The Curtain

Like Katharine Hepburn, Charles Edward (Mean Joe) Greene refuses to sign autographs. Like Bruce Lee, he kicks people. Like Winston Churchill, he cries. "I never had a desire to hurt anybody," Greene says. "I have at certain times had violent urges, but I don't think I ever have hurt anybody. Tried to a couple times, but I don't think I have. Yeah, guess I have. In high school. I was dirty then. Kick 'em. I might not've hurt 'em, though, they might've just been afraid of me.

"I do play football no holds barred. Any edge I can get, I'll take. I'd grab a face mask only in a fit of anger. Uncontrolled anger is damn near insane."

Greene once shattered three or four of Cleveland guard Bob DeMarco's teeth, and they were big teeth way back deep in the jaw. Once, Greene admits, be tried to twist the head off a fellow professional who was holding him. Yet people who spend time with him are proud to say that Joe Greene is a nice, warm, thoughtful, sensitive man--is it because deep down inside they are so relieved that he is not going to twist their heads off?

Certainly there are other men who are nice and don't get the credit for it that Greene does. He's famous; that's part of it: He's the great defensive tackle and volatile cornerstone of the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers. And he has such bearing. His expression--which can be affable, droll, quirky, smoldering--tends to settle into a basic grave. He can look as grave as James Mason, but stronger, of course. His head may be as big as James Mason's chest. Art Rooney Jr. says that Greene is the only man in whose mouth one of Steelers patriarch Art Rooney's huge billy-club cigars looks normal.

No one would take Greene for a sweet/terrifying child of nature. Greene has this discerning look. When Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw tells a joke to the team, one observer notes, he looks to Greene to see if it has gone over. If it's a good joke, it probably has. With teammates or friends, though not with fans, Greene is usually comfortable to be around. He doesn't dominate a table.

But there is that big head. And hands the size of shovel blades. And there is a molten quality about Greene's limbs. He is jointed oddly and moves at once more smoothly and more floppily than other strong big men. His physical presence suggests, perhaps, that he could shift--flick--any loglike portion of himself in any direction at any moment. His college coach called him "a fort on foot." And sometimes, on the field, he goes damn near insane.

Wearing a loose T-shirt and a swimsuit, Greene sits back in a soft chair in his comfortable home in a suburb south of Dallas with his two-year-old daughter, Jo Quel, drowsing on his chest. He has an air of profoundly edgy repose. He muses, "I'm always nervous, like I got to do something, something other than what I'm doing. I don't know what it is. Except playing. When you get into that game, you haven't got time to think about what you ought to be doing. That game, that's it. I feel I've got some helluva games in me. I'm just waiting for 'em to come. That's what I keep pushing for--waiting."

Lord preserve our sense of reality if whatever consummation Greene awaits comes to him. The ground may open, and he will descend to a place more intense, where he can chase Beelzebub around, kicking at him, or a chariot may come down and bear Greene off to a better place where he can make all the tackles and also run back punts. As it is, Greene has led his team to the NFL mountaintop and has had transcendent individual moments on the field. Once he threw the other team's ball away. Once he spit on Dick Butkus in front of everybody. Once he rushed the quarterback, stole the ball from him, rumbled into the end zone with it, tossed it over his head, caught it behind his back and handed it to a cheerleader.

Greene is more than mighty, wily, fierce and quick. He is a man so daringly self-defined and outrageously responsible that it is said of him, as of very few other sports figures, "He does what he wants to out there." He plays--or, sometimes, refuses to play--the conservative, regimented, technology-ridden game of pro football as if it were a combat poem he is writing, and gets away with it; yet he fits himself well enough into the system to be the warmly accepted spearhead and bulwark of a winning organization.

Greene loves football. He quit it the first time he went out for it and was still threatening to quit it for good as late as last season. If his gifts had not been so extraordinary, he would never have gone so far in his militaristic profession, for he has never taken to what is generally considered discipline; he tended to run amok in high school ball, and when an older group of Steelers scouts, now departed, watched him play for North Texas State, they deplored his attitude. "Puts on weight, tendency to loaf," said one. "Physically this boy has all of it," said another. "Mentally he is disappointing in that he only uses his ability in spurts. Will need a heavy hand, but he can play." Where anybody was going to find a hand heavy enough, the scout did not say.