Early Packers Shaped Super Tradition

NEW ORLEANS — Imagine a Super Bowl free of superficial excess. Nothing billed as super, just a championship football game between the best teams from two leagues. No Roman numerals. No gaudy week-long extravaganza of jock-world power, sex and money. No babbling corridor of sports talk shows. No press events extolling the creative marvels of halftime television commercials. No scalped tickets going for $1,300. The stadium one-third empty at game time.

It happened once, 30 years ago in Los Angeles, when professional football inaugurated the tradition that has come to be known as the Super Bowl.

The sporting scene seemed far different then, yet the central theme that day was precisely the same as the one here for Super Bowl XXXI. The Green Bay Packers were playing and they were expected to win big.

The case can be made that Green Bay, the franchise from the smallest market in professional sports, singularly shaped the largest single event in sports, for better and worse. At least on the field.

By overpowering the Kansas City Chiefs in that first game and the Oakland Raiders the next year, the Packers began a three-decade trend of Super Bowl blowouts.

In the public’s eye, the event became larger than life only after provincial Green Bay left the stage, in 1969, when Joe Willie Namath boldly guaranteed that his underdog New York Jets from the American Football League would defeat the blue-blood Baltimore Colts.

But the Packers were there first, solid and dominant. And now, finally, they are back, after a 30-year era of mediocrity that their fans refer to as “the Lost Years.”

As they return, the Packers carry with them an inevitable load of great expectations. Experts said they would win.

Their fans, the notorious cheeseheads, who have swarmed down to New Orleans by the many thousands, assumed that they would win.

The long streak of NFC success (12 in a row) suggested they would win. And the legend of Vince Lombardi demanded that they win.

Mike Holmgren, the coach of the modern-day Packers, deals with those pressures more than anyone. He seems particularly well suited for the task. In his fifth season as Green Bay’s coach, all of them winning efforts, Holmgren, 48, is an outwardly easy-going former high school history teacher from San Francisco whose will to win happens to be as fierce as the old man’s.

He handled the pressure of the past when he took over the team in 1992, by embracing Lombardi’s ghost rather than trying to run away from it.

Old Packer greats such as Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis, Jerry Kramer, Fuzzy Thurston, Willie Wood and Paul Hornung were invited back into the family.

They flooded the locker room two weeks ago when the Packers won their first NFC title since the 1967 Ice Bowl, and many of them roamed around New Orleans this past week.

The other pressure is somewhat easier for the coach to ignore, in rhetoric if not in reality. He starts by noting that he is the personal underdog in his coaching matchup with Bill Parcells, the Patriots coach, who won two Super Bowls when he was the leader of the New York Giants.

Holmgren told his team that he was the “decided underdog in the coaching comparison, but I’m going to show up and we’ll let the players decide.”

Parcells did not win those two titles by chance. He is a tough, occasionally ornery fellow who alternately inspires and intimidates his charges--closer to the Lombardi archetype than Holmgren is.

But the strangest motivation that the Patriots have this week is that they want to win one for their soon-to-be erstwhile mentor.

The worst secret in New Orleans is that Parcells is bailing out, following the money to New York and the hapless Jets.

Another way that Holmgren tries to ease the pressure of being so heavily favored is by ignoring it.

“The idea of being favored, whether it’s the Super Bowl or any other game, we don’t deal with that a lot,” Holmgren said. “We’re going to play football up to our standard.”

Holmgren and his Packers have been favored in every game this year except when they lost to the Cowboys in Dallas, one of only three losses against 15 victories.

They entered the season with one pre-eminent goal: winning it all.

Whether it was superstition or a history teacher’s appreciation of the disastrous effects of hubris, Holmgren excised one phrase from his team’s vocabulary all year even as they worked toward that goal.

In dealing with the press, players and coaches were not allowed to say the words “Super Bowl.”

Defensive end Reggie White, the all-time NFL sack leader, helped keep the team focused by repeating, after every big victory, stay cool, not yet. “When we win the Super Bowl, we can celebrate for the rest of our lives,” he would say.

Lombardi is known for his immortal quote: “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.” Less popular, but equally revealing of his character, was his lament about the addiction of success. The more you win, he said, the less satisfying it becomes, yet the more you need to win again and again.

Lombardi won five titles in nine years. Holmgren has never won one as a head coach. White has never won one as a player.

The Packer fans have not won one since Lombardi left.

To them, there is one thing worse than the addiction of success. That would be losing to the New England Patriots. But winning is not everything to Mike Holmgren.

“My philosophy on this game and games we play in our season is that you have to enjoy the journey,” he said. “It’s too difficult to win a game in this league, so enjoy it. It’s seven months of your life for a coach.

“There are no days off. You eat a lot of meals off plastic plates in the office. You don’t get to see your family as much as you would like. Just to say if you lose one game, whether it’s the Super Bowl or some other, that you should write off the season as a failure, that’s wrong.

“There will be a period of mourning certainly, if that should happen. But then you get ready for the next year.”