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By: Gino Giovannetti
Bears Vs. Packers:
More Culture Clash Than Rivalry
August 31st, 2006
CHICAGO – In an era of expansion, free agency,
corporate sponsorship, multi-million-dollar contracts and billion-dollar
broadcast revenues, Sunday’s opening game between the Chicago
Bears and Green Bay Packers at venerable Lambeau Field in Cheeseville
may represent one of the few remaining rivalries in professional sports.
Webster defines rivals as “one of two or more striving to reach
or obtain something that only one can possess,” e.g., an NFC
North Division, Conference or Super Bowl title. By that definition,
it is indeed a rivalry.
But Webster goes on to define a rivalry as “one that equals
another in desired qualities: peer.” And “having the same
pretensions or claims: emulate.” By that definition, this is
no rivalry.
Players Have More In Common Than Fans
Granted, players on the respective teams are, in fact, peers
and inevitably emulate each other. They’re predominantly Generation
Xers or Yers who make seven or eight figures a year, drive gas-guzzling
luxury cars that come fully loaded with loaded pistols, have cribs
built and furnished by professional architects and designers, sport
tattoos, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, Rolexs, and Sean Jones duds.
Many come from single-parent homes, run four-point-something 40-yard
dashes, like big booty, Southern cooking, video games, Fitty Cent,
Chingy, Chamillionaire, Lloyd Banks, Tyra Banks, Three 6 Mafia, Sean
Paul and whatever Puffy is calling himself this week.
That’s why win, lose or brawl, when the game ends, players from
both sides will kneel down on one knee in a circle of prayer and thank
God that they made hundreds of thousands of dollars for three hours
of work and can still get back to the Bella Lounge or Carnivale for
a piece of grouper or groupie before the last call for Krystal. (The
Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia states that the grouper features a “stout
body and large mouth and gills that form a powerful sucking system
that sucks their prey in from a distance, swallowing prey rather than
biting pieces off of it.” After reading that, I did not feel
compelled to corroborate similarities between the former and the latter.)
So as far as the “peer” criterion is concerned, this could
be a rivalry.
But these two pioneering organizations historically have rarely had
the “same pretensions or claims.” Lombardi’s Packers
owned the Bears and the rest of the NFL in the ‘60s. Both teams
inhaled during the ‘70s. Ditka pummeled Forrest Gregg’s
thugs in the ‘80s. Favre won 18 of 20 games during the ‘90s
and early ‘00s. And Lovie and Rex won three of the last four,
including two in a row at Lambeau and both games last year.
So there hasn’t been much of a rivalry on the scoreboard for
the past 50 years. And this year doesn’t look too promising
either for the retooling Packers.
So Close, Yet So Far Away
Being born on Chicago’s Northwest Side and growing up in Southeastern
Wisconsin, I think I have a fairly objective as well as historical
perspective on the so-called rivalry. Chicago and Green Bay fans are,
in fact, bitter rivals for at least six hours a year. Gambling has
a lot to do with that; especially the Packer fans' predilection for
begging for points but rarely granting them. But they are not “peers”
and they do not try to “emulate” each other.
That’s why it isn’t so much a rivalry as it is a culture
clash.
Despite how homogenized are society has become, Chicago and Green
Bay fans are different in almost every way. Chicagoans shop Gucci,
Prada, Armani, Wang, Klein, Karan and Lauren.
Packer fans shop Oshkosh B’ Gosh and anything with “dash/mart”
after it.
Bear fans eat at restaurants with names like NoMI, Les Nomades, Topolobampo,
one sixtyblue, Wave, mk and Japonais. And they drink wines like pinot
noir with corks in them.
Packer fans eat in halls, lodges, and drive-thrus. Whatever they eat
is usually staring back at them from a nearby wall or mantle. If they
eat fish, which they do every Friday night that they aren’t
being breast-fed, they deep fry it before putting mounds of tartar
sauce on it. When they really want to go out on a culinary limb, they
boil the fish. And their wine list is apt to include Miller High Life,
“The Champagne of Bottled Beers.”
In short, Bear fans eat sushi. Packer fans ice fish for it.
Chicago has the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science
and Industry, Millennium Park, Navy Pier, Shedd Aquarium, the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera—and Oprah.
Green Bay has the Packer Hall of Fame, Fuzzy Thurston’s Steakhouse,
Brett Favre’s Steakhouse, James Lofton’s stairwell, the
Titletown Brewery…did I mention the Packer Hall of Fame?
Chicago has expressways named after deceased former presidents like
Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan.
Green Bay has streets named after dead football coaches like Lombardi
and a guy who would rather die in Seattle than live in Green Bay.
With all due respect to Marie Lombardi, if I was uprooted from Manhattan
to Green Bay I’d have a quaffed a few thousand vodkas myself.
