The Green Bay Packers were my first favorite pro football team back in high school and college. I remained a fan even though most of my interest in the NFL shifted to the Saints and Cowboys.
After all these years of pulling for the Packers except when they played Dallas or New Orleans, I’m disenchanted with them.
Their prima donna quarterback Aaron Rodgers has turned fans off with contract disputes, threats to leave the team, demands for more authority, deceit about vaccines and other issues.
The old Packers won five league championships in the 1960s with legendary coach Vince Lombardi and great players like Bart Starr, Jimmy Taylor, Ray Nitschke, Jerry Kramer, and Max McGee.
Lombardi was the epitome of the old-time, Bear Bryant type football coaches and was one of the most quoted men in the history of the game.
It’s a little hokey, but his old saying, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win,” has been splashed on signs in high school and college locker rooms for decades.
Besides dominating the league in my younger years, the Packers had a strong Louisiana flavor. Fullback Jimmy Taylor played at LSU, and receiver Max McGee starred at Tulane.
The Packers were not just good, they were colorful. If there had been awards for flamboyant characters, McGee would have been the MVP.
Lombardi liked to go over fundamentals of the game in his first meeting with new players. He held up a ball and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” McGee said, “Coach, slow down, you’re going too fast for us.”
McGee earned a reputation for partying with pretty ladies and missing curfews. Lombardi caught him a few times and imposed small fines.
In those ancient times before multi-million-dollar salaries for players, McGee was making $35,000 a year.
Lombardi told him one night before a big game, “McGee, if you miss curfew tonight, the fine will be $5,000. If you see a lady worth that kind of fine, let me know. I want to go with you.”
I talked to McGee several times when we were about to induct him into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame here in 1987 and asked if he needed assistance with travel arrangements. He said he didn’t.
At the pre-banquet reception, two trucks pulled in front of the coliseum. McGee, his wife and three other couples in their finest cocktail attire piled out of the cabs and beds of the pickups.
They flew in on a private jet and asked the airport manager to call them a taxi. There were no cabs here back then, so the manager and a friend delivered them to the festivities in their dusty trucks.
Aaron Rodgers needs a lesson in such lack of pretension…
The Grand Ole Opry was broadcast for the 5,000th time a couple of week ago. WSM Radio in Nashville carried the first show just two months after the station went on the air in 1925. It was called the WSM Barn Dance at the time.
My parents, brother and I used to gather around a big console radio in the living room and listen to the Grand Ole Opry, Louisiana Hayride, the Gillette Friday Night Fights and old-time radio shows like Fibber McGee and Molly.
My mother danced by herself in her stocking feet to Opry music.
I thought of that when I saw Porter Wagoner and Connie Smith at the Grand Ole Opry House years later and visited the historic Ryman Auditorium, long-time home of the Opry.
It’s good to know the music I grew up with and still love is going strong after 5,000 radio shows.
NOTE: Reflections is taking a few weeks off for the holidays and will be back next year if the Good Lord’s willing and all…REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES