Bears HOF Left Tackle; Jimbo Covert

[soulman]

 

Bears great Jimbo Covert’s Hall of Fame career forged from steel country determination

By Dan Pompei Jul 30, 2021 17

It’s about an hour and 45 minutes from a modest house on Catherine Drive in Conway, Pa., to 2121 George Halas Drive NW in Canton, Ohio.

It seemed like it took forever for Jimbo Covert to make it there.

When he reflects on the journey to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he thinks of the people. Those he encountered along the way were the mile markers of his six-decade trip.

“In every stage of your life, you meet people who have a big influence on you,” says Covert, who is being inducted to the hall next Saturday as part of the centennial class. “It’s what makes you as a person and also makes you the type of player and competitor you are.”

The first stage of his life played out in the borough of Conway, a river town in the heart of steel country. Jimbo’s grandfather John Covert worked at Armco Steel for 44 years. His father, also John Covert, worked there for 34 years before the mill closed. His uncles worked there too, and so did his brother, whose name is John Covert as well. Jimbo saw the conveyor belt of kids going from grammar school to high school to Armco. It was, young Jimbo figured, his destiny to work there too.

A family of six required sacrifice, so Armco wasn’t the only place Jimbo’s dad worked. After he finished his eight-hour shift, he came home, showered, changed, and delivered couches and dressers for Sears for another eight hours. Jimbo’s mother Patricia Covert, meanwhile, put in her time at JCPenney, where the employee discount — cost plus 10 percent — meant everything worn by Jimbo, his brother, and sisters Deborah and Elaine came from Penney’s.

One July day, Jimbo’s dad took him to work with him at Armco. As oppressively hot as it was outside, it was much worse inside, where the blazing orange from the blast furnaces made it seem like some sort of netherworld.

“You never want to come here,” John told his son. “Ever.”

But where else could he go? Most of the neighborhood kids who didn’t get jobs at the mill went to work at Conway Yard, the largest freight yard in the world at the time. A few joined the military.

John told Jimbo something else. And he repeated it from time to time. “If you work hard and dedicate yourself, good things will happen,” he would say.

 

Jimbo Covert during the NFL Honors awards presentation in 2020 after being named a new Hall of Fame inductee. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)

One kid from the neighborhood didn’t go to work at the mill, or the railroad, or join the military. J.D. Haglan, five years older than Jimbo, was the best football player around, the quarterback who could do it all. The neighborhood kids played football in Jimbo’s side yard, and whenever Jimbo wasn’t picked to play on Haglan’s team, he cried. Haglan became what Jimbo thought was the greatest quarterback in Freedom High School history, and he drew scholarship offers from schools across the country. He played at Clemson.

Haglan was the only athlete from the area that Jimbo knew of who received an athletic scholarship.

“I always had dreams of playing at the next level, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence that said that was going to happen,” Jimbo says. “J.D. had a huge influence on me. I said, ‘If he could make it out, I could make it out. I don’t have to go to the mill.'”

Like every kid in the neighborhood, Jimbo was a Steelers fan, and his hero was Joe Greene. His dad took Jimbo and his brother to Steelers training camp at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., where they carried the players’ helmets. When Jimbo went to Freedom High School, he wore No. 75 as Greene did, and he played the same position, defensive line.

In Jimbo’s first couple of high school years, his coach was a yeller, practices were drudgery and the team struggled. But when he was a junior, Freedom hired Chuck Lucidore as head coach. Lucidore made preparation enjoyable. He had players compete in drills. Conditioning was gameplay. His comical sayings lightened up practices. Lucidore made every team member feel valuable — he had an encouraging word for every player every day. The team turned around under Lucidore, going 10-0 in Jimbo’s senior season.

 

The Covert brothers on the Conway Raiders: John (8) and Jimbo (10). (Courtesy of Covert family)

It was Lucidore who reminded Jimbo how much he loved the game, and it was Lucidore who showed him he could make it out like Haglan — with a scholarship to play defensive line at Pitt.

