A Brief Packer Encounter

Now that football season has begun, and the Green Bay Packers have won their first game, it's time to share my low brush with fame and my close encounter with the celebrated team.



I was born in 1960 and so came of age as a football fan in a world where the Packers seemed to win everything, every year, and were peaking as I came into my first conscious football memories.  I remember watching the Ice Bowl on our landlord's television--we lived on the second floor of a duplex and they lived on the first and had one of the few color televisions on the block.

The Packers used to play a charity basketball game in Milwaukee with the local college basketball powerhouse, The Marquette Warriors (as they were then known).  My Cub Scout Pack (#287) attended one of these games in 1970, during the off season following the Packers' victory in what later came to be called Super Bowl I.

I don't remember the score.  I'm guessing the Warriors won the actual game.   After the game's conclusion tables were brought out and the attending Packers were seated behind them while all the spectators were invited to come onto the court to make a circuit of the tables and get the autographs of the players present.  (It was clearly another time.)

Awe-struck I made the rounds, only disappointed in that my current hero, Bart Starr, was not there that night.  As the quarterback of Vince Lombardi's team, number 15 was the most popular player with ten-year old boys in the state of Wisconsin.  But the player who became my all-time favorite Packer--and still remains so--number 66 Ray Nitschke--was there.  He was clearly the most famous Packer present that night--in 1970 he had already played for the team for a dozen years.  He was a famously fearsome presence on the field, scowling and crouching over opposing players he'd just leveled with a maniacal glint in his eye.  Off the field, with his thick-rimmed glasses on, this rather ordinary, balding man presented an unremarkable appearance.  You understood why he had titled his autobiography Mean on Sunday because on the other six days of the week he carried himself more like everyone's bland uncle.

Ray Nitschke and a fallen opposing player

Again, reflective of another time, as I shyly presented him with my autograph book, my father, who had been standing just behind me, asked if he could take a picture of me with the future Hall of Famer.  I took a few nervous steps around the table thinking I would crouch next to Nitschke but to my surprise one of the fiercest linebackers to ever play in the NFL reached out over the table and with the hands that had caused havoc on the playing field lifted me up and sat me on his lap.  My dad took the picture.

I don't know what happened to that picture of me in my Cub Scout uniform sitting in Ray Nitschke's lap.  Some 27 years later, while I was working for the publisher HarperCollins, I was doing the marketing on a new reference title Total Football, done in cooperation with the NFL.  The NFL had offered to supply a famous, retired player to act as spokesperson for the book and I was delighted when I heard it was going to be Ray Nitschke, who had become a kind of permanent keynote speaker at the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Canton, uniting the game's glamorous present with its gritty past.  It was also the year following the Packers return to the Superbowl after three decades.  I looked forward to the opportunity that would surely arise to meet him again.

But it wasn't to be as I left HarperCollins for another job before the book came out and Ray Nitschke died the following year.

That photograph at that basketball game would be enough of a memory for one night but I also remember another player much more vividly because I even remember what he said to me, though I can't remember anything Nitschke might have said to me as I nervously sat in his lap in front of my delighted father.

Center Ken Bowman, along with guard Jerry Kramer, opened the path for Bart Starr's game-winning goal-line sneak in the 1967 "Ice Bowl."  By 1970 he had played with the Packers for six years and had actually earned his law degree from the University of Wisconsin while still an active player.

As a ten-year old I wasn't actually sure who Ken Bowman was.  Like most kids I focused on the quarterback and the flashier players, and didn't appreciate the men who worked in the trenches.

When my turn came to get Bowman's autograph I slid my book across the table to him and he proceeded to write a large, flourish of a signature that took up the entire page.  The book was passed to the player next to him--and I can't remember who that was--and with several more players to come I said something like "Please don't take up the whole page like that guy (pointing towards Bowman) did."  I'm sure the tone I said it in made me sound like one of the precocious, annoying children often set up as foils for W.C. Fields.

The Packer in front of me laughed and Bowman looked over to me, frowned, and said loud enough that even my hearing-imparied father could get the words "Oh, I bet you're the kid who doesn't flush the toilet."  I'm not sure why he said that.  It might have some claim to being an occasionally accurate statement, at the time.

But I remember it as the day I took a verbal block and was soundly knocked on my ass by a Green Bay Packer lineman.