Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing [Side Roads], an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.
We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully on the Our Philosophy page.
Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; and shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.
Today we look at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.
by Thomas J. Lee
I grew up just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin. For the last thirty-odd years I have made my home in or near Chicago, Illinois. Each of these cities has a team in the National Football League. Both teams are as old, as venerable, and as legendary as the league itself.
Their rivalry is storied. Think of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Think of Palmer and Nicklaus. Think of Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Think of Manchester United and Liverpool, of Ali and Frazier, of Evert and Navratilova. Rivalries all, each pales against the heroic test of wills that has defined the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears since their founding in 1919.
The Packers and the Bears have played each other 181 times, twice a year for almost an entire century. They have each won more world championships than any other team. Curiously, only once before, in 1941, have they faced each other in post-season play, and never before have they played each other for a championship. That will change Sunday afternoon, when the Packers and the Bears face off in Soldier Field on the shore of ice-laden Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago. Without question, it will be their greatest game ever. Our grandchildren will probably hear stories of it.
The winner of this game, for the National Football Conference championship, will go to the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl is traditionally the crowning glory of American football, but this year it is so incidental as to be all but irrelevant and anticlimactic. Rather, this weekend's game, between the Packers and the Bears, is what really counts for these two teams. For them it is all that counts. If the winner of this game loses the Super Bowl, it will still be victorious in the eyes of its fans, for it will have vanquished the only team that matters.
Now I love Chicago. Truly I do. I went to graduate school here. I raised my family here. For years I wrote a newspaper column here, and I have spent most of my career here. I love the lakefront, the architecture, the museums, and the symphony. I love Navy Pier and Lake Shore Drive and the Archicenter boat tour and Wrigley Field and the University of Chicago and the rickety old Red Line and even O'Hare Airport. Almost all my friends live here, all but a few of them benighted Bears fans, and I even love them.
But I am not, and I never will be, a fan of the Chicago Bears. Never. Never, never, never. To the very marrow of my bones, to the synapses of my brain, to the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers, to the valves of my heart and in the plasma of my blood, I am a fan, through and through, of the glorious Green Bay Packers, and that is the way it will always be.
It has always been thus, too. As far back as I can remember, the Green Bay Packers were the very center of every autumn in my hometown, a few miles down Highway 41 from Green Bay. My brother actually attended the famous Ice Bowl, the NFC championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, when the temperature at kickoff was 13 degrees below zero. Today, I own one of those gaudy yellow foam cheese heads, and I even have a frozen brick of genuine Lambeau Field turf in my kitchen icebox. I really do.
Green Bay is an improbable city to have a major sports franchise. It has a population of scarcely 100,000 people, in sharp contrast to the millions in greater Chicago and other cities with NFL teams. That alone makes the Packers unique, but there is much more to the story.
The Packers are the only major sports team to release their balance sheet every year, and they are the only team to be owned by the general public and operated on a non-profit basis. The team's by-laws call for all its assets to be given to charity in the event the team is ever moved from Green Bay. That would be unlikely in any case; since 1960, the Packers have sold every single seat for every game in their stadium. Over the course of a half-century, not one ticket has gone unsold, and there is a waiting list of thousands. No other team in major sports can claim anything remotely close to that.
Even the great George S. Halas respected the Packers. In the 1950s, Halas, the founder and longtime head coach of the Bears, drove the 200 miles to Green Bay during the off-season to urge the citizenry to build a stadium for the Packers, which were struggling through a sustained slump and had little immediate prospect for success. Until then the Packers were playing at the Green Bay East High School field (just coincidentally, the alma mater of legendary New York Times sports columnist Red Smith). Without a new stadium, the NFL would move the team from Green Bay. Voters listened to Halas and approved the new stadium.
Still the hapless Packers continued to lose. Two years later a granite statue of a man named Vince Lombardi arrived from the East Coast. He would be the new head coach and general manager of the sad-sack team. The year before his arrival, the Packers had lost all but one game in their new stadium. That season still stands as their worst ever.
The next year, under Lombardi, the Packers began winning. They started the season with a victory over the Bears and finished with more wins than losses. The year afterward, they won their division; and the year after that, they won the world championship. They would win the world championship four more times under Lombardi, including the first two Super Bowls. Today the Super Bowl trophy carries his name.
There's an important lesson for leaders everywhere in the Lombardi play book, for the great coach won all those championships with most of the same players on that pathetic, losing team he inherited: Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jimmy Taylor, Jerry Kramer, Ray Nitschke, Forrest Gregg, Max McGee, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, and more. They were all losers, and they knew it. Lombardi came along and made them believe in themselves, and so they did. Once they believed in themselves, they played like winners.
You can expect both teams to play like winners Sunday. The Bears have come out of nowhere to win their division; at the start of the season, experts were predicting they would win only four of their sixteen games. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler passed and ran for two touchdowns each last Sunday. The Packers have survived more than a dozen significant injuries, and they have rolled over two excellent teams en route to their NFC championship berth. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is at the top of his game. The Packers beat the Bears three weeks ago in the regular-season finale, but the Bears prevailed back in September.
The convenient and conventional thing for me to say here would be: "May the best team win." But I cannot bring myself to do that. Not for this game. Not for any game between these two teams. No, my sentiments are all to one side. They are all on the side of the venerable, the estimable, the great and glorious Green Bay Packers. I can only speak my truth, and this is it.
GO, PACKERS!
Addendum on Sunday, 23 January 2011: The Packers won, 21 to 14, in a hard-fought game on loose turf that made proper footing difficult. Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler was hurt in the second quarter, and third-string quarterback Caleb Hanie drove the Bears to two touchdowns in the second half but also threw two interceptions, one of which ended the game. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked masterful on an early touchdown drive but was otherwise lackluster. Fortunately, the Packers defense stepped up to the challenge.
Addendum on Sunday, 6 February 2011: The Green Bay Packers went on to win the Super Bowl and thereby become the new champion of the National Football League. The Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31 to 25, after pulling out to a dramatic lead early in the game but losing some momentum in the second half. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who completed three touchdown passes, was named the game's most valuable player. For the Packers it is their thirteenth world championship; no other NFL team has nearly as many. (The Bears are in second place with nine championships. The Steelers have six championships to their credit.)
(c) Copyright 2011 Thomas J. Lee All rights reserved.
