What about Bob?

Some good stuff from some of the former Giants linebacker's teammates in memory of Van Pelt, who died Tuesday of a heart attack at age 57. Here's T-Rock's story from today's newspaper.
LT:
"One of the greatest players I ever played with. I not only liked him as a player but he was one of my true friends, one of the original members of the Big Blue Wrecking Crew and the Crunch Bunch. We’ve done a lot together over the years and he will be sorely missed. If you knew Brad, you loved Brad. He was a very unique individual. He always put a smile on my face. You could never stay mad at him. He was a true character. One the reasons we’ve kept such a good relationship for so long is because there are not a lot of guys out there like Brad Van Pelt."

Harry Carson:
"Brad was a very good friend. Obviously he was a great teammate, but I consider him more of a very good friend and very much like a brother. Having played together for a number of years, but then the relationship after football and the things that we did as a group of linebackers after football, those things really bonded us together. Myself and Lawrence and Brian Kelley and Brad we would go to Hawaii every year, we would play golf, and just sort of hang out. We went down to Mexico to build homes with Habitat for Humanity and went down to Walter Reed to visit the wounded warriors coming back from Iraq. Those things are special to me and that is how the bond sort of evolves and really does continue."

Brian Kelley:
"I have known Brad for such a long time and he is such a great person. He wasn’t a guy that had material things, material things didn’t matter to him. He just lived his life day to day and that was Brad. It wasn’t bad, it was just the way he was. He was a very generous person and he is definitely going to be missed.

"It is a shame too and it really bothers me too that here is a guy that plays 14 years in the league, five Pro Bowls, has some great stats and stuff like that, and is never mentioned for the Hall of Fame, which just irks me every year. This guy has numbers that people in the Hall of Fame would dream they have and he is never mentioned.

"I remember when he first came out of Michigan State and he was a safety and they were trying to get him to play linebacker and I watched him make the first tackle on the first guy and I looked at him and said, ‘God this guy is just not a linebacker, he doesn’t know anything about linebacking from playing safety.’ I remember his rookie year they saw it too and they tried him at tight end, they tried him at several positions to try to find a position for him, but they couldn’t. He just didn’t fit in at that time and I think two years later Marty Schottenheimer came in as the linebackers coach and put him in front of a tight end and that was history after that. He had five Pro Bowls and 14 years."