AMERICA'S REAL TEAM

By Steve Wulf

A foot of snow two weeks ago left Green Bay, Wisconsin, with a white Christmas and the Packers with a problem: Lambeau Field had to be cleared to prepare it for the National Football Conference divisional playoff game on Jan. 4. So Ted Eisenreich, the Packers' buildings supervisor, did what he usually does in similar situations. He put out the word in the mill town of 96,466 that he needed 200 shovelers to dig out the field at $6 an hour. Dozens had to be turned away, while still others offered to work for free. "I don't want the money," a 50-year-old Packer fan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "I just want to help."

A few days later, a posse of media descended upon the Dallas Cowboys' training complex in Valley Ranch, Texas, to do a different sort of digging. Less than 48 hours after the Cowboys beat the Minnesota Vikings 40-15 in their wild-card playoff game, Dallas police announced they were investigating a claim by a 23-year-old waitress that wide receiver Michael Irvin held a gun to her head as she was sexually assaulted by offensive tackle Erik Williams and another man, unidentified, in Williams' home after the Viking game. Bad news is nothing new to the Cowboys, who have already endured the drug suspensions of Irvin, defensive end Shante Carver and defensive tackle Leon Lett last year, or to the players in question. Irvin, arrested for drug possession last spring while in a motel room with an ex-teammate and two "self-employed models," is currently in the first year of a four-year probation sentence; Williams, who was once accused of sexual assault by a teenage dancer (the case was settled out of court), is only now off probation for the drunken-driving offense that caused the knee injury that kept him out of the latter half of the '94 season. Irvin and Williams are either easy targets or--easy--the biggest fools in the land. Irvin, maintaining his innocence, told the media after Wednesday's practice, "I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys go rewrite, reprint, rerun all these things about what happened Sunday night when you find out that I wasn't even at Erik's house...Can you run it with the same intensity that you ran this other stuff? I want to see if it's possible."

Such is life with the franchise billed as "America's Team." On the other hand, far to the north, life is so sweet for the Packers that many are coming to view them as America's real team. Owned by snow-shoveling townspeople rather than a manure-shoveling megalomaniac like Jerry Jones, dedicated to reviving the glorious tradition of Lambeau and Hutson and Lombardi and Hornung, led by a truly charismatic defensive end (Reggie White) and a throwback quarterback (Brett Favre) who has learned to confine his swashbuckling to the field, the Packers are ready to do the Lambeau Leap into the nation's heart. Their 35-14 victory over the San Francisco 49ers on Saturday on the "frozen tundra" of Lambeau Field put them on a collision course to meet their natural rivals, America's Most Wanted, in the N.F.C. Championship Game next Sunday. (The defending Super Bowl champion Cowboys played the arriviste Carolina Panthers Sunday as TIME went to press.)

The Packers and Cowboys, linked by history and excellence and separated by style and region, seem to play each other constantly, not just on the field, where the Cowboys--having won the last eight contests--maintain a 13-10 edge, but also in sports bars and on call-in shows and even on august editorial pages. The question of which organization is really America's Team was taken up by Paul Gigot in the Wall Street Journal in response to a piece written by Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard. Barnes had maintained that the Cowboys' status as the national team was justified because the city, the owner, the fans and the character of the team were all reflective of conservative America. Gigot, who confessed that his mother is one of the Packers' 1,915 shareholders, countered that Green Bay embodies tradition, communal loyalty, volunteerism and decentralized management, and is therefore the conservative's Dream Team.

(Inspired by Gigot's confession, I too must reveal that the Wulf family has an investment in the Packers, though ours is of a more emotional nature. Our son John has been a Packer fan most of his life, which is now seven years long, despite having never set foot in Wisconsin. Let's see, he has a No. 4 Brett Favre Packer jersey, a No. 92 Reggie White Packer jersey, a Packer sweatshirt, a very cool Packer T shirt, two Packer baseball caps, one Packer knit cap, a Packer checker set, a Packer piggy bank, a miniature Packer helmet and several autographed Packer photos, which he wrote away for, all by himself. He is currently reading Run to Daylight!, by Vince Lombardi. So for his sake, we would like to see Green Bay go all the way.)

