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Big Cat's heart was as big as his body

Posted: Mar 12th 2007 By: CMBurnham

Ernie "Big Cat" Ladd, remembered as both literally and figuratively larger than life, died Saturday night after a long bout with cancer. The former football and wrestling star was 68.

"It's a personal loss not just to our family, but to the whole community," said Eddie Robinson Jr., whose ailing father coached Ladd at Grambling State. "I was fortunate enough to be in high school when he was here, so my football heroes growing up were people like Ernie Ladd."

A talented 6-9 3/4 defender both at GSU and then with the San Diego Chargers, Ladd left the gridiron at age 30 to mount a second career as a well-known villain during wrestling's earliest days as a national attraction.

Born Nov. 28, 1938, in Rayville, but raised in Orange, Texas, he had battled cancer--first in his colon, then later in his stomach and bones--since 2004. Funeral arrangements were still pending on Sunday, according to Roslyn, his wife of more than 45 years.

"I always thought he would beat that thing," said former Grambling teammate A. Lane Howell, a Monroe native and resident. "He was always the ultimate optimist, a true warrior. He will certainly be missed."

Ladd, a father of four and grandfather to over a dozen more, remains the only person in both the American Football League and World Wrestling Federation halls of fame. He was also a 1994 inductee into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, recognition for a college career that included 1960 first-team all-conference honors under GSU legend Eddie Robinson.

It was for those local exploits that Ladd was honored over the public-address system during Sunday afternoon's Grambling baseball game.

"It just brought a shock over the crowd," said longtime former GSU baseball coach Wilbert "Dean" Ellis. "He loved Grambling. It's so sad to lose one of our own, one of our greats."

Ladd once said he never met his biological father until he was 18, and that was during visiting hours at Angola. But Ladd was happily raised, he said, by a loving mother and stepfather in Orange.

Ladd actually played tight end at Wallace High, but that position was never considered once he arrived at GSU; even then, weighing a robust 218. He'd gained 80 pounds by the time he finished school.

"I got too heavy," Ladd liked to say. "It would look funny, a 300-pound tight end."

Ladd would become a defensive stalwart on GSU's first-ever Southwestern Athletic Conference championship football squad.

He then helped form the nucleus of the 1963 AFL championship team at San Diego, which selected him in the 15th round of the '61 draft.

"We were like a family," Ladd said in May 2005. "We were one of the first integrated teams, with black players and white players as roommates."

Ladd--who played pro football at 317 pounds and, in his late 60s, set his "normal weight" at 380-- needed a lot of fuel to keep going. The legend of his appetite casts a shadow almost as long as his own.

"When Ernie was drafted by San Diego, there used to be a place the players passed by each day to go to camp and eat breakfast," late former GSU sports information director Collie J. Nicholson once told The News-Star. "It was $3 all you can eat. Ladd stopped by a couple of times, and one day the guy who owned the place was standing outside waiting for Ladd. He gave him $5 to go eat somewhere else."

At one legendary AFL press junket, Ladd consumed--in order--two shrimp cocktails, three dishes of cole slaw, three servings of spinach, three baked potatoes, eight rolls and a half pound of butter, four 16-ounce steaks, three desserts and washed it down with a half gallon of milk.

Later asked if there was any food he didn't like, Ladd thought for nearly five minutes before answering: "Squash."

The Chargers said at the time that it cost the club $50 a day--big money in the early 1960s--to keep Ladd sated while on the road.

The expense, in the end, was worth it: San Diego eventually advanced to four AFL title games in five years with Ladd, and won that '63 crown by crushing the Boston (later New England) Patriots 51-10. Ladd would play in four straight AFL All-Star games, as well.

Ladd, one of more than 200 of Robinson's former players to play professional football, was named to the San Diego Hall of Champions in 2004.

He never forgot Grambling, friends say.

"Ladd had such a varied career after he left Grambling, but yet Grambling was always foremost in his thoughts and actions," said former GSU football assistant Doug Porter. "When I worked there, he always came back every year to work (as a volunteer coach) with the team. 'Mr. Grambling' was a way to describe him."

Contract disputes eventually led Ladd to sign with Houston, where he played for two seasons, and then with Kansas City where he reunited with future Pro Football Hall of Famer Junious "Buck" Buchanan, a former Grambling teammate on that 1960 SWAC title team.

When Ladd completed his eight-year pro career, he had played in 112 consecutive AFL games, and appeared on the roster for both Super Bowl I and IV with the Chiefs.

As big as he was, Ladd was known for his cat-like quickness, something that later inspired his lifelong nickname.

Ladd began wrestling as a sideline during his rookie pro season, and found the payday and fame so alluring that he eventually gave up football.

"In what other sport can you pick up a $14 pair of boots, 59-cent socks--spend maybe a total of $50--and convert it into $100,000 a year, if you are sharp and train?" Ladd would rhetorically ask. "My intention was to go back to football, but pro wrestling was so good to me."

Ladd's bad-guy storylines, not to mention signature moves that included the "guillotine drop" and a boot to the face, resonated with the next generation of sports fans. Rivalries with Andre the Giant and Dusty Rhodes helped shape wrestling's 1970s persona.

Eventually, the battering he took on the field and in the ring began to take its toll.

Ladd's knees were so damaged--his first surgery came while still in college--that he was eventually forced to walk backward down long staircases.

"He was just some kind of athlete," Robinson once said of Ladd, noting that he actually came to Grambling to play basketball. "Then he got hurt and had to have a knee operation."

But Ladd's boundless spirit was unbowed by his body;s failures. He even displayed a distinctive flair for humor after his cancer diagnosis.

"The doctor told me I had three-to-six months to live," Ladd said in 2005, then at the mid-way point in his nearly four-year battle with the disease. "I told him Dr. Jesus has the verdict on me."

Ladd put that faith to work through his final illness, serving as a pastor in the Louisiana town of Franklin. For years, he was also involved in prison ministry work and community service projects, as well as local and national political campaigns.

Ladd even briefly owned a New Orleans restaurant--it was named, memorably, Ernie Ladd's Big Cat Throw-Down BBQ--and followed that commitment to Houston where, in 2005, he ministered to Katrina evacuees at the Astrodome.

"He had gotten involved in developing communities," Ellis said. "He represented us well. He made an outstanding contribution to society after his sports exploits."