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Jimbo redshirted his first year at Pitt. He tore his rotator cuff as a junior in high school, but he never told anyone he was injured because he thought it might cost him a chance to get a scholarship.

On the day Jimbo moved from the defensive line to the offensive line the following year, Joe Moore, a storied high school coach who was in his first year coaching Pitt’s offensive linemen, pulled him aside.

“You will be an All-American one day,” he told Jimbo. And then Moore helped Jimbo make his prophecy come true.

There was an area in Pitt Stadium they called “the hole” where offensive linemen practiced. Moore made Jimbo and his offensive line teammates, including Russ Grimm and Mark May, run the mirror/dodge drill for hours, until their legs shook. He instructed them to do one-on-one pass-protection drills live, without helmets, to teach them to keep their heads out of the block. He valued leverage above all and insisted his blockers keep their helmets and shoulder pads lower than the player across the line of scrimmage.

When Jimbo got to the Bears, he missed Moore’s individual technique drills. So he stayed on the field after practice in training camp for another 20 minutes or so doing pass sets over and over, or sliding down the line back and forth, just like Moore taught him.

Jimbo was called for holding only 12 times in 111 games in the NFL. The reason, he believes, is he always used the pass-protection technique Moore taught him — hands inside, elbows in.

“He meant everything to me,” Jimbo said of Moore. “He was the reason I was a first-round draft pick, the reason I did what I did with the Bears, and the reason I got in the Hall of Fame. He put that foundation there.”

Two other acquaintances Jimbo made in college still are impacting him today. During Jimbo’s first game at offensive tackle, a freshman quarterback came off the bench. His first pass was an interception. His second pass was a near-interception. His third pass was a touchdown. “He had such tremendous confidence,” Jimbo says of Dan Marino. “It was so impressive to me.”

Marino’s confidence made Jimbo understand the importance of believing in himself. And it made him more confident. Marino and Jimbo became lifelong friends, and remain neighbors in South Florida.

 

Mike Ditka and Dan Marino were among the former Pittsburgh Panthers players joining Jimbo Covert during a ceremony to retire Covert’s jersey in 2015. (Jared Wickerham / Getty Images)

A strawberry blonde cheerleader at Pitt wasn’t much impressed with Jimbo when he was dating a friend of hers. But she came around about a year later. Shortly after Jimbo was chosen by the Bears with the sixth pick in the 1983 draft, Penny Campbell became Penny Covert. She has grounded him ever since, through surgeries, a Super Bowl, births and deaths, and much more. “She is the glue that keeps it all together,” he says.

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When Jimbo arrived at Halas Hall for the first time and made the acquaintance of Mike Ditka, the coach left no doubt about what would be expected of him. “Welcome, kid,” Ditka told him. “I have a position for you to play. It’s left tackle. That’s where you are going to start.”

And so, at minicamp days later, Jimbo was the starting left tackle. Never mind that he didn’t know the plays.

In his first summer with the team, no one looked at Jimbo and thought, “Hall of Fame.” Every system he had played in previously had odd numbers on the left and even numbers on the right. The Bears offense, a derivative of what Tom Landry ran in Dallas, had it reversed. “I went the wrong way for like the first three weeks,” Jimbo says. “The system really threw me for a loop.”

Jimbo’s performances in his first three games were uneven, but Ditka cut him some slack. In Jimbo’s fourth game against the Baltimore Colts at Memorial Stadium, his father, mother, brother, sister, uncle and aunt watched him play in person for the first time as a pro.

It did not go as he hoped. He missed assignments, gave up sacks, and was pulled from the game by Ditka.

“He cussed me up and down,” Jimbo says. “Some of the words I had never even heard before. The stands in that stadium are right by the field, and my parents heard it all. Then he cussed me out in the tunnel going into the locker room. Then he cussed me out in front of the team.”

Ditka was so enraged during his postgame speech he punched a metal trunk, breaking his hand. Ditka challenged Jimbo the following week in practice to get his act together and told him he needed to prove something to him. Jimbo performed so well in his next game against the Broncos that Ditka gave him a game ball. And to Jimbo’s recollection, he never missed another assignment in his career.

