Formidable Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Chad Brown talks about the one Steelers legend even Bill Cowher feared: linebacker Greg Lloyd.
These days, the Steelers linebacker room of the 1990s remains close-knit, with Chad Brown snapping a photo with Levon Kirkland and Greg Lloyd back in May.
At the time, Brown said that the best thing about football is “brotherhood”, and in recent interview with FanSided’s Stacking The Box podcast, Brown revealed that Greg Lloyd was definitely the intimidating older brother of the group.
Knowing that Lloyd was quite the character back in ’90s, FanSided’s Matt Verderame asked Brown to indulge them with a few choice Greg Lloyd anecdotes.
“How much time do we have?” Brown joked.
Brown then told three stories about the infamous linebacker, starting with the fact that he used his tae kwon do skills to jokingly terrorize his teammates.
“At the beginning of training camp, Greg Lloyd would bring some of his tae kwon do paraphernalia with him, and one of them was a long staff. There wasn’t a lot of room in the dorm room for Greg to practice, so he would go up to the parking lot where the players parked and he would practice with his bo staff — he would do all the stuff. And when you parked your car coming back from lunch or running a quick errand, and Greg was there with his bo staff, you literally had to walk the other way around the dorm because he would want to practice on you. And you couldn’t tell Greg ‘no’ because he was the baddest man in football.
So he’s intimidating people — professional athletes, the toughest of the tough — and making them walk all the way around the other way of the dorm just to avoid him.”
Chad Brown dishes on the best Greg Lloyd stories from 1990s Steelers squad
But Lloyd’s tae know do shenanigans weren’t always so innocent. One practice, when Kirkland mentioned that his wrist was hurting, Lloyd shocked him by karate-chopping his arm. The impact broke his bone, and Kirkland was sidelined with a cast for the next 14 months.
Then, Brown revealed the “topper” when it came to stories in the Greg Lloyd vault.
“We had special teams practice before every practice, so Levon and I, being the younger guys, are out at practice doing our special teams duties. Kevin and Greg, they didn’t have any special teams responsibilities, they would go out there and kind of play around and laugh and joke around. Well, the JUGS machine is right where Greg and Kevin are laughing, and Bill Cowher is coming out of the locker room, and it was the old Three Rivers Stadium where we practiced, so it’s essentially kind of coming out of the baseball dugouts, as it were. So they take the JUGS machine and they fire a football at hit Bill Cowher in the groin with a football from a JUGS machine from about 50 yards away.
Bill Cowher’s clearly got a temper, and we’ve seen Bill Cowher’s jaw and all the NFL Films clips of him getting in somebody’s face and going all full bull Bill Cowher on them…Bill Cowher takes a knee, because he just got hit in the groin, he takes a knee, and he gets up and sees that it’s Greg, and then he has to go, ‘Okay, man, that’s funny, that’s a good one.’ Even Bill Cower was afraid to confront Greg Lloyd.”
Even though these three pillars in the Steelers brotherhood are all smiles these days, Chad Brown makes it known that everyone feared Greg Lloyd — teammates and opponents alike.