Green Bay Packers: Who wore #82 best?

#82 … remembering Lionel Aldridge

At #82, we take a look at Lionel Aldridge, a talented player whose tragic story of mental illness you may or may not know.

Maxymuk points out that Paul Coffman was a Packers Hall-of-Famer who was “probably the best receiving tight end in Packers’ history. He was always open when fellow Kansas State alumnus Lynn Dickey was in trouble and caught 322 passes, including 39 scores. He went into the Packers Hall of Fame in 1994.”

But it was Aldridge that is our focus today. He played nine years in Green Bay after being drafted in the fourth round of the 1963 draft. He was drafted as an offensive guard, but it didn’t take long for Vince Lombardi to switch him to the defensive side of the ball.

Here is what Maxymuk said about Aldridge:

"Many had to overcome financial setbacks and physical ailments, but Lionel Aldridge accomplished much more than any of his teammates. Aldridge cam back from the snake pit of mental illness; he drove off the demons that had overrun his mind. … By opening day (1963) he was the starting right defensive end, replacing Bill Quinlan who had been traded to the Giants. Aldridge was a rare individual, a rookie starting on a Lombardi team; Vince preferred that rookies sit for a year and learn their positions and profession. Besides Aldridge, only Boyd Dowler and Ken Bowman won starting jobs in their first years during Lombardi’s rule. Lionel was fast, strong, and an able pass-rusher. He was known as the “Big Train” and would start for Green Bay for the next nine years, until Dan Devine traded him to San Diego for Jim Hill, who would turn out to be a key player for the 1972 playoff run. Even when he broke his leg in 1967 training camp, Lionel had the cast off in two weeks and was back on the field for the third game of the year. He retired in 1973 and with his rich baritone voice and articulate manner went right into broadcasting. He was an immediate success in his new field, doing sports reports on television, then serving as Jim Irwin‘s analyst for Packers games, and even working for NBC on network games. However, that would all change rapidly. After his initial success in broadcasting in 1974, Aldridge began to hear voices in his head saying that he was failing as a husband and a father and that he didn’t deserve his professional success. He thought that people watching him on television could see inside him and that they were out to destroy him. His work began to suffer. Jim Irwin remembers a broadcast when Lionel stared at the 50-yard line the whole game and did not say a word. He began to be hospitalized periodically for his worsening mental problems. Some reports say that he failed to take his medication, but Aldridge himself also reported that one of the problems of the medication was that it would make him feel so good that he felt he could stop taking it because he was no longer sick. Willie Davis‘s Los Angeles office one day asking for $3. Willie gave him $300 and got him a hotel room, but Lionel quickly vanished again. After two years of wandering the nation homeless, he urned up at a Milwaukee rescue mission in 1983 and at last got on a regular and appropriate medication program. He began working at the Milwaukee Post Office and took up public speaking on behalf of the mentally ill and homeless. Aldridge was quoted as saying, “For so many years, I had so many sounds in my head. I love to sit there. The only things I hear are the external. The cars on the street, dogs, people.” He died in 1997 at the age of 56 of congestive heart failure and weighed over 400 pounds by then. Outside the easily charted, win-or-lose atmosphere of professional sports, each person measures success differently. Each person must achieve his own triumph … Lionel Aldridge achieved a major triumph in life by coming to a certain peace and being able to say, “Every day I am OK is a miracle. I worry about my kids. But nothing makes me mad.”"

The following are Aldridge’s career statistics as provided by Pro Football Reference:

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Here are the players who have worn #82