As Jimbo was becoming a steady and domineering blocker, he also was establishing himself as a leader. In a preseason game his rookie season against the Raiders, veteran Lyle Alzado grabbed Jimbo’s facemask after a couple of plays. After another play came a shot under the chin. With one mighty swing, Jimbo let it be known that the Bears offense would no longer be taking punishment — it would be delivering it.

He had to send a similar message at Halas Hall, where the Bears defense long had bullied the offense. Jimbo endeared himself to Ditka not only because he executed his assignments, but also because he helped change the offensive identity by adding an element of toughness. Ditka usually opened training camp practices with an Oklahoma drill. If Jimbo ever lost one, no one can recall it.

 

Jimbo Covert, left, with Mike Ditka and Covert’s brother John at a party after Super Bowl XX. (Courtesy of Covert family)

During one practice, defensive tackle Steve McMichael, as tough as anyone who ever wore a jockstrap, gave Jimbo a little extra after a whistle. Jimbo grabbed McMichael, lifted him in the air, slammed him to the ground, and pinned him there.

In his second NFL season, Jimbo, on a team full of leaders, was voted a captain by his teammates.

Jimbo believes he became a better player because he practiced against McMichael, Dan Hampton and Richard Dent.

He took more reps against Dent than anyone. They came to the Bears together as rookies in 1983. They were assigned to dorm rooms at Lake Forest college without air conditioning in their first training camp. Jimbo, Dent and the other rookies subsequently brought their pillows and blankets to the cramped rookie locker room in the basement of Halas Hall and slept head-to-toe for the length of the space.

And then they went out to practice. “I needed to be a better pass protector,” Jimbo says. “Richard had one of the best first steps of any defensive end in history. If you didn’t have a good pass set, you were beat. The battles we had in practice were better than I was going to see in the game.”

Dent was one of many Bears teammates who helped make Jimbo what he was. Jimbo always was as tough as anyone, but he was inspired by the toughness in Walter Payton.

“I was blocking for him once and he got tangled up and the whole pile went down right on his ankle,” Jimbo says. “I heard the sound it made. I thought he broke his ankle. He got up, walked to the sideline, and didn’t miss a play. He didn’t project himself as being a tough guy, but that was a tough guy.”

Jimbo was similarly inspired by quarterback Jim McMahon, of all people. McMahon missed many games with injuries, and his toughness was questioned by some. But not by Jimbo.

“When you saw Joe Montana with someone was coming towards him, he’d hit the deck and live to fight another day,” Jimbo says. “He’d take the sack. Mac was like, ‘I can beat him to the sidelines,’ or ‘I could split these guys.’ That’s when he got hurt. He was a tough guy, just couldn’t stay healthy.”

No Bear was closer to Jimbo than fullback Matt Suhey. They were roommates for six years, and Jimbo chose Suhey to present him for induction to the Hall of Fame. Suhey, a successful business person even as a player, counseled Jimbo on preparing himself for the phase of his life that would come after football. Jimbo suffered a back injury in 1988 that ultimately cut his career short and made his wait for the Hall of Fame long. He retired after just eight seasons, but thanks in part to Suhey’s guidance, he was ready for what was next. He has worked for nearly 30 years as a healthcare executive and is an operating partner for Cressey & Co. Private Equity.

 

Jimbo Covert paves the way for Matt Suhey during a game against the Buccaneers in 1984. (Chuck Solomon /  Associated Press)

Jimbo credits his fellow starting offensive linemen Mark Bortz, Jay Hilgenberg, Tom Thayer and Keith Van Horne with allowing him to concentrate on his assignments because he was confident that they would handle theirs. The Bears offensive line of the 1980s arguably is one of the best in modern NFL history, as the team went from 18th in the league in rushing to No. 1 for four consecutive seasons once the line came together. The line also helped the Bears finish second in rushing twice and third once – all three times were after the retirement of Payton.

