Packed With Charm : Home of the NFL’s Oldest Team Is a Quaint Place With the Atmosphere of a College Town

We’re looking for Lombardi when we happen upon a guy and his girl.

They are watching the Green Bay Packers practice. With warm smiles and scrubbed faces, they could be any young Midwestern couple spending a late-summer afternoon watching their favorite football team.

Except they are standing on the trunk of their car. They have been standing there for nearly three hours.

If they don’t stand there, they can’t see the players, who are across the street, behind a tarp-covered fence.

There are small dents in the late-model Buick from where the couple have shifted their weight. With a video camera, the young woman films the players as they walk from the field.

Chris Hoffman and Rebecca Ellwein have driven 13 1/2 hours from Hazen, N.D., for this.

And they are not alone.

For a solid block, on cars with license plates from Minnesota to Illinois, fans are standing on trunks and looking for glimpses of green and gold.

It has been like this every day for a month.

“Not much I can say but, it’s the Pack,” Hoffman said.

“My back hurts,” Ellwein said.

*

The assignment was to fly to Milwaukee, drive two hours north to an industrial town with a population of about 90,000 and report on the rebirth of the oldest and most charming of NFL teams.

The Green Bay Packers, who will play the Rams in Milwaukee on Sunday, are 75 years old this season. But they don’t look a day over 25.

With a new coach, new quarterback and new demeanor, they won six of their last seven games and finished 9-7 last season. They leaped to the next level in the off-season and if they perform as expected will advance to the playoffs for the first time in a decade.

To the league’s best young passing combination, Brett Favre and Sterling Sharpe, they added eight free agents, among them $17-million defensive end Reggie White.

Management gave Sharpe a decoy in Mark Clayton. And the Packers gave Favre another weapon by trading for running back John Stephens. They hired some big linemen to make a young team a little meaner.

Under Coach Mike Holmgren, a former San Francisco 49er assistant, they are combining a 49er offense with a Philadelphia Eagle-style defense, hoping for the best of both worlds.

The organization, which has won 11 league championships--plus the first two Super Bowls, before the NFL-AFL merger was complete--has not been back to the Super Bowl since 1968. Some are saying this could be the season they return.

That was supposed to be the story.

But driving past the Titletown motel, past the statue of a Packer receiver making a leaping catch, and approaching the giant green-and-yellow Crayola box that is Lambeau Field . . . the question arose.

Are there still ghosts? Are there still remnants of the team that won NFL championships five times in seven years in the ‘60s?

Where is the steam that billowed from Bart Starr’s mouth as he barked signals on frigid December afternoons?

Where is that gap between the front teeth of the Packer linebackers who celebrated each sack with a smile?

Where is the ferocity of Vince Lombardi, he of the horn-rimmed glasses, long overcoat and scowl?

The locals say that Packer success awakens a certain spirit in this town. We wondered if we could find it.

Considering the relentlessness of those old Packer teams, it should have been no surprise when it found us.

*

Looking for Lombardi led to the parking lot outside Lambeau Field.

Every late summer and fall afternoon, for as long as anybody can remember, boys have gathered here on bicycles.

When the players emerge from their stadium locker room in full uniform before practice, most of them pick a boy and a bike.

The players ride the bikes across the parking lot to the practice field while the boys jog alongside, toting the players’ helmets.

“It’s one of the amazing things that only happens in Green Bay,” says Rich Moran, a guard who so enjoys the ritual that he gets exclusive rights to one boy’s services each year by paying him $40 a week.

This year, more than 100 boys and bikes have turned the quaint ritual into a demolition derby, and the Packers changed their safety rules when a young boy was hit by a car crossing the street between the parking lot and practice field.

White and Favre tried riding the bikes, but they couldn’t move because of all the autograph seekers, so they now travel by car.

“Can you imagine what they’ll be doing if we actually win a few games?” said Favre, a friendly Mississippi native with chipped teeth and a thick accent. “Hopefully, we won’t go out this year and fall flat on our faces.”

Even if they do, these fans will be there to pick them up. The Packers have sold out every non-strike game at Lambeau Field since 1959.

“I realized I was someplace special the first time I went to the ticket office,” Moran said. “The man in front of me was just seeing how much longer he had to wait for season tickets.

“The lady at the window said, ‘Eight more years.’ And the guy had already been waiting 10 years. Ten years!”

This college atmosphere has impressed White, the former Eagle standout who was wooed by teams in big markets such as New York and San Francisco.