Bear fans will arrive for Sunday’s game by charter jet, helicopter,
limousine, Lexus, Mercedes, BMWs and SUV’s equipped with the
latest digital electronic gadgets.
Packer fans will arrive in Dodge-driven Ram Tough trucks, Trans-Ams,
Camaros, VW vans, RVs and buses. Almost all with Packer and/or #3
Dale Ernhardt, Jr. decals on them.
Bear fans will be adorned in cashmere, leather, suede and wool.
Packer fans will be wearing foam cheese heads, green-and-gold polyester
number 4 jerseys, denim bib-overalls, snowmobile suits, hunting boots,
and fluorescent-orange hunting paraphernalia. (Chicagoans hunt, too.
We’re just smart enough to wipe our fingerprints off, ditch
the gun, and keep our kill in the trunk where it belongs—not
on the hood.)
The Cohen Brothers could just as easily have named their film “Mukwonago”
as “Fargo.”
Don’t get me wrong. There will be a number of not so sophisticated
Bear fans in attendance from Chicago’s South Side who are still
celebrating the White Sox World Series championship. If a referee,
player, coach, fan or sideline reporter is assaulted by a drunken,
belligerent degenerate with a tattoo-covered torso and a penchant
for smoking crack and showing crack, he or she will probably be from
this despicable contingent.
Get Over It
On Monday morning, the Chicagoans who were in attendance and those
who watched on television will return to the Chicago Board of Trade,
the Mercantile Exchange, the Merchandise Mart, Dean Witter, LaSalle
Bank, Leo Burnett, Lettuce Entertain You, the Chicago Transit Authority,
City Hall, Second City, etc.
The only discourse about the game will consist of a water cooler comment
or two about a vicious hit, a diving catch, a spectacular return or
a blown call.
Talk of the game will quickly be supplanted by talk of the kids, the
morning traffic jam, escalating property taxes, tomorrow’s trip
to China, the workout at the East Bank Club, dinner at Gibson’s,
live theatre, and Mayor Daley’s latest see-no-evil/hear-no-evil
extortion plot.
Packer fans who were in attendance and those who rooted from tree
stands will return to their green-and-gold tractors—including
those that don’t run like a Deere®—and their green-and-gold
farms, barns, houses, garages, and trailers beneath their green-and-gold
Packer flags adjacent to their green-and-gold mailboxes.
On the farm, at the dairy, in the cafeteria, at Century 21, Wal-Mart,
K-Mart, Kohl’s, Target, Dairy Queen, Burger King, KFC, the body
shop and the credit union, Packer fans will be calling for an end
to McCarthyism and pleading that their hillbilly hurler finds the
Vicodin and the Jack Daniels before he has to have his prematurely
graying head surgically extricated from his own endzone.
So barring an upset on Sunday, Bear fans will be able to boast that
“Our African-American players from Florida, Georgia, Alabama,
Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California
beat your African-American players from California, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.”
While talk of a football “rivalry” will be tabled for
at least until New Year’s Eve, the culture clash will intensify.
Because for disgruntled Packer fans, the game represents a battle
of rural versus city, silo versus skyscraper, Milwaukee versus Chicago,
Wisconsin versus Illinois, blue collar versus white collar, liver
sausage versus foie gras, Protestant versus Catholic, gentiles versus
Jews, producers versus consumers and, ultimately, Good versus Evil.
R.I.P. Brett
Considering the fact they managed to dislodge Mike Brown’s facemask
from Favre’s riddled chest only days before training camp started,
I don’t think a mismatch of this magnitude should be conducted
on the Lord’s Day, much less be broadcast on national television
during daylight while impressionable children are awake.
I implore outgoing Commissioner Tagliabue that if the game must be
played to preserve the integrity of the game and League that it be
contested in a closely monitored environment with paramedics and flight-for-life
helicopters nearby.
Furthermore, I recommend that the game be televised only on pay-per-view
cable between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. so that the relatively
small number of Dairyland children traumatized by the carnage of another
Bears mauling can be hypnotized into believing that what they witnessed
was merely a horrifying nightmare.
Finally, for the CheeseHeads’ sake, let’s hope that the
Packers somehow make it a game, that Brett Favre remain in one piece
for the duration of his 17-week wake, that more deer are killed than
deer hunters, and that we can continue to consume untainted, un-tampered
with dairy products from the barren wasteland that is Wisconsin.
Because not only are the Packers all the CheeseHeads have to live
for up there. But otherwise, they may start migrating to the other
49 states. And that wouldn’t be good for Illinois, the nation,
or Western civilization as we know it.
Gino Giovannetti is a member of the “Jonathon Brandmeier
Morning Show” on “The LOOP,” WLUP 97.9-FM. He is
a graduate of the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and
also attended the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University.
The views and opinions of Gino do not represent those of WLUP Radio,
Emmis Communications, Inc., or anyone with a brain the size of a walnut.
Gino@WLUP.com
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