New day in old rivalry
CHICAGO — The Green Bay Packers are headed to town for the NFC championship game and Chicago Bears fans are starting to become, well, a bit unbearable.
Turn on the radio in Chicago and you’ll hear no shortage of jokes about Packers fans, many of which have something to do with low intelligence. There’s been plenty of laughs over a Green Bay newspaper headline that read “On To Chicaco.” Many more center on the dietary habits of fans north of the “Cheddar Curtain,” like this one:
What do you call a 400-pound Packer fan? Anorexic.
All of this sniping, fun or otherwise, makes sense since the NFL’s oldest rivalry has had 92 years to simmer. Vince Lombardi, Don Hutson, Bart Starr, Ray Nitschke, Bronko Nagurski, Dick Butkus, Mike Ditka and Walter Payton — all of those names and more add to the rich history, but so does the relationship between the loyal fans in the two states.
John Cochara has been hearing from his so-called friends who decided he was celebrating a Packers win over the Bears a little too much in 1995 and duct-taped him to a stop sign.
“They’re saying, ‘You better watch out, there are a lot of stop signs out there,’” said Cochara, whose punishment outside a bar just south of the Wisconsin-Illinois state line included a sign over his head that read “Packer Fan.”
On the other side of the state line, Packers fan Frank Emmert Jr. of Lake Superior, Wis., reminisced this week about the time he survived a small plane crash in 1995 thanks to the foam cheesehead he put over his face seconds before impact.
“The FAA credited it, not me,” said Emmert, 52.
Mike Pyle, who played center for the Bears for nine years, including the 1963 championship season, recalled how his coach and owner of the Bears, George Halas, brought a message over to Packers coach Vince Lombardi before a game.
“He went to the locker room door at Lambeau and said, ‘We’re going to whip your (expletive),”‘ said Pyle, 71.
Yet, with all that bad blood all those years, you’d have to go back to the week after the attack on Pearl Harbor to find the last time the Bears and Packers met in a playoff game. (The Bears won on their way to the championship).
This time around, the winner of Sunday’s showdown goes to the Super Bowl at Cowboys Stadium.
Not that the Super Bowl seems to matter much: Packers fans said beating the Bears at Soldier Field would be a wonderful cake, with a Super Bowl victory serving as the frosting.
“There would be nothing sweeter than to watch the Packers take that George Halas trophy at Soldier Field,” said John O’Neill, whose outfit at Packers games is a green bishop’s costume and miter, with Lombardi’s face on it. He’s appropriately known as St. Vince.
It’s the same story in Bears country.
“For guys who have followed the Bears all their life and truly hate the Packers, yeah, this is their Super Bowl,” said Mark Foster, 54. “We can lose 50 to nothing in the Super Bowl to Pittsburgh or the Jets, but if we beat the Packers, who cares?”
