Mourning the loss of the great Tunch Ilkin
By STEVE KING
It’s Pittsburgh Week, Part 1 — one of the two biggest weeks of the year for the Browns, with the other one being Part 2 of the home-and-home series — as the AFC North arch rivals get ready to meet on Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium.
Imagine that, the Browns and Steelers playing on Halloween for the first time since they began meeting 72 years ago. Scary? Ghoulish? You bet.
If you’ve seen some of the previous games in this series, such as when Turkey Jones acted as if Terry Bradshaw’s head and shoulders were a posthole digger, when “Mean” Joe Greene kicked Bob McKay between the … uh, in a very delicate area … because he thought he was being held too much without it being called, when Chris Gardocki flipped off Bill Cowher in plain view of 73,000 in the stadium and a regional television audience, and when Terrelle Smith and Joey Porter got into a fight in the pre-game warmups and were both ejected, then it would serve a greater good if these two teams played every year on Halloween, even if it’s not on a Thursday, Sunday or Monday.
That both clubs need Sunday’s game badly as they try to make up ground on the division’s co-leaders, the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL’s surprise team, the Cincinnati Bengals, serves only to up the ante and the angst, anger, aggravation and aggressiveness of the proceedings.
Indeed, the storylines are endless — they always are in this series — but none of those is the story that makes the top of my personal front page.
Rather, it is that this is the teams’ first game against one another since the passing of Tunch Ilkin, the longtime former Steelers offensive lineman and then longtime color analyst on the team’s radio network. Just 19 days short of his 64th birthday, he passed away on Sept. 4, about a week before the start of the regular season, after a lengthy, courageous battle against the dreaded killer that is Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
He was the Steelers’ version of the Browns’ Doug Dieken, a beloved, big-hearted, former lineman who became known to a whole legion of younger fans because of his work on the radio and also his strong faith and his obsession with doing all he could to help others. In Pittsburgh, they talk of Ilkin like they do of Dieken in Cleveland. It’s no surprise, then, that the two men became good friends.
When I was covering the Browns, whenever they played in Pittsburgh, first in Three Rivers Stadium and then in Heinz Field, my seat was, for whatever reason, was always in the far right-hand portion of the press box, next to the big ceiling -to- floor soundproof glass plate that divides the electronic portion of the box from where the writers sit. I would watch Ilkin and play-by-play announcer Bill Hillgrove do their broadcast. It was fascinating. They looked like they were having so much fun, and they were.
I love radio. Before I got involved in the writing end of the media, I wanted to be on the radio — not TV, but radio. And if someone right now gave me the choice between the two, I would choose radio hands down.
I never knew Ilkin was involved in all these things outside of football, He got so much joy out of that. He really cared about people, and the older you get, the more you realize that that is what we’re called to do. It isn’t about us, but rather it’s about everybody else. He inspired me to look deeper inside of myself to figure out how to do that better.
That’s the legacy he left behind. As Doug Dieken told a Pittsburgh reporter after his death, “Everybody wants to be like Tunch Ilkin.”
That he is not around for a Browns-Steelers game leaves a void that, to me and I’m sure a lot of others both in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, is much bigger and so extraordinarily more important than anything that will happen on the field on Sunday, or any other time these teams meet down the road.
