The day was February 6, 2011- a day that will forever be my greatest sports memory. The Green Bay Packers are the third oldest franchise from the National Football League and while they initially formed in 1919 by Indian Meat Packing worker Curly Lambeau and Green Bay Press Gazette editor George Whitney Calhoun, the team officially entered into what was formerly known as the American Professional Football Association in 1921. The league was later renamed the National Football League in 1922, but it wouldn’t be another 44 years until the Packers would change NFL history and create the root of my passion for the Packers forever. In 1966, the Green Bay Packers won the first ever Super Bowl which then was named the AFL- NFL Championship where the two competing leagues held a competition between the winner of each respective league. This game would later be dubbed by media members as the Super Bowl, but their was was still a lingering question about the big game that millions of people gathered around their TV’s, mobile phones, and laptops, to enjoy with friends and family every year. See, up until the year 1970, the winner of the Super Bowl was awarded the NFL- AFL championship trophy; built every year by Tiffany and Co. Once the NFL and AFL merged into one league, the name of the trophy was in need of a different name and in the year 1970, the NFL decided to rename the Super Bowl trophy after the man who took his team to the first two big games and won each time. That man’s name was Vincent Thomas Lombardi. The trophy that was awarded to the winner of the Super Bowl each now engraved the name of the coach that made the Green Bay Packers a sports dynasty in the 1960’s and a team that would be a part of sports history for eternity.
Now, in my previous blogs I had mentioned how much of an important part the Packers are to my parents and the city of Green Bay. To say that important could be used to describe my parents love and passion for their hometown team would be a ridiculously large understatement. My parents attended games, watched games on TV, and stuck behind the Packers through the early stages of their lives when the teams was enduring two and a half decades of below average to middling mediocre play on the once revered frozen tundra. Green Bay couldn’t seem to get it right and my parents along with the rest of the city of Green Bay watched and supported them through thick and thin until finally in 1996, the team previously viewed by the rest of the league as a laughing stock, would return the Lombardi Trophy to the city that could once again could be embraced as Title-town.
The day was February 6th, 2011, a day that will forever be my greatest sports memory. On this day, The Green Bay Packers played the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl 45. Similar to their last Super Bowl victory after a more than extended hiatus from the big game, I, much like my parents was jubilant, enthusiastic, and thrilled to watch my favorite sports team get a shot to bring the Lombardi trophy back home. Former Packers head coach and winner of Super Bowl 31 once said, ” As important as it is to any other player or any other team, it means more to us”. That quote from the coach that led the Packers to their first Super Bowl win in nearly three decades was the feeling of not just myself, but every person who’s fandom was tride and true to the green and gold. That day, My mom, brother, longtime family friends Tony and Lindsay, their newborn baby Chloe, and I sat around a living room TV in my childhood home at 3848 Knapp St. Rd. to watch the Green Bay Packers play in North Arlington, Texas. At around 9 pm central time, the stage was set, the Steelers had the football on their own 33 yard line with 55 seconds left in the game. It was 4th and 5 and if the Packers defense, who had been tough and resilient all season long could make a stop, the Packers would be able to run the clock down to zero seconds and would bring their 13th championship and 4th Super Bowl trophy to the city of Green Bay. My mom brother, and I were standing in our living room my hand holding my moms and my brother hands tented up on his face. “Please, one more stop” was my the thought circling through my head. It was time, Roethlisberger took the snap from his center, hesitated for a couple of seconds then fired one last desperation throw to wide receiver Mike Wallace. In a split second the ball went through the hands of Wallace and fell innocently into the turf of AT&T Stadium. Jubilant, pride, excitement; there weren’t enough words to capture this moment as my mom brother, and I all jumped off the living room floor and exchanged hugs and joyful tears. It was at that moment in time that a figure in sports I usually despise, Joe Buck, said the words all Packer fans woke up wanting to hear, “The Green Bay Packers… have won the Super Bowl.
The G.O.A.T. 