One of the reasons they clicked is the way individuals complemented one another. Jimbo recalls Hilgenberg making an on-field suggestion during the Bears’ victory over the Giants in the 1985 playoffs to facilitate a sweep against a particular front. “Come down and hit the nose guard and I’ll pull,” Hilgenberg said. The Bears did it three or four times with success. “We freelanced and it worked,” Jimbo says. “Hilgy was great at that. He was such a great player, and he deserves recognition from the Hall of Fame also.”

The blockers’ position coach, **** Stanfel, also has Jimbo’s eternal gratitude. Stanfel was a Hall of Fame offensive lineman himself, so he commanded respect, and he was such a caring coach that Jimbo never wanted to let him down.

In the spring of 1987, they were told the baby in Penny’s womb, due around the start of training camp, would be born with spina bifida. Jimbo asked Stanfel to meet him at The Nite N’Gale, a popular restaurant with the team.

“It was a pretty emotional time for me,” Jimbo says. “I was worried about how I would handle everything, missing training camp. He told me not to worry about anything. He said they would get on without me. It was a comforting discussion and it helped me get through that.”

When Jessica was born, Jimbo took some time off. Stanfel and Ditka supported him, and teammates and their wives raised money for the Spina Bifida Association. Jessica, 34, remains a blessing in her parents’ lives.

Jimbo also benefitted from some of those who worked against him. He couldn’t have become a Hall of Famer without forcing his opponents to respect him. Jimbo played 17 games and allowed 4.5 sacks against Hall of Fame pass rushers. He went against Lawrence Taylor of the Giants and Lee Roy Selmon of the Bucs seven times and never allowed a sack.

“I played against a lot of excellent offensive tackles and I put him in the top echelon,” Taylor says. “I put him up there with the best of the best.”

(Top photo: Associated Press / NFL Photos)

[soulman]

I keep thinking, and hoping, that Tevin Jenkins will turn out to be our 21st century Jimbo Covert and that along with the rest of the OL we'll see another group like the '80s Black 'n Blues Brothers.

[BEAR FACE DOWN ARROW]

22 hours ago, soulman said:

I keep thinking, and hoping, that Tevin Jenkins will turn out to be our 21st century Jimbo Covert and that along with the rest of the OL we'll see another group like the '80s Black 'n Blues Brothers.

Thanks for a fun flashback; my dad got me that poster when I was a kid!

[soulman]

36 minutes ago, RunningVaccs said:

Thanks for a fun flashback; my dad got me that poster when I was a kid!

Jimano's, the Chicago style pizza place near me I often mention has a huge version of that poster up on one of their walls along with a whole lot of pics of Chicago sports venues and players.  I'd love to have one too but don't know where I'd hang it around here.  My only Bears paraphernalia is a wind sock I have hung in the corner of my den. 

That came as a gift from my soul brother in Green Bay.  He collects memorabilia and when he finds Bears stuff at yard sales or in a thrift store he buys some of it and sends it to me proving that a life long Bears fan and life long Packer fan can actually be best friends.  LOL

And I would be eternally grateful if the football Gods can turn Tevin Jenkins into another Jimbo Covert.  They both seem to bring a nasty disposition to work with them.  **** Stanfel who was the Bears OL Coach turned Covert into a HOF LT.  Now we have another top OL Coach whose goal should be to turn Tevin Jenkins into a HOF LT.  I'm pullin' hard to this kid to become the LT we haven't had since Covert retired.

[Heinz D.]

1 hour ago, soulman said:

Now we have another top OL Coach whose goal should be to turn Tevin Jenkins into a HOF LT.  I'm pullin' hard to this kid to become the LT we haven't had since Covert retired.

Andy Heck was pretty good...

[soulman]

59 minutes ago, Heinz D. said:

Andy Heck was pretty good...

True but not Covert level good.

[Heinz D.]

15 minutes ago, soulman said:

True but not Covert level good.

Few are.

People tend to forget how good Covert was. Probably because Ditka's bad decisions deprived us of a true dynasty. 

[soulman]

2 minutes ago, Heinz D. said:

Few are.

