jnells
Cheesehead
Great read!
LINK: http://sports.espn.go.com/travel/news/story?id=3149179
GREEN BAY, Wis. — The first place Lambeau Field hits you is right in the nose.
It's 9 a.m. on game day here, and already the alluring aroma of brats grilling on Weber grills is rarifying the eastern Wisconsin air. The smell wafts through the gray skies of a crisp November morning, drawing you into the Lambeau Field experience as if it were a trap play drawn up by Vince Lombardi himself.
No GPS is necessary to locate Lambeau Field. The telltale signs surround the 50-year-old home of the Packers, inviting you in to the kind of big-time football experience that happens only in the NFL's smallest city.
The streets around Lambeau – which rises out of a neighborhood that's part industrial, part residential – are named for Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr and Mike Holmgren.
Just a couple of blocks down Lombardi Avenue sits the one and only Tundra Lodge. The neighborhood McDonald's eschews the corporate-mandated red tile roof in favor of Packers green with gold stripes. A bridge in town is named for Ray Nitschke.
This is Titletown, USA, in all its Sunday-morning glory.
Like the city of Green Bay (population 100,353), Lambeau Field appears far too small to house so much historical significance. There are no towering upper decks, just the original seating bowl surrounded by the red-brick veneer of a renovated exterior. A stadium this intimate can't possibly hold 72,615 fans, 12 NFL titles and one of professional sports' most unique game-day experiences.
Maybe that's why the Lambeau Field aura stretches so far beyond the stadium's famous tundra, to myriad tailgate parties and caravans that roll into town from across the state.
Eight times a year, a sellout crowd arrives from all points in Wisconsin – and beyond – to squeeze into the benches of the NFL's oldest stadium. Another 74,000 stand by on a waiting list. At noon, Mason Crosby will officially kick the game off. For Packers faithful, however, the fun begins long before game time.
Game day in the NFL's version of a college town starts early, in many cases, far from Green Bay.
Today's contest is for "Gold Package" season seat holders, meaning many in the crowd will journey from Milwaukee, which is located 119 miles south. You couldn't get lost between Milwaukee and Green Bay if you tried. Just find a car with a Packers logo on it, and fall in line. The caravan will deposit you in the right place.
The Lambeau Field exit off US-41 is Lombardi Avenue, and if that doesn't clue you in to the fact that you're within a Bart Starr sneak of pro football's de facto capital, that aromatic mixture of charcoal and brats filtering through the neighborhood surely will.
Football hangs heavy in the air, too. Outside Lambeau, touch football games break out in the parking lots. An endless string of oversized inflatable Packers make the surrounding streets look like New York City during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Nearby, residents turn their homes into parking lots, while virtually every corner of the surrounding neighborhood plays host to a tailgate party.
One such party goes off at Brett Favre's Steakhouse, which stands in the shadow of Lambeau Field. Here, behind an eight-foot-tall, black-granite monument to Favre, the parking lot is transformed into a giant outdoor celebration of the Packers and their iconic quarterback. Twenty-five bucks gains you admittance to an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink party that begins at 10 a.m. and rollicks under green-and-gold-stripped canopies until 30 minutes before kickoff – leaving just enough time to make it to your seats.
Inside the restaurant, fans watch a pregame show while wolfing down the Breakfast of Super Bowl Champions (four strips of bacon, scrambled eggs smothered in cheddar cheese, country-fried potatoes and a buttermilk biscuit), and swilling Leinenkugels and Bloody Marys (which in Wisconsin come with a beer chaser).
A television talking head makes an announcement: "Brett Favre," the voice says, "is the biggest surprise of the NFL season." The Sunday brunch crowd roars in approval. That's not only our quarterback you're talking about, that's our host.
Next door to Brett Favre's Steakhouse, a warehouse-size merchandise outlet called the Jersey Store offers the mind-bending sight of a man clad in a Favre jersey buying a Favre jersey. One, presumably, for laundry day.
The store does a brisk business, as do makeshift stands selling bootleg gear ("Got Brett?" T-shirts seem to be the hot item) set up along the streets leading into the stadium. In virtually every instance, the buyer of new Packers gear is wearing old Packers gear. You can never have too much, it seems.
