Why Everyone Should Root For the Packers
sportsillustrated.cnn.com.
By Leigh Montville
This is a suggestion.
Tired of living in NFL fear? Worried that some fat-boy owner in a vicuna coat -- Hello, there, Art Modell -- is going to render a lifetime of watching, praying and season-ticket buying meaningless in a moment, taking the old hometown team to some new megabucks stadium for some new megabucks deal? Worried that your heart is going to be ripped from your body and dropkicked to, say, St. Louis or Phoenix or Nashville or wherever? Stung by the money trends of the '90s? Reduced to quivering under your bed at the prospects the NFL future may hold?
Relax.
Try the Green Bay Packers.
Sick of expansion nonsense? Can't root for some team with a name that sticks in the throat like a half-swallowed piece of popcorn? Refuse to adjust the television to a set of team colors you can't even describe? Can't stand the AstroTurf playgrounds, the antiseptic carpets spread over concrete? Can't stand the corporate clients in the next seats, everyone talking business instead of nickel defense? Can't stand the business influence everywhere, the corporatization of sport? Can't stand the megalomaniacs like Jerry Jones?
Please.
The Packers.
Fed up? Is that the final verdict? Not going to take it anymore? Going to spend Sunday afternoons learning macrame and Cajun cooking and how to get in touch with your inner self? Heading for that NFL 12-step program? Quitting something that has been so important in your life for so long?
One last try.
Put this hat shaped like a large piece of cheese on your head. The point goes toward the front.
The Packers. They are what you have been seeking all along. Maybe they are all that is left. The grass is still green and perfect at Lambeau Field -- not Prestone Antifreeze Lambeau Stadium or the Prudential Life Insurance Lambeaudome -- and the team colors are still a deep forest green and stoplight yellow, and each breath from each player on a cold day still makes a healthy little cloud of steam. Football is still football. The way it always was. The way it is supposed to be.
They're not going anywhere, these Packers, except maybe down to Chicago to kick a little serious Bear butt on a Sunday afternoon. They're legislated into the environment, their existence protected as strongly as if they were the piping plover or spotted owl. Their bloodlines are obvious -- the team is the sole same-city survivor from the long-ago origins of the professional game, with an unbroken string of seasons from 1919 covering 11 championships and involving some of the greatest names ever to touch this strangely shaped ball. Lombardi. Hutson. Lambeau. Hornung. Starr. The future is pleasant, with the team coming off an appearance in the NFC title game, with Most Valuable Player Brett Favre throwing passes and with big Reggie White dumping people onto the ground. The present is... the present is football.
What more could you want?
"Anyone who comes here, I take 'em first down to City Stadium, where the old teams played," Packers general manager Ron Wolf says. "I tell 'em, 'This is where it all began.' I say that if you want to play football -- if that's what you really want to do, play football -- then there's no other place to be. If you want Hollywood, this is not Hollywood. But if you want football...."
What more could you want?
The oft-done Titletown curiosity story of the '60s -- the Lombardi Years -- the one about the small market (pop. 96,466) possessing a big-time team, has evolved into a much deeper, much more meaningful tale of the '90s. Green Bay has become the island of normalcy, of reason, in a high sea of moneygrubbing madness. As other familiar franchises depart from their faithful followers in the second, fourth and 24th largest cities in the country, leaving piles of dog bones and faded pom-poms in their wakes, the small-town team chugs along nicely with familiar small-town values.
"I feel I'm involved with the preservation of a national treasure," team president and chief executive officer Bob Harlan says. "This is a nonprofit organization devoted to football. We make our money from football, and we spend our money for football. That's why we exist."
The concept that is a charade in all other places -- that "our team" is part of "our town" and deserves "our allegiance" -- exists in reality only here. Nonprofit football. While other owners cast themselves as grand civic humanitarians, at the same time heading toward the safe-deposit box, this is the one place where the game actually is a civic venture. The owners actually are the people who root for the team.