People tend to forget how good Covert was. Probably because Ditka's bad decisions deprived us of a true dynasty. 

I hold Mikey McC far more responsible than Ditka and mostly for his penurious hold on the team and it's personnel including never being willing to spend on another QB despite knowing McMahon could no longer stay healthy enough to even play 16 games let alone the playoffs.  So we ended up with guys like Fuller and "Bambi" Flutie or QBs with some degree of talent like TZack and Harbaugh who had to go through the Ditka meat grinder.  It was Ditka's disrespect for the QB position in general that pissed me off most.

[dll2000]

On 7/31/2021 at 10:43 AM, soulman said:

I keep thinking, and hoping, that Tevin Jenkins will turn out to be our 21st century Jimbo Covert and that along with the rest of the OL we'll see another group like the '80s Black 'n Blues Brothers.

In mid 80s literally every boy I knew had this poster on the wall.  I would be in a strangers house and if they had a boy, it would be there.  

For northern IL kids it was like the Farrah Fawcett poster of 70s, lol.

 

 

[dll2000]

On 8/1/2021 at 1:21 PM, soulman said:

I hold Mikey McC far more responsible than Ditka and mostly for his penurious hold on the team and it's personnel including never being willing to spend on another QB despite knowing McMahon could no longer stay healthy enough to even play 16 games let alone the playoffs.  So we ended up with guys like Fuller and "Bambi" Flutie or QBs with some degree of talent like TZack and Harbaugh who had to go through the Ditka meat grinder.  It was Ditka's disrespect for the QB position in general that pissed me off most.

Ditka was a bad coach and a terrible personnel evaluator.  There I said it.

He was good leader and motivator, but a bad coach.

He inherited great talent from a string of amazing drafts.  But he had no imagination, no forward thinking and was stupidly impulsive and lazy. 

 He really illustrated that in New Orleans with Ricky Williams and other moves given more power.

Buddy Ryan was an ***, but he was also right.   He won that super bowl for Bears, not Ditka.   And Buddy Ryan had his own shortcomings as demonstrated in Philly.  But at least he was innovative on defensive side of ball and even somewhat on offensive side of ball.  

Two meatheads - which is fine - but give me a Brown or a Walsh or a Jimmy Johnson or a Belichick or a Reid or a Landry.   Guys who think not just lead with insane gusto and bravado.   

I think it really helps to have one charismatic meathead on any staff, but they shouldn't be in charge.

[soulman]

1 hour ago, dll2000 said:

Ditka was a bad coach and a terrible personnel evaluator.  There I said it.

He was good leader and motivator, but a bad coach.

 

You'll get no argument from me there.  But he was also blessed with an excellent group of assistant coaches and coordinators who did all of the heavy lifting on their end allowing Ditka to be able to do what he did best......motivate.  Buddy Ryan was no schlub when it came to motivating his guys either and overall a far better X's and O's coach.  That Bears defense was the scariest defense I've seen in my lifetime.

They were brutal.

Edited August 4, 2021 by soulman

[soulman]

1 hour ago, dll2000 said:

I think it really helps to have one charismatic meathead on any staff, but they shouldn't be in charge.

If there's an opening where would a guy like me apply?  😁

[dll2000]

1 hour ago, soulman said:

If there's an opening where would a guy like me apply?  😁

You don't apply for a meathead position.  You have to demonstrate your meatheadedness to powers that be in some fashion.

 

 

[soulman]

46 minutes ago, dll2000 said:

You don't apply for a meathead position.  You have to demonstrate your meatheadedness to powers that be in some fashion.

 

 

If I can't even get a ticket to watch camp how am I supposed to do that?  Maybe a letter indicating I would start Nick Foles perhaps?

[dll2000]

21 minutes ago, soulman said:

If I can't even get a ticket to watch camp how am I supposed to do that?  Maybe a letter indicating I would start Nick Foles perhaps?

No, no, no.   You have to ram your head into a locker at full speed or creatively torture some nerds or rookies or freshman or whatever.   Something along those lines.