Dear Mr. Jack Lambert,
As I type this thank-you note, I’m sitting 4 feet away from your No. 58 Pittsburgh Steelers jersey, which my 18-year-old son mounted on my office wall last night.
By the time I got it framed in a shadow box, it probably weighed 30 pounds, and I needed a real carpenter with a stud finder and a drill to mount and level it.
I still can’t believe that you sent me this. But there it is, with your Sharpie signature and the words, “For Mark Kennedy, A Hall of Fame Writer.” Of course, you are the real Hall of Famer, Mr. Lambert — a consensus top 40 player in NFL history — not me, an everyday newspaper guy in a small media market in Tennessee.
To properly thank you, I need to tell you a story.
On the day your jersey arrived at my workplace, I was in the ICU at a local hospital with my wife, who was dying from complications of a brain aneurysm. Your gift was a ray of sunshine on a particularly grim day. Someone at my work office called my mobile phone to tell me that an important-looking gift had been placed on my desk, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was.
Happy for a mental diversion, my mind tried to guess what the gift might be. I first thought it might be some sort of community gift from coworkers. Then for some utterly bizarre reason the words “Hall of Fame” popped into my head. Imagine my surprise, hours later, when I discovered your gift with the Hall of Fame reference.
I should tell you that during this hard time for my family, I had about six similarly astounding coincidences that have no easy explanation: like a young friend who emerged who is about the same age as our oldest son and has the name we had picked out for him had he been a girl; and the family members who mysteriously changed vehicles due to a battery malfunction, a switch to a tall truck that might have saved their lives during a 500-year flood event here.
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I came to believe that there is something about the twilight of a loved one’s life that puts us into a spiritual realm where we begin to see the interconnectedness of life. I think the great revelation of heaven will be the realization that every event on Earth is connected, like a huge ball of string.
Mr. Lambert, this might be presumptuous, but I believe you sent me that jersey as part of an unseen plan.
I was 16 when the Steelers won their first Super Bowl in 1974, and you would have been maybe 22 years old. I latched onto the Steelers that year and have been a die-hard fan ever since. You were my favorite player because you represented ferocity and strength, two qualities I never had as a young man.
But I was, and still am, a competitor. Every time you broke through the offensive line and obliterated a quarterback or a running back, I pounded the couch as if my body, too, had absorbed part of the hit. After four Super Bowl victories in six years, I was all-in for life as a Steelers fan.
Again pardon my brazenness, but I believe I received your jersey as a reminder that sometimes we draw strength from other people. I have needed a bold heart since my wife passed away, and now every time I look at your jersey on the wall, I feel Steel-Curtain strong. I feel like you and Joe Greene and Mel Blount and Jack Ham and all the other defenders who embodied that glorious Pittsburgh dynasty.
I also admired the way you ultimately walked away from the NFL limelight and seem to have lived a more-or-less quiet, noble life. To me that requires a different kind of strength and confidence.
We will probably never meet in person, Mr. Lambert, but I just wanted to let you know that your example on the football field 50 years ago still resonates with some of us fans through the decades — and more importantly, feeds us strength.
And that, more than stats and yellow Hall of Fame jackets, is the real measure of a man.
Your grateful friend from Tennessee,
Mark Kennedy
Family Life is published on Sundays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.