“He said, ‘Lawrence, are you sure?’ ” Hunt recalls. “I said, ‘Absolutely, pops. If they’re not gonna pay me what I think I’m worth, there’s no reason to stay.’ ”

Upon his return home, Hunt floundered. Back at Iowa State — where Johnny Majors had a pretty good coaching staff featuring Jackie Sherrill and Jimmy Johnson — Hunt earned his “Big Daddy” nickname with 334 career tackles.

Who was he without football?

“I didn’t know how hard it would be,” Hunt says. “I was always that name — Big Daddy — with a number on my back. I wasn’t sure what to do. I checked into a local counseling group and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I don’t feel like myself.’ ”

The crisis didn’t last. Hunt, 72, went on to a successful career in business and ultimately in service of others. He was a child-abuse investigator and still works with at-risk youth in his small Florida town an hour from Tampa. He’d grown up a Florida kid and vowed to return to help make it a better place.

It’s kind of a Moonlight Graham story — an aspiring athlete who misses his big chance but helps society in much more significant ways. One look at a photo of a beaming Hunt posing with his grandchildren tells you he doesn’t spend much time thinking about what might have been.

But he does spend some. He could have been part of the Steel Curtain.

“You can’t help but look at it and ask yourself, would I have measured up to those guys? Was I good enough, fast enough and strong enough? That’s a question I’ll never, ever be able to answer — but life has worked out pretty good for me.”

‘I never quit’

Fans kept mistaking him for Terry Bradshaw. Hugh Lickiss didn’t mind. A long-shot, blonde-haired linebacker from tiny Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, he just wanted to stick around — and that idea was suddenly in grave doubt as Chuck Noll yelled in his face with Franco Harris lying on the ground.

...continued

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.