Save for a few minor tweaks, the Packers have been wearing the same uniforms all the way back to the days when Lombardi was merely a name on a sweatshirt, and not the name of a street and a trophy. That being the case, it's not as if Packers fans need to concern themselves with keeping up with the latest fashions. And that only serves to make the constant ringing of cash registers at merchandise outlets in and around Lambeau all the more remarkable.
Green Bay is the unofficial epicenter of pro football, and, today, it also feels like the hub of sports marketing.
After the Jersey Store, the next stop is a Fuzzy Thurston-hosted tailgate party at the Resch Center, home of the Green Bay Gamblers junior hockey team. Thurston, a Packers guard from 1959-67, was a member of five NFL title teams and two Super Bowl champions.
The 75-year-old Hall of Famer signs autographs at $10 a pop, while fans chow down on the requisite beer and brats. Thurston reportedly prepared for the 1967 Ice Bowl game, when the temperature was 15 below zero, by guzzling "about 10 vodkas." I can think of no better pedigree for a Lambeau Field pregame party host.
Given the open bar, Thurston isn't the only one answering to the name Fuzzy on this morning. Some partygoers participate in a contest, donning frozen jerseys in hopes of scoring game tickets.
It's less than an hour before kickoff now, but the tailgate parties show no signs of slowing.
Before I make my way to the stadium, Ken Wachter, the Resch Center's president & CEO has a tip: "John Madden loves the chili at Chili John's inside the Atrium."
That's recommendation enough for me.
I make my way past the Don Hutson Center – the Packers indoor practice facility – and through a parking lot, where I pass the twin statues of Vince Lombardi and Curly Lambeau that line up like a pair of split backs outside the stadium. There, an orderly procession of Packers fans take turns posing for photos, before entering the contemporary glass and steel "Atrium" that was attached to stadium's exterior in 2003.
The Packers have done a remarkable job of modernizing Lambeau without erasing its history. The 2003 renovation kept the original seating bowl, with its unobstructed sight lines in tact, while adding 11,600 seats (at a cost of $295 million).
The five-story, 366,00-square foot Atrium – home to the team's administrative and football operations offices – could just as easily be its own attraction at Disney World. Packersland anyone?
The Atrium also houses the two-story team store, which has a twisting line longer than the one outside Space Mountain, and a Leinenkugel Lodge bar. I've been in town roughly two hours, but already I can figure out that that's just about everything a Packers fan needs. Curly's Pub (named for Curly Lambeau, the stadium's namesake) is here, as well, and so is an ice-cream parlor called Frozen in Time.
Beneath the Atrium sits the Packers Hall of Fame, and its subterranean location is apropos, given that it's a repository for all manner of buried treasure. The HOF, which spreads over 25,000 square feet, attracts more than 100,000 visitors annually and offers an in-depth history lesson. We learn that:
• Curly Lambeau was the team's founder and first coach.
• Then-Vice President Richard Nixon was on hand at the stadium's original dedication, Sept. 27, 1957.
• Lambeau Field is the oldest NFL stadium and is among the elder statesmen of all major American professional sports' homes.
The payoff to the self-guided tour is the site of the Packers' three Lombardi Trophies, and if the significance and history of this franchise's place in NFL history hasn't hit, yet, the name on the trophy offers a vivid reminder.
Meanwhile, in the stands, seemingly every single seat is filled by the time the two teams line up for the noon kickoff. There are no stragglers at the concession stands, and absolutely no one is stuck in traffic because the streets are deserted.
This alone offers a nice insight into how it is that Green Bay is home to a thriving NFL team while Los Angeles has lost two.
Even if you're not a Packers fan, chances are you have a personal connection to Lambeau Field. There are reminders of history everywhere. Yellow, grated railings separate the fans from the field, and they look just like they did during the famous Ice Bowl game in 1967. And the diagonal chalk striped end zones are right out of the Paul Hornung era.
My own passion for the NFL has been dormant since 1994, when the Rams left southern California for St. Louis. I'm now a neutral observer of pro football, interested but not engaged.
