Ex-Packers receiving great Sterling
Sharpe joins tight end Shannon as first brothers in Hall of Fame
[July 30, 2025]
By ARNIE STAPLETON
Shannon Sharpe donned his gold jacket emblazoned with the Pro
Football Hall of Fame logo at his Atlanta home last winter and
awaited his brother's arrival.
Sterling ambled down the stairs and into the basement looking
perplexed.
“Welcome, bro!” Shannon said.
To what, Sterling wondered, “your house?”
“To the Pro Football Hall of Fame," corrected Shannon. "Class of
2025.”
The first pair of brothers who will ever have both of their busts on
display in Canton fell into each other's arms, decades of doubts
dissipating in a medley of laughter and tears.
Dashed was the notion that seven stellar NFL seasons weren't enough
for football immortality.
All along, the brothers figured it was Sterling who would reach
Canton first. He was born three years earlier and the wide receiver
had a standout career at South Carolina and then for the Green Bay
Packers, who made him a first-round pick in 1988, two years before
the Denver Broncos selected his younger brother in the seventh round
out of Savannah State.
Sterling would start every game for seven straight seasons until a
neck injury cut short his career just as he and the Packers were
peaking. The green and gold would go on to return the title to
Titletown behind fellow Hall of Famers Ron Wolf, LeRoy Butler,
Reggie White and Brett Favre while Sterling dabbled in broadcasting
before leaving football behind for the golf links.
Sterling was named to five Pro Bowls and earned first-team All-Pro
honors the three years he led the league in receptions. He averaged
85 catches in his career — an unheard of number for that era and 10
more than Jerry Rice averaged in his first seven seasons.
In his last season he led the league with 18 touchdown receptions,
including a trio of scores in his final game despite dealing with
numbness in his arms and tingling in his neck caused by an abnormal
loosening of the first and second vertebrae in his cervical spine.
He had felt increasingly bothersome symptoms over the last half of
that season and he suffered what's commonly referred to as
“stingers” against the Falcons in the Packers' final game at the old
Milwaukee County Stadium on Dec. 18, 1994, and again six days later
at Tampa, where he caught nine passes for 132 yards and three
first-half touchdowns in what turned out to be his final game.
Right after Christmas, he learned he needed neck fusion surgery that
would limit his head swivel, making it too dangerous to continue
playing football. Upon hearing the prognosis, he stood up and shook
his doctors' hands.
"I had already accomplished what I wanted to,” Sterling told NBC
affiliate WIS News in Columbia, South Carolina, this spring. “... I
just wanted to play, and I got to play in the NFL for seven years.”
His career cut short at age 29, his protracted wait for Canton would
last 31 years.
“Sterling was supposed to be in the Hall first,″ Shannon said ahead
of his 2011 induction, where he drew a standing ovation for saying,
”I'm the second-best player in my own family."
Unlike Sterling's truncated testimonial, Shannon's Canton
credentials were never in question. He set the standard at tight
end, going to eight Pro Bowls in 14 seasons, earning four first-team
All-Pro honors and winning three Super Bowls in a four-year span,
two in Denver and one in Baltimore.
He gave his first Super Bowl ring — from Denver's 31-24 win over
Green Bay in 1997 — to Sterling. And he called the chance to welcome
his big brother into the Hall “the proudest moment of my life.”
Despite their shared love of the game, the brothers who grew up in a
tiny cinder block house in rural Georgia were different in one big
way: Shannon overcame a childhood speech impediment to become one of
the game's most talkative players and later one of football's most
vocal commentators. Sterling preferred to hone his craft in relative
obscurity and mostly avoided the public and the media.
[to top of second column] |
Green Bay Packers wide receiver Sterling Sharpe (84), chased by
Phoenix Cardinals Jay Taylor, heads towards the goal line to score
the first touchdown of an NFL football game in Tempe, Ariz., Nov.
18, 1990. (AP Photo/Jeff Kida)
“As a football player, I was unapproachable,”
Sterling told WIS News. “I didn’t want to be approached. I didn’t
want to be famous. I didn’t want to make friends. I’ve got a job to
do and I’m going to do this job better than anyone else does
anything else."
Butler said Sterling's media blackout was on par
with his isolated nature. He just didn't let many people into his
orbit.
“Sterling didn't want nobody to know what he did,” Butler told The
Associated Press. “He didn't want other receivers mimicking him. His
edge was his physicality and his brain.”
Butler said teammates started calling Sterling "The Hermit,” because
“he just wanted to play football. He didn't want to go nowhere. He
didn't want to do nothing. He'd be swiping his card to get into
(Packers headquarters) at 6 o'clock when nobody's up but burglars
and roosters.”
Ask him for his autograph and he'd walk right past you. Send him a
letter care of the Packers and he's sign a stack of them, Butler
said.
Every Tuesday, Sterling would spend his time answering fan mail,
“signing 1,000 autographs,” Butler said. “I never did that. He was
the only one in the building signing everything. He’s probably going
to hate on me for telling that story.”
Sterling was amongst a group of wide receivers including Andre Reed
and Jerry Rice that defenses began double-teaming in the late 1980s.
Sterling embraced the extra attention of the “clamp and vice”
defense and actually became better for it.
“He said if two guys are doubling me, they don’t hide it,” Butler
recounted. “The corner has outside leverage, the safety has inside
leverage, the linebacker is in a zone. He broke it down like this:
‘When it’s a pass, I’m going to attack the worst cover guy, the
safety. When it’s a run, I'm going to attack the worst tackler, the
cornerback.‘ I'd never heard nothing like that. It made so much
sense.
"If he’s putting pressure on the safety, running straight at him,
it’s what we call a panic state. As soon as he turns around to run
with you, you stop on a dime and ‘Magic’ (Don Majkowski) or Brett
would throw him the ball. I’d never seen any receiver do that, where
he just said I’m going to attack the weakest guy based on what the
play is.”
Butler said another of Sterling's hush-hush advantages actually
salvaged his own career.
Favre’s fastballs at practice were exacerbated in the winter months,
so to save his hands and preserve rhythm with his quarterback,
Sterling began wearing scuba diving wetsuit gloves, Butler said.
With their padding and super tack, the gloves served like a
catcher’s mitt. They worked out so well in the elements that
Sterling began wearing them indoors, too, Butler said.
“So I went out and got me some scuba gloves like Sterling and it
saved my career,” Butler said. “I started to get more interceptions.
And before you know it our whole secondary was wearing them. I don’t
think opponents realized it. Again, you don’t talk about it."
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