Saturday, January 10, 2015

Revisiting the "Glory Years"

It may not be Ice Bowl II, but it's going to be chilly tomorrow when the Cowboys come to Green Bay for their divisional playoff. And when we start talking Ice Bowl, I start thinking about a record I checked out from the city library so many times I could recite chunks of it by heart...


The Packer Glory Years features radio commentary from the three-year run of NFL championships, culminating with Bart Starr's quarterback sneak to win the Ice Bowl against Dallas. It all happened before I was born, but throughout the perpetually 4-8 1970s (at least that's how I remember them), the Packer legacy was imprinted on me--largely through this record. And thanks to the glory of YouTube, I go back and listen to it again about once a year.

We played our share of pickup football, and I'm sure it had something to do with my concurrent fascination with tabletop football games. And there is the curious case of recording the play-by-play of a couple Super Bowls that HAS to be on a cassette somewhere or other still--with Troy Wiegand doing color commentary!

This was the match-up I was hoping for this week--Packers/Cowboys has been a great rivalry well beyond the Ice Bowl, after all. In particular, I'm thinking about the 1990s when Green Bay seemed like they just couldn't get past Dallas. Texas was a cruddy place to be a Packer fan in the early-to-mid 90s, though the emergence of the sports bar helped to mitigate greatly (and was a nice way for a grad student to blow steam before hitting the books again)...

I remember being at Adam & Yael's wedding reception in Boston, stealing updates at the bar during a particularly brutal Packer loss in Dallas during the 1996 playoffs. It became clear that GB needed home-field advantage, and it made every game of the 1996 season matter--which was extra fun, because I was back home in Arizona that fall, saving up for my first trip to Lithuania. Dad and I would go to a sports bar on the west side of town after church--it was our thing. I could wax poetic about that year's Super Bowl win--against who? oh yes, the Patriots!--but let's double back to this weekend's game with the Cowboys.

In the greater scheme of things, football means a lot less to me than it did 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Still, tomorrow's game takes me back to elementary school in Manitowoc: playing football, playing football board games, listening to records of football games. As DH drags our chairs around the living room, and I'm washing dishes listening to this recording, it all comes back.

How can I not smile?

No comments: