SUPER BOWL XXI : DENVER vs. NEW YORK : Green Bay Is Souring on Packers : Glory Years Have Yielded to Defeats and Transgressions

A few weeks ago, Morning Glory Farms in nearby De Pere stopped printing images of National Football League superstars, including Green Bay Packer wide receiver James Lofton, on the sides of its milk cartons.

The promotion was pulled and replaced by panels extolling the virtues of calcium rather than contact sport, after customers threatened to boycott the brand.

“We had been getting a lot of phone calls and letters from people telling us they were not going to buy the product anymore because of those football panels,” said Tom Hudock, manager of the dairy’s consumer products division. “They didn’t think it was the kind of image we should be showing to youngsters.”

Improbable as it may seem, the city that once crowned itself “Titletown USA” appears to have soured on its once-mighty Packers. The franchise that long had been a major source of pride to this wholesome but football-crazed community of 90,000 has lately proved an embarrassment to Green Bay, the last outpost of big-time professional sports in small-town America.

The Packers still hold a record 11 titles in the National Football League, but Sunday’s Super Bowl in Pasadena will be the 19th straight championship contest that they have missed. Last season proved especially dismal. The team finished with a 4-12 record, its worst in 28 years.

The current crop of Packers has not just squandered the winning legacy forged by such Green Bay legends as Curly Lambeau, Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr and Paul Hornung, it has also earned a reputation for dirty play--both on and off the field.

Three Packer stars have been involved in highly publicized sexual assault cases, and two of them have been charged with crimes. Wednesday, 10-year-veteran Lofton, the top pass catcher in Packer history, was ordered by a judge to stand trial for an alleged sexual attack of a woman last month in a stairwell outside a local bar.

The charges, and unsportsmanlike Packer play on the field as well, have shocked the die-hard fans of this conservative and religious Midwestern community, and many here admit that the team’s poor record on the field this year has magnified their frustration.

“People were kind of down because of the kind of season they were having, and then you throw in all this other stuff with the players and it just makes it worse,” said Charley Brock, a retired insurance broker who played center and linebacker on Packer teams from 1939 to 1947.

Packer players have been in trouble before. For instance, star halfback Hornung was suspended for the 1962 season by league officials for betting on games. But in those days the Packers were one of the league’s dominating squads and local residents took Hornung’s transgression in stride. Also, Hornung bet only on his team, something the locals could easily identify with in those days.

Attorney Ken Bowman, a center who played on Packer teams that won the first two Super Bowls in 1967 and 1968, agreed that Packer fever would quickly rebound once the team did.

“Mike Ditka (the Chicago Bear coach) got arrested for drunk driving after he won the Super Bowl last year and the Chicago faithful wanted to hang the state policeman,” Bowman said. “There’s an awful lot that can be appeased by winning.”

For now, though, even team officials admit feeling let down.

“It’s created a turmoil for us,” said Packer President Robert Parins. “. . . We wonder what we must do to impress upon our people that when you’re a Green Bay Packer you represent a fine institution. It leaves us very frustrated and there’s a feeling of disappointment besides.”

A cloud seemed to hang over the team long before Lofton’s arrest just before last month’s season finale. Defensive back Mossy Cade had been charged the previous year with sexually assaulting a relative in his Green Bay area home and the case has yet to come to trial.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is considering an appeal from a strip-tease dancer who also wants sexual assault charges brought against Lofton and halfback Eddie Lee Ivery over another incident in a Milwaukee bar three years ago.

Last October, defensive tackle Charles Martin was accused of indecently grabbing a woman in a Green Bay nightclub, but she declined to press charges after the 270-pound lineman apologized and paid $500 for damage done to her clothing in the incident.

A few weeks later, Martin made matters worse when he committed one of the most publicized cheap shots of the 1986 football season, slamming Chicago Bear quarterback Jim McMahon to the ground after McMahon had released a pass.

The flagrant hit cost Martin a two-game suspension. It also ended the season--and possibly the career--of McMahon, who was injured on the play and later had to undergo shoulder surgery. McMahon has said, however, that he had suffered the shoulder injury before that hit and would probably have needed the surgery in any event.

Last season, boos and catcalls were directed at the home team from the stands of Lambeau Field--rare in this Packer-smitten community--and a record number of no-shows was recorded for sold-out games. Team officials insist that the no-show problem might have more to do with malfunctioning turnstile counters than lack of fan interest.

As woes multiplied, historically uncritical local press coverage of the team turned from boosterism to prejudgment.

“Green Bay can tolerate losing but it will not tolerate losers whose amoral or immoral acts sully the name of the team and the community,” the afternoon Press-Gazette editorialized last month at the season’s close.

A recent cartoon in the morning News Chronicle sarcastically suggested that a pollster had found that many local residents wanted the assault trials involving Packer players moved to Iran. “They lop stuff off criminals, don’t they?” asked one figure in the drawing. “Just whatever was used to commit the crime,” responded another.

A telephone survey commissioned by Cade’s lawyers last month showed an astounding 92% of area residents questioned knew about his sexual assault case and an unusually high number of contacted persons expressed direct hostility toward the defendant or the team in general.