"The way our ownership is established, you couldn't do it now," Harlan says. "The league rules wouldn't allow it. You can't have a public corporation owning a team anymore. We are one of a kind."
The owners of the team are 1,915 stockholders. None of them have more than 200 shares. Most have only one or two, usually framed and placed on a rec-room wall. The price of the stock when it was issued in 1950 as the team faced financial failure was $25 a share. The price today is $25 a share. No dividends have ever been distributed. None will be. No stock is available. None is expected to be available soon. Nonprofit football.
"I have one share that I bought in 1950," team public relations man Lee Remmel says with a nice smile. "It probably wasn't the greatest financial investment I ever made, but I could still get my 25 bucks back if I wanted."
The team will never move. It could possibly die -- 60% of its revenue comes from the shared television money of the NFL -- but the fortune that would come from a forced fire sale (the current estimated worth of the franchise is $166 million) would make no one rich. The money would be given to the Sullivan-Wallen American Legion Post. That is the bylaw in the corporation's charter. The Sullivan-Wallen American Legion Post would have the finest shuffleboard machines in creation.
"I didn't know this situation like I should have known it when I came here," says Wolf, whose arrival in 1991 after assorted NFL stops marked the beginning of the Packers' recent success. "You come in with other teams on a Saturday night, stay at a hotel, then play a game on Sunday and leave, and what do you learn? One city is the same as another. You come in here and live, though, and you see how unique this place really is."
The absence of an extrovert owner makes Wolf's job easier. No extra opinion is brought to the draft table requesting a star-quality running back for marketing purposes when the team really needs a no-nonsense strong safety. No yammering is heard when the strong safety -- or the running back -- turns out to be prone to falling down or fumbling at inopportune times; the No. 1 draft pick can be benched without repercussion. Football people can make the football decisions. It is an amazing concept.
In five years Wolf has been able to rebuild the Packers into the most intriguing team in the league. They are the new kids, trying to push into that trading off of the Super Bowl championship (which comes with the Lombardi Trophy, for heaven's sake) that the Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco 49ers have executed for the past four years. Each season since the arrivals of Wolf and coach Mike Holmgren (in '92) has been a step forward. After last season's 27-17 upset over the 49ers and the spirited 38-27 loss to Dallas in the NFC title game, the Super Bowl is the one step remaining. The Packers have become a bona fide threat to the Dallas-San Francisco stranglehold.
Favre, already one of the most intriguing players in the league with a tough-guy style that's a throwback to Detroit's Bobby Layne, now faces the added challenge of throwing off a publicly acknowledged addiction to painkillers. While the Cowboys and the 49ers seem to extract each play from a computer readout, Favre still seems to draw the plays in the dirt with a Popsicle stick.
White, the defensive leader, has become the elder statesman embarked on a grand crusade to win a title, playing in pain and speaking with a preacher's eloquence about his quest. His crusade to rebuild burned-out black churches -- begun after his own church in Knoxville, Tenn., burned the week before the NFC Championship Game -- has brought him a broader eminence as a spokesman for calm.
The entire Packers package is irresistible, an outfit on the rise minus the modern collection of egomaniacs and fatheads. A true team.
"The chemistry on this team is as good as any I've ever been around," White says. "Everybody kids each other, and the ego thing is low."
The facilities are simply the best in the NFL. The stadium, where the team has an 18-2 record over the past three seasons, is an intimate green bowl, 60,790 seats pressed as close to the field as possible, with a ring of 198 recently installed luxury boxes at the top as a corporate halo. ("You're even close to the action in the luxury boxes," Harlan says. "A man last year told me it was amazing that we had made the windows with some sort of magnifying glass. I told him, 'No, that's just the view.'") The Don Hutson Center, the two-year-old indoor practice facility across the street from the stadium, has all of the requisite modern football workout toys. The Packer Hall of Fame, on Lombardi Avenue, complete with interactive exhibits and slide shows, is a perpetual reminder of past glories.
