Elijah Pitts, a running back for the Green Bay Packers during their glory years of the 1960's and the assistant head coach of the outstanding Buffalo Bills teams of the 1990's, died yesterday at Mercy General Hospital in Buffalo. He was 60.

He had been suffering from abdominal cancer and had been on medical leave from the Bills since last October.

Pitts played for the Packers from 1961 to 1969 and again in 1971 during the Vince Lombardi era, when Green Bay won four National Football League championships and two Super Bowls. He scored on touchdown runs of 5 yards and 1 yard in the Packers' 35-10 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl I on Jan. 15, 1967.

He was an assistant coach in the N.F.L. for more than two decades and took over as the Bills' acting head coach for three games during the 1995 season when Coach Marv Levy was being treated for prostate cancer. The Bills went to four Super Bowls, losing them all, during his years in Buffalo.

Pitts hardly seemed destined for a long career in pro football.

The son of a sharecropper, he grew up in Mayflower, Ark., a town with a high school so small that it did not have a football team. He attended high school 12 miles away in Conway, Ark., was a football star there and was offered scholarships by a number of colleges. But he decided to stick close to home, playing for Philander Smith College in Little Rock, a school with several hundred students.

Pitts was picked by the Packers in the 1961 draft as only a 13th-round selection and had to compete with the star runners Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor. ''I went with the attitude that I was as good as anyone,'' Pitts recalled.

He made the Packers as a backup runner, but he was such an aggressive tackler that Lombardi soon selected him as captain of the special teams.

In 1966, when Hornung was hampered by an injury, Pitts teamed up with Taylor, the fullback, in the starting backfield, and in the N.F.L. championship game against Dallas in the Cotton Bowl he was Green Bay's leading runner. In gratitude for his performance in the inaugural Super Bowl, the Packers pictured him on the cover of their 1967 guidebook, running behind a block by the lineman Fuzzy Thurston. Pitts ran for 28 touchdowns during his career and was named to the Packers' Hall of Fame in 1979.

During his playing days, Pitts never thought of becoming a coach, but he went on to be an assistant with the Los Angeles Rams, the Bills and the Houston Oilers of the N.F.L. and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League between 1974 and 1984. He returned then to Buffalo as an aide in charge of running backs and special teams, and he became the assistant head coach in 1992.

Pitts, who lived in Buffalo, is survived by his wife, Ruth; two sons, and a daughter. His son Ron was a cornerback for the Packers and the Bills.

''I apply some of Lombardi's teachings,'' Pitts said in the mid-1980's. ''Not in the way he would, but in my own way.''

He said Lombardi's tenet that ''fatigue makes cowards of us all'' made the greatest impression on him.

''I tell it to my players,'' he noted in an interview for ''Distant Replay,'' by his former Packers teammate Jerry Kramer with Dick Schaap (Putnam's, 1985). ''If you're tired, you're a coward.''

Pitts could hardly have considered himself lacking in courage, given the odds he faced in making the Packers. But when he was once asked whether the intimidating Lombardi had scared him the first time he heard him, Pitts responded, ''He scared me the last time I heard him, too.''

Elijah Eugene Pitts