has changed.”

He kept fighting. The best therapy seemed to be keeping busy and never giving up. During his stays in hospitals, he would prolong the most routine chores, just to fill the void of time.

He brushed his teeth several times a day, made pots and keychains and baskets – anything he could put his unsteady mind to and keep it there.  

Eventually he returned to Milwaukee and landed a job with the post office. He also worked part-time for a radio station and at a psychiatric hospital.

When he wasn’t working, he read and otherwise learned all he could about schizophrenia and its devastating effects. He worked hard to get better. In time, he did.

“What was really important to me was that medical people cared about me, that they somehow communicated to me that they care. They really are our link with reality. They are in a better position to reach us than anyone else, and if they are callous and uncaring, then that doesn’t give us much hope.

When there is something lacking, it is usually caring, somehow conveying to the patient that they believe this patient can recover. 

“I’ve been lucky to have doctors who cared for me, who wanted me to get well and who got this message across to me in their manner. Everything about them said to me, ‘I want you to get well.’ But what I’ve done has been completely on my own.

“I used to walk along on the sidewalk and look at the grass and think, ‘The grass can’t help me,’ or, after a rain, ‘The mud can’t help me.’ I would see people laughing and enjoying themselves, and I would think, ‘God, if I could only laugh again.’

But there was a little hope I could feel in my chest that was saying, ‘You’re gonna laugh again. It’s gonna happen.’

“It did happen. I can laugh again.’”

In 1988 he was pursuing a college degree in sociology and enjoyed speaking before mental health groups. His messages: 

For physicians in general and psychiatrists in particular: “Caring and hope are what we need most from you.”

For family and friends of the mentally ill: “Show us you believe in us. Don’t be well-meaning. Don’t lay guilt on us.”

For the nation’s 2.5 million schizophrenics: “There’s a lot you have to do for yourself that doctors and drugs can’t do for you.”

He was a grandfather. His two daughters and a granddaughter lived nearby and he saw them often.

“They need somebody who is functioning, somebody they can look up to and say, ‘Yeah, my dad was sick, but he overcame it.”

The Return of the Ring

In 1984 the Green Bay Packers held a reunion of the 1967 team that had won the first Super Bowl. Lionel Aldridge was not there.

Sportscaster Dick Schaap produced a video of the reunion, on which the book Distant Replay, co-written by Schaap and former Packer guard Jerry Kramer, was based.

When Schaap learned that Aldridge while sleeping on a city street, had lost his Super Bowl ring, he vowed that the first profits the video earned would go to replace the lost ring.

In the meantime, Aldridge had set his own goal of replacing the treasured memento, and he finally did.

“It took us until 1988 to show a profit on the video,” said Schaap. “In April we sent him a check for $6.000.”

Lionel Aldridge died in his apartment on February 12, 1998, probably of congestive heart failure, at age 56. He weighed 408 pounds.