Posted on 01/08/2004 8:12:25 AM PST by wisconsinconservative
Bring it on, Cheeseheads!
We love Brett, hate the Packers
By WILLIAM BUNCH bunchw@phillynews.com
AP
The always dangerous Brett Favre
LOVE the man. Hate the town.
OK, let's drop the atty-tude for about 10 seconds, and give some props to Green Bay Packers' QB Brett Favre. All of America - yes, even us - loves the spunk of this future Hall of Famer and his Hollywood-ready saga.
It was Favre - in case you've been living in a spider hole outside of Mosul recently - who took the field 24 hours after learning that his mentor father had died of a heart attack, and had the game of his life, launching an improbable playoff drive that seems guided by a higher power.
And so, truth be told, we spent the last week praying that we'd be sitting here last night writing a hater's guide to Dallas (Michael Irvin, Jerry Jones, Lee Harvey Oswald) or Seattle (Microsoft and Starbucks - too easy!) - anybody but Green Bay.
But then we remembered something else from Green Bay, that "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." And in the National Football League, to win on Sunday is to hate.
And so we hate Green Bay.
Vince Lombardi would have wanted it that way.
It's not like it's hard to find reasons.
It's too small
Let's be honest here. Green Bay is the nation's 69th-largest TV market, and we were stunned to learn it was even that large.
Green Bay, Wis., doesn't deserve a professional sports franchise any more than our own beloved neighborhood of Frankford or Pottsville or Pottstown or wherever the heck that place is that Gov. Rendell was trying to get the 1925 NFL title restored when he was supposed to be passing the state budget.
So why do 70,000 cheese-headed folks - 70 percent of the town (don't call it a city - pul-leeez) - show up at Lambeau Field on any given Sunday? Why has pro football succeeded here and failed in places with a few more folks, like, say, Los Angeles?
It's not because
the people are made of
hearty midwestern stock. It's because THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE TO DO THERE!!!
Well, actually, there's one other thing to do in Green Bay - drink. Under the heading of "Entertainment," the Green Bay Press-Gazette's Web site doesn't have "Nightlife" but there's a massive section for "Taverns" - as if there's a difference between the Buck Stop Inn and the creatively named Watering Hole Tavern.
You're certainly better off drinking than eating. The "Restaurant" section lists all nine of Green Bay's Taco Bells under the heading "ethnic."
Splinter-free!
Indeed, there's only one other thing besides football that Green Bay is famous for. We'll give you a hint: It's still manufactured here by the Quilted Northern division of Georgia-Pacific, whose slogan is: "We Make the Things That Make You Feel at Home."
That's a polite way of saying: "We Make Toilet Paper!"
Yes, Green Bay actually bills itself as "the toilet paper capital of the world," although for some reason Green Bay's Web site is called titletown.org and not worldtoiletpapercapital.org.
I guess we should be grateful, since Green Bay claims that Quilted Northern made the first TP that was "splinter free." But then the Packers won't be needing Quilted Northern after they get wiped by the Eagles at the Linc this Sunday.
No Warren Buffets here
There's a sucker born every minute - in Green Bay. Somehow, civic leaders duped citizens into owning the team without reaping any benefits. A total of 4,748,910 shares is owned by 111,507 stockholders - none of whom receives any dividend on the initial investment despite the millions of dollars of TV cash that's pumped into the franchise every year.
And you thought Sun Microsystems was a bad investment!
Reggie, what happened?
But then there's something about wind chills of minus-40 that can make people act a little loopy. Consider all-time NFL sack leader Reggie White, who was beloved during his seven seasons with the Eagles for his ferocity on the field as well as his godliness off field.
Then he goes and signs a $17 million deal with the Packers, and the next you know he's standing before the Wisconsin Legislature blasting gays for comparing their plight to that of blacks and adding: "We allow rampant sin, including homosexuality and lying, and because it has run rampant in our nation, our nation is in the condition it is today."
White was promptly dropped as pitchman for Campbell's - which probably spared him from a career-threatening injury like those suffered by every other Chunky Soup endorser.
Holier than thou
The funny thing is that if White wanted to find "rampant sin," he needed only to look down the row of lockers at the Packers' All-Star tight end, Mark Chmura. The ultra-conservative Chmura refused to go to Bill Clinton's White House with his Super Bowl winning squad in 1997 and said later of the Monica Lewinsky affair: "I look like a genius now. I knew it all along."
But in 2000, Chmura - who was 31 at the time - didn't look like much of a genius when he was charged with raping his family's 17-year-old babysitter in a bathroom at a hot-tub-soaked party after Waukesha Catholic Memorial High School's spring prom.
Chmura was acquitted but conceded his "immature" behavior was "something a married man shouldn't do."
We knew it all along.
Frozen tundra, hah!
Most of the Green Bay football myth is exactly that - myth. Take Lambeau Field's legendary "frozen tundra," a clever turn-of-phrase phrase made famous by - you guessed it - a Philadelphian, legendary NFL Films' voice John Facenda.
It turns out that not only is the playing field at Lambeau not tundra (duh), it's not even frozen! Alleged tough guy Lombardi had electric heating coils installed underneath so players like pretty boy Paul Hornung wouldn't get hurt. And the Packers practice indoors for most of the season.
What a bunch of wimps.
St. Vince
Even Lombardi himself wasn't really all that. Yeah, yeah, five NFL titles, never had a losing season, rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. But as you might guess for someone who thought winning was "the only thing," there were times when expediency won out - a cheating scandal when he was assistant coach at Army, and when he welcomed back prodigal son Hornung after the Packers star was suspended in 1963 for betting on Green Bay. (Ask Pete Rose what he thinks of that.)
And he did have losing seasons on the playing field of life, where his total devotion to football caused him to ignore his wife's growing drinking problem and to rarely be there for his kids.
So if you're scared about facing the vaunted "Pack" on Sunday, just remember the biggest loss of Lombardi's coaching career. It came in 1960.
At Franklin Field, in the NFL championship game.
17-13, Eagles.
Godspeed, Brett Favre. And good luck... next year.
We'll see how your "vaunted" run defense does against Ahman, Najeh, and Tony. If we need it, our QB, not overrated like the one in Philahellphia, can play a good game.
Thanks, but it'll take more than a roll of that to clean up the excrement I've seen printed in that paper.
Hey, that's cheddar, Dog! (OK, so they put the Swiss cheese holes in it to make it look cheesier. So what? I've got some cheese earrings!)
GO PACKERS!!!
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