And, yet, a trip to Lambeau Field stirs old passions. Just being in the company of Lambeau offers a connection to the late, great L.A. Rams. A visit here somehow feels like meeting up with an acquaintance with whom I share in common a dearly departed mutual friend.
The Packers are lining up against Brooks Bollinger and the Vikings on this day, but, for the life of me, I can't help but see ghosts of Roman Gabriel and the Rams.
The Packers, of course, aren't going anywhere. Given that 112,015 stockholders publicly own them, there is no threat of a Georgia Frontiere or Al Davis selling out the locals for greener grass.
Across the aisle from me sits a gray-haired man who's pushing 80. Clad in a vintage Bart Starr jersey, and one of the interlocking "GB" caps that was favored by Dan Devine, he's taking full advantage of the opportunity to grow old with his team.
To my left, a fan wearing an ensemble of cheesehead, Packers dress shirt and green and gold, tiger-stripped Packers Zubaz pants straight out of 1990 chows down on green-and-gold nachos. Then he makes a first quarter announcement:
"Seriously, I love watching Adrian Peterson," he says, "but today, we're gonna break his neck!"
Thankfully, the Packers show a little more restraint. They knock Peterson from the game in the third quarter, but the diagnosis is a torn knee ligament that would keep him out for a couple of games.
For a crowd that is so impassioned and well lubricated, most of the rowdiness is good natured, and no fights break out. The rivalry with Minnesota, I'm told, is friendly. If you want to see real hatred, come back when Chicago is in town.
Halftime offers an opportunity to sample the chili John Madden raves about. Chili John's has been a Green Bay intuition since 1913, when Lithuanian immigrant John Isaac opened a restaurant adorned only with a sign that read, "Chili." Locals soon began calling the place "Chili John's" in honor of the owner, and the name stuck.
The chili comes in mild, medium, hot and extra-hot recipes and, as in Cincinnati, comes with spaghetti. As a broadcaster, Madden might have become a caricature of himself, but he's still spot on as a food critic.
Lambeau Field's unparalleled offering of pro football pageantry – and beer & brats – is timeless. At a balmy 54 degrees at kickoff, the tundra is nowhere near frozen today, but it's still hard not to see Bart Starr's breath rising in the air near the goal line he crossed to the win the Ice Bowl in 1967. The players change, but the uniforms – and the passion – remains the same.
Still, there is a reason to make your Green Bay pilgrimage sooner than later: The opportunity to see what has become the NFL's version of Sinatra at Carnegie Hall won't last forever.
The name on the building says Lambeau and the name on the street is Lombardi, but, for now, Green Bay is Brett Favre's town.
And, sure, there's only one regular-season home game left on the 2007 calendar and at least one playoff game, but a trip to Lambeau Field can't be rushed. Plan it out … and hope Favre is around next season.
Like Lambeau, the 38-year-old Favre appears to have undergone a recent renovation. In this, his 246th consecutive start, he completes 33 of 46 passes for 351 yards and three touchdowns.
His three-yard pass to running back Vernand Morency in the second quarter gives him more that 60,000 career passing yards, which, it seems, correlates perfectly with the number of Leinenkugels consumed at Lambeau on a Packers game day.
In the fourth quarter, Favre throws a pass that either Darren Sharper or Cedric Griffin could easily intercept. But the two Vikings collide, and the ball caroms right into the hands of Ruvell Martin for a touchdown. Martin then Lambeau Leaps his way into the stadium's front row, getting lost in a celebratory mob of green and gold humanity.
Given that many in the crowd are Packers shareholders, the Lambeau Leap amounts to the boss giving one of the employees a pat on the back for a job well done. So much for Mark Cuban being the coolest owner in pro sports.
The Packers, their quarterback, and their community ownership are having one of those afternoons where nothing can go wrong. When it's over, the Lambeau scoreboard tells the tale: Next to a Sargento Cheese ad, the score reads, Green Bay 34, Minnesota 0.
"Today," Favre says after the game, "was awesome."
Spend a day at Lambeau Field and you'll know the feeling.
LINK: http://sports.espn.go.com/travel/news/story?id=3149179
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