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Home of the Champions. Nowhere does the game generate more excitement than in Green Bay, Wis., a city of 63,000 that has been hooked on pro football since 1919, when only sissies wore helmets and the mark of a player was the gap between his front teeth. Green Bay has much to be proud of. It has its Neville Public Museum, its Service League, and its 65-piece symphony orchestra. Its paper napkins wipe the mouths of 93 million Americans. Its citizens are kind to animals and hospitable to strangers; they even manage a polite chuckle when visitors joke about the city's 139 bars and its unsavory reputation as a gangster hangout during Prohibition. But on two subjects the town has no tolerance: the Green Bay Packers are the best football team in the world, and Vince Lombardi. 49, is the world's greatest football coach.
Few rah-rah college towns can match the unbridled devotion of Green Bay for Lombardi and his doughty athletes. There has not been an empty seat in City Stadium (capacity: 38.663) since 1959; the only way anyone gets to see a game is by buying a season ticket—and even that, like joining a country club, takes years of waiting. Green Bay's youngsters save their pennies in kiddy banks in the shape of green-and-gold-suited Packers. Portraits of Packer players hang on soda fountain walls; restaurant diners eat their soup off "Know-Your-Packers" doilies. The pastors of some Green Bay churches end their sermons with a short, earnest prayer "for our Packers," and the police force feels the same way. "The only crime here." says Chief Elmer Madson, "is when the Packers lose."
Romantic Superstars. And why not?
The Packers are the current wonder team of football, a group of superstars romantically molded out of a gang of has-beens. Four years ago, they were the lowest of the low; now they are world champions.
This season, they started out by winning ten games in a row, by scores that ranged from the redemptive (9-7 over Detroit. 17-13 over Baltimore) to the ridiculous (49-0 over Chicago. 49-0 over Philadelphia). But in this league of experts, it is an article of faith that on a given Sunday any team can beat any other. Everyone was gunning for the Packers, giving it the old college try. Finally, on Thanksgiving Day in Detroit, the gung-ho Lions took the Packers apart, pad by pad. In the first half, Detroit's massive linemen smothered Green Bay Quarterback Bart Starr for losses that totaled 79 yds.; the Lions built up a 23-0 lead and held on to win, 26-14.
Furious with defeat, the Packers rebounded, flaying the Los Angeles Rams 41-10, and the San Francisco Forty-Niners 31-21. As of last week it was certain—barring a last-game loss to the last-place Rams—that the Packers were heading for one of those classic challenges of sport: a return engagement with the New York Giants, in the title playoff Dec. 30. Last year, it was the Packers who were on the way up, feeling mean and hungry; they had lost the 1960 playoff to the Philadelphia Eagles. This year it is the Giants who yearn for revenge—for last year's crushing 37-0 defeat.