Life has a top rope and also a turnbuckle. Kevin Greene loved the one, didn’t care about the other.
He sacked more NFL quarterbacks than any linebacker in NFL history, and was third overall to Bruce Smith and Reggie White.
“I love to check out the No. 2s,” he said, meaning the backup quarterbacks who were forced to put down the clipboard after Greene had disabled the No. 1s.
The loudest place in any stadium was the place next to Greene.
“He was intense, but it was a ‘fun’ intense,” said Michael Stewart, the Rams’ safety in those days. “He was yelling, ‘Give me one more second! Give me a little more time on the back end!’ When we did that, he would cause some havoc. He was Hulk Hogan to me.”
Greene eventually went to the actual top rope and became a fairly big name in professional wrestling. Ric Flair befriended him in Charlotte. On the NFL Network’s “A Football Life” documentary, Flair said Greene was always asking for another move.
“He said he wanted to do a suplex,” Flair said, laughing, “and I’d say, well, we really haven’t rehearsed it.”
But when Greene died Monday at 58, you inevitably thought of the turnbuckle, which doesn’t bend to your bull-rush. Automatically you brace for the sad details, even with no reports of dementia.
“He was a ramrod,” said Jackie Slater, who squared off with Greene at every Rams practice, two Hall of Famers lifting each other. “He had no trouble getting up on his hind legs and lowering his head like the big rams do.”
Not long ago Greene sent Slater a video of his son Gavin, a pass rusher for Mississippi College. Slater told Greene that Gavin, on technique alone, will beat a lot of offensive tackles.
“It was one of those moments where I realized the respect we had,” Slater said. “I literally mean it when I say when we shed some blood and tears in that relationship. It’s like losing a family member.”
Greene had 160 sacks. He had 33 in 1988-89. When he was 37 he had 12 for Carolina.
“Eventually we told him just to get the quarterback,” former Rams coach John Robinson said Monday, “and, boy, he did that.”
At Auburn, Greene was a 180-pound walk-on who quit when he was asked to punt. It was more fun, he said, to play intramural ball “and jack up the frat boys.” He returned as a junior. The next season he led the SEC in sacks and was the conference’s Player of the Year.
“He would have hurt all of us inside linebackers if they hadn’t moved him outside,” recalled Dr. Gregg Carr, an All-American teammate. “By the end, he just overwhelmed people.”
That led him to the Rams and, eventually, those daily wars with Slater.
“He could go from speed to power better than anybody,” Slater said. “He learned to use his speed to the edge and then spin outside, and after that, he learned to get outside and rip. He’d experiment. It was intense. But we made each other better.
“If you ever beat him, he took it hard. He learned that on every play, there’s no in-between.”
“You’re kicking somebody’s ass or you’re getting your ass kicked,” Greene would say.
Stewart remembered the defense calling itself “The Lunchpail Crew,” remembered Greene yelling, “I’m gonna get you!” at Joe Montana and then sacking him three times in the first quarter.
“The strike year was 1987 and we’d be picketing and having fun with the replacements,” Stewart said. “Kevin told them, ‘You better win, that’s all.’ We’d scream at each other in the weight room. We’d try to beat each other to the returner on special teams. He was an inspiration.”
Eventually, he went to Pittsburgh, teamed with Greg Lloyd on bilateral quarterback raids, got to a Super Bowl, and identified with the Steelers until the end.
“He was a showman, an entertainer,” Carr said.
Greene also was a rapt student. He did all of his hell-raising in uniform, or in the weight room. When it was over he became Green Bay’s linebackers coach.
“I wanted to take all the gray area out of it, and clarify it,” he said, and he found a kindred, shaggy, pupil in USC’s Clay Matthews, who became the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year. Together they helped beat the Steelers in Super Bowl 45. In 2016 Greene became a Hall of Famer.
“I saw him a while ago at Auburn and he looked like he could still play,” Carr said. The anxiety remains until we learn the cause of death, but what Greene showed us was a life with a cause.
