Alex Karras has died. The football great-turned-tv and movie star of Webster and Blazing Saddles was 77, and had battled dementia. On Monday, it was reported Karras was near death after suffering kidney failure. The news moved his former team, the Detroit Lions, to pay prompt tribute.  "Perhaps no player in Lions history attained as much success and notoriety for what he did after his playing days as did Alex," Lions president Tom Lewand said in the Monday statement. Along with real-life wife Susan Clark, Karras parented child-star Emmanuel Lewis in the 1983-89 family sitcom Webster. Before that, Mel Brooks fans knew Karras as the horse-punching, man-beast Mongo in the 1974 Western send-up, Blazing Saddles. Karras was probably never more of the zeitgeist then when he was part of the Howard Cosell-era Monday Night Football broadcast team for three seasons, from 1974-1976. Other credits included the teen comedy Porky's, which also costarred Clark, the Oscar-winning Julie Andrews musical Victor Victoria and the thriller hit, Against All Odds. "I guess I've always been a performer," Karras once said. "But if I'd have told anybody back in high school in Gary [his Indiana hometown] that I wanted to be an actor, they'd have had me quarantined."...