Best Pittsburgh Steeler of all time: “Mean Joe” Greene - Part 1
Out of all the players in the history of the Pittsburgh Steelers, if you had to pick just one that showed just how great this franchise was, the player to choose would be defensive tackle Charles Edward Greene, more popularly known as “Mean Joe” Greene.
When you talk about the Steelers, the first person that comes to mind is Greene since it would be incredibly difficult to find a Steeler that you could place ahead of him as the greatest of all time.
He was an unbelievable force to be reckoned with and just took the game of football by storm. The name of the game was greatness and Mean Joe was the star player. After all, that’s why he was chosen by Coca-Cola for their “Coke and a smile” commercial in
1979. The guy just didn’t smile much unless he just took you down to the ground in the most painful manner possible.
In 1969, head coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers Chuck Noll’s very first draft choice was a little-known, small-town college defensive lineman named Joe Green. He is the number one Steeler for one reason. Before he came to Pittsburgh, there was no such thing
as the franchise’s infamous “Steel Curtain.” People tend to forget what a terrible franchise the Steelers were before Greene came to town. Mean Joe brought the Steelers the thing that they had never really had: toughness.
Although these days it seems as though the Steelers had always had an incredibly solid defense, it wasn’t always so. Since the Steelers team was commissioned in 1933, they had never gotten farther than the Divisional Playoffs, but with Mean Joe, all of that
was going to change.
He changed the personality of the team and with Greene in there the Steelers started building around him and had an identity for the first time ever. To opposing quarter-backs, he was the twilight of their career. To the Steelers, he was the dawn of a new
era.
No one else in the entire National Football League was more deserving of the moniker “mean” than Greene. However, Greene said himself in an interview in 1982 to “Just remember Joe as a good football player and not really mean.” But boy was this guy mean.
Well, mean is one thing and nasty is something a lot worse. And Greene was nasty.
He just played the game with a vengeance in the area that he was responsible for. If you were holding him, he didn’t complain to the referees like today’s defensive lineman. He punched you in an area where it really, really hurts. Mean Joe would send his
message to players he didn’t like by simply kicking the guy in the groin. Greene acknowledged that “Those offensive linemen didn’t like me a whole lot.”
There is probably a former Cleveland Browns’ lineman out there somewhere that has a permanent imprint of Mean Joe’s fist in their nether regions, but this guy just didn’t care.
The remaining article will be discussed in the second and third part of this series. Take a look!
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own and in no way represent Bettor.com's official editorial policy.
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