Citing the poll as evidence that the current climate could jeopardize chances of getting a fair trial, Brown County Circuit Judge Richard Greenwood recently postponed the jury selection that had been scheduled to begin Jan. 26--suggesting that, in the current climate a Packer player could not get a fair trial here.

Per Johnson, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay who conducted the poll, said angry comments by those surveyed ranged from “The Packers aren’t the kinds of role models our kids ought to have,” to “They’re all guilty,” and “Move ‘em out of town.”

Green Bay, of course, is unlike Chicago, New York, Denver, Los Angeles or any other of cities that have National Football League teams. It is as easy here for fans to rub shoulders with players as it is hard for players to stay out of the public eye.

“I don’t know what the standard of conduct is for the L.A. Rams or Raiders, but I can tell you it’s a lot easier to get lost in L.A. or New York than it is in Green Bay,” said Dan Devine, former Packer coach. “Everyone (on the team) lives in a glass house because everyone knows every player.”

If the town is unique to the NFL, so is the team. Lambeau, who played under the great Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, founded the Packers in 1919 with a $500 contribution from the meat packing firm he worked for. Two years later, the Packers joined the reorganizing forerunner to the NFL, which was then made up of such long-forgotten squads as the Akron Pros, Dayton Triangles, Rock Island Independents and Canton Bulldogs.

Of those early pro teams, the only survivors are the Packers, the former Chicago Cardinals, who now play in St. Louis, and George Halas’ Decatur Staleys, who became the Chicago Bears.

NFL franchises quickly gravitated to the big cities where the big money was--but the Packers stayed in Green Bay, outlasting other Wisconsin franchises, including one in much bigger Milwaukee.

The other teams were privately owned and could be easily shifted. But strapped for funds in 1923, Lambeau and his financial backers had turned the team into a nonprofit corporation and sold the shares to public-spirited Green Bay residents, none of whom ever received a dividend check.

Today, nearly 1,800 people who either live in Green Bay or have family ties here hold a piece of the Packers. So the town, in effect, owns the team.

Even without the Packers, Green Bay would be prosperous. Straddling the southern flank of Lake Michigan’s Green Bay from which it takes its name, the city is home to a trio of large paper mills. From its port, huge boatloads of dried milk are shipped. Sausage factories and meat packers still abound, and the National Cheese Exchange, which sets nationwide cheese prices, has headquarters here. One of Wisconsin’s two state penitentiaries is also located in Green Bay.

But the Packers are the institution that sets Green Bay apart from Appleton, Oshkosh and dozens of other similarly sized towns in the state and across the country. Green Bay draws its national identity and self-image from the team.

“It’s the high culture in town,” said Johnson, the pollster. “We treat the Packers as church, the symphony, the ballet. The game is something not just to watch but be seen at. Women dress up in their finest furs. It’s exactly the same as if you were going to the opera.”

Over the years, Packer fans have proved a devoted and hardy lot. They endure games marred by blinding snowstorms and freezing temperatures. No matter what the season, a group of as many as 30 retirees gathers each weekday morning at Martha’s coffee shop on Broadway to talk Packers.

And in the summer, fans turn out by the hundreds, sometimes thousands, just to watch workouts at the team’s training field across the street from the stadium.

Until he died two years ago, a local sheet metal contractor named Howie Blindauer spent his own money to mimeograph rosters, revised daily to reflect players cut from the team, and passed them out to practice-session spectators. These days, Blindauer’s son, Mike, still prints the rosters and 70-year-old Elmer De Peaux, a retired mill hand who has not missed a game since 1927, distributes them.

Despite such proven loyalty, even De Peaux is starting to grumble about recent developments.

“The people are just disgusted,” he said. “The no-shows at the game reflect it. We always took pride here even when we weren’t winning, but this is a black eye for us.”

Speculating over causes for the decline in Packer fortunes has become a favorite pastime here. Some fans blame lax management, others blame Coach Forrest Gregg--himself a former player and Packer legend from the winning Lombardi days--and many say a roster housecleaning is in order.

“The community and Packer organization would be better off if those few individuals who are irresponsible would be eliminated from our midst,” said Green Bay Mayor Sam Halloian.

Nearly everybody seems to resent skyrocketing player salaries.

“I go to every game and I’d still go even if they never won again,” said Dennis Mohr, a 32-year-old truck driver. “But the mental mistakes they’re making on the field seem to be the same ones they’re making off the field. All this money, money, money. It’s distracting.”

Monsignor Mark Schommer, an official of the Roman Catholic diocese headquartered in Green Bay who once tried to make the team as a tight end, said the charges of sex crimes and dirty play strike an especially sensitive chord in a community still steeped in conservative, Midwestern morality.

“There’s a lack of sophistication here,” Schommer said. “This is a good home town, a safe town, a religious town. We are shocked by that kind of behavior and we don’t like to see it from people who really have everything going for them. Anytime talent is wasted or an opportunity lost, people are going to be disappointed and outraged.

“We’re a little disgusted with it. When does this stuff stop so we can get out and play some football?”

Times staff writer Wendy Leopold contributed to this story.