Ernie Holmes
(1972-77)
Myron Cope wrote this about the 1976 game when Joe "Turkey" Jones spiked Terry Bradshaw into the turf at Cleveland Stadium: "Afterward, at the Cleveland Airport, an ambulance carried Bradshaw onto the tarmac where all of us in the traveling party stood waiting for Terry to be transferred to the team's plane. He had been strapped to a so-called spine board, on which he lay as medics removed him from the ambulance. 'Let me have him,' Fats told them. He wrapped his mighty arms under the spine board, arched his broad back and alone lifted the big quarterback up the stairway into the plane. On instructions from team doctors, he gently carried Terry the length of the aisle to the plane's farthermost reaches where the arms of seats had been retracted to create a makeshift bed. Years later, when Fats Holmes returned to Pittsburgh for that 25th anniversary of the Steelers' first championship team, he told his teammates he loved them. He meant it." Ernie "Fats" Holmes was an original member of the Steel Curtain and finished his six-year career with 40 sacks, still eighth on the team's all-time list. He had 11.5 sacks in 1974, including a stretch of six consecutive games with a sack, which ties him with Joe Greene and Greg Lloyd for the longest such streak in team history.
