White, Packers Fit Nicely Together

Reggie White was fond of saying God told him to go to Green Bay in 1993 to sack sin and quarterbacks.

White was the first big-time free agent to switch teams, shocking many when he left the Philadelphia Eagles and picked the Packers over San Francisco.

Not only did “The Minister of Defense” help restore the glory to Green Bay, but he proved to other players, particularly blacks, that Wisconsin wasn’t a winter wasteland.

And Green Bay embraced him. White said he didn’t know what was better, playing in a town with such a deep history of great football players, or in front of all those bare-chested cheeseheads.

“Brett [Favre] is the icon here, but this is still the house that Reggie helped build,” fullback William Henderson said Sunday, hours after learning of White’s death at 43.

Before White’s arrival, Green Bay was the place coaches threatened to send malcontents, the NFL’s very own Siberia.

While White was being wined and dined, he’d ask team executives to point out the inner city where he could minister on his days off. The Packers had no such blight to show him, so then-general manager Ron Wolf and then-coach Mike Holmgren feared their courtship was futile.

“I told him, ‘You’re already a great football player. Come here and you’ll be a legend,’ ” Wolf recalled Sunday night.

Sure enough, White, who combined size, speed and strength like no defensive lineman before him, would find a way to mix his faith with football in Wisconsin.

“That’s what changed the football fortunes of this franchise. It was huge,” team President Bob Harlan said. “Everyone thought the last place he would sign was Green Bay and it was monumental because not only did he sign, but he recruited for Green Bay and got guys like Sean Jones to come here. He sent a message to the rest of the NFL that Green Bay was a great place to play and before that this was a place people didn’t want to come.”

After a quarter-century of futility, the Packers rose again, reaching the Super Bowl twice and winning it all after the 1996 season when White set a record with three sacks in the Packers’ 35-21 win over New England.

“He had a lot to do with my success in the National Football League,” said Holmgren, now coach in Seattle. “He was just a wonderful player, first of all. Then as a person, he was just the best.... I’m a better person for having been around Reggie White.”

It was a common sentiment, shared across a stunned NFL on Sunday.

“I was trying to fight back tears today ... and then I’m like, I don’t care, I’m going to cry,” said former Packer teammate Eugene Robinson, now a commentator for the Carolina Panthers, where White spent his final season.

Opponents game-planned around White, and so did the Packers.

“I think his enthusiasm and his fun playing football,” is what stood out about him, Holmgren said. “I’ve never seen a guy enjoy it more. It was contagious. He set the tone for the whole football team that way.

“You couldn’t help but get caught up in it, players and coaches.”

He took that same passion to the pulpit, to schools, to the streets, to the homeless.

“He was absolutely passionate about everything,” Robinson said. “That’s what I loved about Reg; he was just so passionate. I always told him, ‘Man, you’ve always got to have a cause.’ ”

White made headlines in 1998 with a speech to Wisconsin lawmakers in which he blasted homosexuality and used ethnic stereotypes when describing the gifts each race brings to the tapestry of humanity. He later apologized for offending so many people but stuck by his Biblical beliefs.

Preaching, praying or playing, White was fervent.

“He had a passion about getting on the corner, getting on the edge,” Robinson said. “I told him, ‘You know what they should do -- they should get a highlight package of you and give it to every defensive end in the league.’ ”

White’s impact on the Packers didn’t end with his departure from Green Bay after a fantastic farewell season in 1998, when he was selected NFL defensive player of the year after recording 16 sacks despite playing with a bad back.

Green Bay is the only team that hasn’t had a losing season in the 13 years since free agency and the salary cap were introduced in 1992, and no team has a better record than the Packers’ 156-80 mark in that span.

Nobody has worn No. 92 in Green Bay since White left, and the Packers had planned to retire his jersey next season.

“On Christmas Eve, [Packer Coach] Mike Sherman and I were talking about it on the plane back from Minnesota,” Harlan said. “I told him I wanted to do it before we have to do Brett’s number. Mike said, ‘Let’s do it at the opener next year.’ What a great idea, I said.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t get it done in time.”

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Sunday’s key injuries:

* Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger left Sunday’s game against Baltimore in the fourth quarter because of injured ribs. It was unclear whether the injury was serious.

* New England defensive end Richard Seymour left the win over the New York Jets because of a leg injury in the third quarter.

* Seattle tackle Walter Jones was taken for X-rays on his left ankle during the third quarter against Arizona.

* Pittsburgh cornerback Deshea Townsend broke his right hand against the Ravens, but said he can play with a protective cast.