Hey, it’s nothing personal.
I’ve now been in Green Bay for three days and I can tell you, it really does suck. I have a lot of friends here, my family is here, the Green Bay Packers are here, and I love them all, but there really is nothing to do here (except for tonight, when I will terrorize Lambeau Field, the Baltimore Ravens and the bars surrounding the stadium).
We told you about the Sports Illustrated poll revealing that many NFL players didn’t want to play in Green Bay, last month. Green Bay finished third in the poll behind Oakland and Buffalo.
Well, the “real” journalists in Green Bay finally picked up on said poll yesterday, when the Press Gazette’s Pete Dougherty wrote a piece speaking to several members of the Packers who defended Green Bay.
The typical response centered on two things – the Packers’ tradition and the family atmosphere of Green Bay.
“That’s insane that you wouldn’t want to play for a storied tradition like the Green Bay Packers. The only thing I can take into account is they’re not thinking the right way, they’re thinking about other things, they’re not thinking about what’s important, what it means to be a Green Bay Packer. I don’t think people understand that from the outside looking in,” linebacker Nick Barnett said.
“Until I visited. When I visited I was, ‘Oh, OK, I see why people (play here).’ And really it wasn’t me, it was my wife, she loved it. The people in the organization, they took her out on the town, and she liked the family atmosphere. She was sold and it didn’t take much to sell me,” defensive tackle Ryan Pickett said.
Both of those responses are on target. The Packers do have an unrivaled tradition and any player who doesn’t factor that into the equation is an idiot. Green Bay is also a town built on family, and for the most part, it’s a great place to raise one.
I’m not a player, though, and I don’t have a family. So, as much as the Press Gazette staff writers want to try and make themselves feel better about where they live, I’m sorry, but I can completely relate to the players who voted in that poll.
It’s cold – I went out on Friday night and as I was trying to walk from one bar to another about two blocks away, my balls froze to the side of my leg and my ears felt like they were going to drop off my head. Not comfortable.
There’s nothing to do – my activities since I’ve been here have consisted of going to several bars where the male to female ratio was at least 3-to-1 on the negative side, watching football, eating lunch at my grandmother’s, and doing a ride along with a friend who’s a cop in Howard. While I enjoy some of these things, they are hardly activities I want to pursue on a daily basis. Case in point: I had a friend come up from Milwaukee on Friday night. He left on Saturday because the bar scene was so terrible on Friday.
Hey, I’ve got nothing against this area. I grew up here. It helped form the person I am today (which is a real asshole, if you haven’t noticed). There are a lot of things and people I like here (summer is chief among them).
I have no beef with you if you want to live here. You’re a better person than I. You probably have things like family values, moral compasses, and simple wants and needs. Those things are not familiar to me.
So come tomorrow, if the weather permits, I’m going to take my thin-blooded, amoral, misogynistic ass back to Los Angeles.
But I’ll confirm this now. For the most part, Green Bay sucks.
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