The entire town, in fact, is an expanded football shrine. You can buy a house at Packer Realty and a truck at Packer City Isuzu and gas at Packerland Shell and a table at Packer City Antiques and a spinal adjustment at Packerland Chiropractic and some whey at Packerland Whey Product. The names of former players and coaches and executives can be found on street signs and monuments and local buildings. A beer can be bought at Fuzzy Thurston's Shenanigan's bar, a classic neighborhood spot, not one of those modern temples of sport with 87 televisions. Fuzzy, an All-Pro guard in the early '60s, might be there himself. Or at least his son.
Ray Nitschke, the fearsome All-Pro middle linebacker of yesterday, is still listed in the phone book. Curly Lambeau's widow, Marguerite, is still a resident. Football is everywhere, every day. Just the name, Green Bay, makes you think football. Just seeing it on a public-works truck.
"It's a different place," says Larry McCarren, a Packers center for 12 years in the '70s and '80s and now the city's leading sportscaster. "As a player, you're a lot closer to the people here than you are in other cities. I think that helps. Guys don't travel around here with entourages or limousines, because where would you go? Guys here still do you a favor. Do you know what I mean? I think it helps players to be here. If you're around a lot of regular folks most of the time, you tend to be regular folks."
Kids still wait for the players after practice. It is a tradition. The kids ride their bikes to the practice field on the first day of training camp and wait. Each player comes out and adopts a kid for the season. The kid supplies the bike every day. The player rides it from practice back to the locker facility every day. Friendships are made.
"I always rode this one girl's bike," McCarren says. "I saw her just the other day. Now she's a county sheriff."
The football still matters. The past still matters. The fans still matter. The players -- some of them, at least -- throw themselves into the stands after each touchdown. There is a waiting list of 24,000 names for season tickets to a stadium that has been sold out for every game since 1960. The estimated waiting time is more than 30 years. Newborn children are routinely put on the list in the hope that they will have tickets as they approach middle age.
A year ago, the team did make a major change. For the first time since 1932, it played all of its home games in Green Bay. Previously the home schedule had been split with Milwaukee. Strangely, economics forced the move. The team is now able to make an extra $2.5 million per year with games in Green Bay because of the added luxury boxes. Green Bay, in the end, has turned out to be a more profitable place to play than the bigger city, the reverse of all conventional thinking.
The worry the Packers' executive board had was what it would do with all of the people who had watched the games in Milwaukee. Could the team desert those fans, people who had paid for tickets for a long, long time? No. A compromise was reached. The Green Bay home schedule was split into two packages. Green Bay people could have one set of games. Milwaukee people could take the other set, commuting the two hours to the tiny city for two regular-season games and an exhibition. Ninety-six percent of the Milwaukee ticket holders took the deal.
"It took a lot of work to do, because a lot of these people had never even been to Green Bay in their lives, but we did it," Harlan says. "It would be an awful p.r. blunder for us to pull out of Milwaukee. There were times in our history we never would have survived without Milwaukee. We owed something to these people -- so we just took 'em with us."
Took 'em with us?
Loyalty to the fans?
In the '90s?
"You know, we were the first team to go into Cleveland to play after the Browns announced they were leaving," Wolf says. "It was a drizzly day. Awful. It was like some kind of cloud had descended over the stadium. It was very difficult to play that day. It was like you were part of something terrible. You couldn't even think about football, just that there was something wrong about what's going on here."
The answer is obvious.
Tell the fat boy in the vicuna coat you hope he has an absolutely terrible time in Baltimore with those Ravens. Tell Billy Bidwill you don't care what he does, where he goes. Tell Georgia Frontiere those Rams helmets look ridiculous next to an arch and tell Al Davis that he doesn't deserve Oakland and tell Jerry Jones and Bud Adams and Ed DeBartolo and all the rest of them...
Green Bay.
The Packers.
Your heart has a new and final address.
Issue date: Fall 1996 |
