A glimpse inside my world
■"A Packerville Party: Green Bay, Frozen Capital of the N.F.L., Draws the Faithful," by Bruce Weber, New York Times, 19 December 2004, p. SP7.
Mark Warren likes to say that he always needs to be careful what he says around me for fear it will go into the blog. He's kidding . . . I think.
Then again, perhaps he shouldn't had said that to me if he didn't want it in the blog.
Anyway, when Mark and I were talking in anticipation of our Packer weekend for the Vikings game a while back, he said his old friend Paul Begala (they go way back to TX days) told him that the weekend with me in Green Bay was going to be important for our future collaborations together—in effect saying, to know Tom Barnett is to know the Green Bay Packers.
Begala was right, of course, and Mark came away from the weekend knowing me so much better (as I, him), because not only was I in my element, but so was small-town east Texas Warren.
Green Bay is the smallest town (100,000) in America with a professional sports team. The reason it still has that time it that it is the professional sporting world's only publicly-owned team—meaning there is no effective owner, just a committee on top that looks out for the public's interest. The man who drew up those articles of incorporation was my grandfather, Gerald Clifford, long-time Packer executive (always without pay). That's why he's in the Packer Hall of Fame, an institution whose attendance rates are rivaled only by the "other one" in Canton, OH.
This article is a fun one, right down to noting the news-worthy event (in Green Bay, that is) of the sale of the life-size Brett Favre bobble-head doll for $18,000 (my son Kevin had his eye on that one, I can tell you).
My favorite quote in the piece (on tailgating): "They say we're a drinking town with a football problem. There's some truth to that."