[CBFF] Bears Fans, Take Time to Stop and Smell the Roses

[Steve Behrens]

((( Even More!!! )))


    As Green Bay suffers, an old Packer hopes for better days  Updated
12/6/2006 1:05 PM ET
E-mail<http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2006-12-06-bart-starr_x.htm?POE=SPOISVA#>|
Save<http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2006-12-06-bart-starr_x.htm?POE=SPOISVA#>|
Print<http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2006-12-06-bart-starr_x.htm?POE=SPOISVA#>|
Subscribe
to stories like
this<http://asp.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/rsstrans.aspx?ssts=sports%7Ccolumnist%7Clopresti>
[image:
Subscribe to stories like
this]<http://asp.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/rsstrans.aspx?ssts=sports%7Ccolumnist%7Clopresti>

 The news from Green Bay gets worse and worse. A 26-0 loss to the Chicago
Bears ... 35-0 to the New England Patriots ... 38-10 to the New York Jets.
Scores so sour, even the cheese heads have gone bad.

Lambeau Field is hallowed NFL ground. Lombardi's house. The current
occupants are 4-8, and 1-5 at home. These guys ought to turn the pictures of
the old Packers to the wall.

It seemed a good time to talk to one of those old Packers.

"Obviously as an alumnus, you're hurting for them," Bart Starr said over the
phone. "They're a young team. They're growing."

Starr, the cool driver of the Lombardi dynasty, retired as a quarterback
when he was 37. Same age as Brett Favre this season.

Favre must be the great dilemma for the Green Bay faithful. It is always
painful to see champions go, but also anguishing to see them fade. Nothing
lasts forever, no matter how hardheaded and stouthearted the competitor.
Some have suggested time has run out for Favre.

Bart Starr is not one of them.

"Brett needs a stronger team, a consistent team," he said. "When he's had
that, they've won some games. When they haven't, they don't.

"The only thing missing this year is the lack of team around him. When I saw
him early in the season, he looked great. He looked healthy."

But did he look like a guy who should be fishing on the weekends instead of
ducking defensive ends?

"No."

Starr is 72 now, retired in Alabama, still the model of stability. The
17th-round draft pick who played 16 years with the same team has been
married 52 years to the same woman.

He makes occasional rounds as corporate or cause spokesman. Currently it is
for SecureHorizons, a service for Medicare beneficiaries. So he is out and
about this winter, 40 years after he took the Packers to a new creation that
would be called the Super Bowl.

He won the first Super Bowl MVP, before Brett Favre was born. And the
second. How old is Starr? He played in a Super Bowl when tickets cost $10.

Four decades later, Starr's career will not die. At least one moment of it —
the quarterback sneak for a touchdown in the final seconds of the Ice Bowl
against Dallas in 1967, an NFL championship game played at 13-below zero in
Lambeau Field.

Last week, before the Jets played in Green Bay, their coach showed them a
tape of the Ice Bowl. There was Starr again, promising Lombardi the sneak
would work — "Run the play then, and let's get the hell out of here,"
Lombardi told him, which left Starr chuckling as he went back to the huddle
— and diving over the goal line. A moment forever tied to frozen tundra.

"The first thing that comes to my mind now is how cold it was," Starr said.
"The second is how good the Dallas Cowboys were. Nobody ever gave them
enough credit."

There would not be many more days like that. The Lombardi era ended the next
season. He died three years later. Starr played on, injured and subpart, out
of loyalty to the new staff. He retired in 1971.

"I stayed because of coach Lombardi leaving. A couple of other players made
the same mistake," he said. "I should have stopped then. No question."

They are aging men now, those Packers champions. Some of them are already
gone. The quarterback now speaks for Medicare programs. "When we see each
other," Starr said, "we don't shake hands. We hug."

They probably also talk about the current Packers, who lose badly in the
cold at Lambeau Field, and how times have changed.