White’s main reason for picking Green Bay was probably the money, which includes $9 million this season. But since he arrived, he says his decision has been validated by occasions such as fan photo day, when 20,000 fans probably shot 40,000 rolls of film.

And he still can’t believe the Packers’ first intrasquad scrimmage. White walked out of the tunnel at Lambeau Field and was stunned to see 30,000 fans.

“For just a scrimmage,” White said. “That gave me chills.”

Some of those same fans broke into spontaneous cheers of, “Reg-gie! Reg-gie!” in bars around town when White signed last spring.

And the team was greeted on the first day of summer practice with chants of, “Super Bowl! Super Bowl!”

“This is the most unique sports town in the country,” White said. “To win a championship here would be like winning it nowhere else. The people appreciate the game and the team like nobody I’ve seen.”

*

Looking for Lombardi led to a Green Bay phone book.

Flipping through the white pages, between Verna Nitka and Marshal Nitti, a name jumped out.

Ray Nitschke.

We had no thought of talking to him. But there he is, the Hall of Fame linebacker and legendary symbol of Packer toughness.

We picked up the phone and dialed.

“Yeah?” Nitschke barked over the phone.

Why is his number listed?

“Why not?” he said. “I get a few drunks call and bother me, but not that much. Hey, nobody remembers old Ray Nitschke.”

We told him we do.

“I haven’t seen this many people talking about the team in a long time, since our days,” said Nitschke, 57. “But it figures. We’ve been down for 20 long years. They need something to cheer about. They need this.”

If the Packers win their division title, will it feel like the 1960s again?

“Yeah,” he said. “Only crazier.”

*

Looking for Lombardi led to the Bay family restaurant.

It was 9 a.m. on a weekday. A dozen men and women were gathered at a long table.

They were drinking coffee and rolling dice and talking about the Packers.

One man mentioned something about work. He had to throw a quarter in a Packer mug. Another man mentioned something about a city councilman. Another quarter.

They laughed and joked like family, which figures, because they are.

This is Martha’s Coffee Club, a diversified fan group that has been meeting for 46 years for the sole purpose of talking about the Packers.

Every day for 30 minutes, they talk about who should play right tackle, and how about that kick-return team, and shouldn’t those holdouts get their fannies back into camp?

The club initiation fee: One juicy Packer rumor.

“We still have some beautiful rumors going around about the ‘60s,” John Ebert said. “You should hear the one about this relative of Lombardi and. . . . “

This theme is continued down the road at the 50 Yard Line bar, where a tiny radio station with the best call letters in football--WNFL--puts on a sports-talk show with Ray Scott as co-host.

Yes, this is the same Ray Scott who announced Packer games during the glory years on CBS television. His low-key calls--”Starr (pause), Dowler (pause), touchdown”--made him nearly as famous as Lombardi.

He is 74, and has recently endured everything from a heart attack to kidney failure to a cancer scare. But he left his family in Minnesota for the football season so he could broadcast in Green Bay again.

“I look around now, it is like the Lombardi era all over again,” said Scott, who has rented an apartment in Green Bay for the fall. “It is beautiful.”

*

Still looking for Lombardi led across the street back to Lambeau Field and Bob Harlan, Packer president.

“I think we’re the best-kept secret in the NFL,” he said with a smile.

Harlan is not the Packer owner because there is no single owner. That has been the real secret to maintaining this team as a local landmark, a historical monument, a pretty park.

The Packers are owned by 1,869 shareholders throughout the world, many of whom live in Wisconsin. The corporation pays no dividends. Every bit of profit goes back into the organization.

“We’re a football company,” Harlan said. “That’s all we do. That’s all we care about. So no matter what happens on the field, people know that we are trying to do the right thing.”

For example, they are the only team in football that plays nearly half of its home schedule--three of eight games in recent years--in a different city. Reason? Harlan feels it is the right thing.

The Packers lose about $1.5 million a year playing in Milwaukee, where County Stadium seats fewer people than Lambeau Field and has no luxury boxes. The football-operations experts constantly beg Harlan to end that relationship. He refuses, although he was quoted recently as saying that if hopes for a new stadium in Milwaukee are not realized, he might reconsider.

“We have been there since 1933 . . . those people have been very good to us,” Harlan said. “This is a state team, and we have to recognize that.”

Harlan also approves spending millions on players such as Reggie White--yes, they have the money--because he feels it is the right thing.

He tells of walking through a parking lot in Madison, about 120 miles from Green Bay, before an exhibition there this summer.

“A man walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, ‘Thank you. We’re going to have a great team this year,’ ” Harlan said. “I thought, 120 miles away and he’s saying we . I thought that was special.”