The Packers are also the romantic's Dream Team. It's a Wonderful Life gets mentioned in Green Bay stories almost as often as "frozen tundra" and "Titletown, U.S.A." do. Perhaps the best tradition, among the many, in Titletown is the bike ride. Every year on the first day of training camp, local kids ride their bicycles to the practice field, and each player adopts a girl or boy, whose bike he rides from the field to the locker room for the rest of the year. (Some Cowboys apparently have a similar tradition involving "self-employed models.") In an era in which players charge money for autographs, and athletes look upon fans and the media as so many flies, the bike ride is not just quaint. It is therapeutic. And in an era in which team owners hold franchises for ransom, and city-states fight city-states for them, it is positively heartening to know the Packers will always be in Green Bay. How's this for a bylaw? If by some civic catastrophe the Packers--now valued at $165 million--must be sold, the proceeds go to Green Bay's Sullivan-Wallen American Legion Post.

The town owns the team in more than name. Coach Mike Holmgren likes to tell the story of one of his first visits to the grocery store after he left the 49ers to take the Green Bay job in 1992. As his cart approached that of a little old lady, she looked at him and said, "Hey, California, go out and kick some butt." Make no mistake: the city on the Fox River and Lake Michigan is not exactly paradise. Just like Bedford Falls, it has its dark side. African-American players, isolated and marked as Packers, once likened the town to a prison. After a series of Cowboy-like incidents in the mid-'80s, a Wisconsin legislator proposed that a penitentiary be built in Green Bay "so the players can walk to work." The Packers looked so inept on the field that there were doubts the team that won the first two Super Bowls would ever make it back. There were even suggestions that the team should move.

America loves a good rags-to-riches story, and for the Packers, theirs began anew in 1992. From out of nowhere, or rather the New York Jets, came a new general manager, Ron Wolf. He hired Holmgren, the crackerjack offensive coordinator for the 49ers who can go both ways--tough and tender. That same year Wolf traded a first-round draft choice to the Atlanta Falcons for backup quarterback Brett Favre, who soon replaced incumbent Dan Majkowski. Favre has since replaced Bart Starr in the hearts of many Packer fans as he has driven the team first to respectability, then possibility and now probability. Patrons at Shenanigans, the bar owned by legendary Packer guard Fuzzy Thurston, get misty-eyed talking about the play Favre made on Dec. 8 against the Denver Broncos: with 23 seconds in the first half and the Pack up only 6-3 on the Denver 14, Favre stiff-armed onrushing All-Pro defensive tackle Michael Dean Perry, scanned the field for a receiver, made eye contact with Antonio Freeman, then drilled the ball between two safeties for the TD that put the Broncos away. In one play, he demonstrated strength, poise, acumen and a great arm.

Helping Favre along has been White, who was signed as a free agent in '93. Besides being the best defensive end in N.F.L. history, White is an ordained minister who keeps every Packer on the same page of the hymnal. Even more impressive, perhaps, is what White has done to Green Bay. He has enlisted the townspeople in his crusade to rebuild burned-out black churches, a mission begun when his own church burned down in Knoxville, Tennessee, the week before last year's loss in the N.F.C. Championship Game to the Cowboys.

A few months after that game, Favre tearfully admitted he was addicted to the painkiller Vicodin. Last summer he checked himself into the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and emerged a new man. He swore off alcohol and married his high school sweetheart, the mother of their five-year-old daughter. But soon thereafter, his best friend back in Kiln, Mississippi, Mark Haverty, was killed in a car accident; the driver, who police say was legally intoxicated, was Brett's brother Scott. A month after that, his sister Brandi was arrested in connection with a drive-by shooting in Louisiana. Through it all, Favre managed to stay clean and to lead the Packers to their best season since 1966. Said Holmgren: "Given everything he's had to deal with, it's been an amazing year. I don't think there's anybody that I know who could have handled it any better."

Last week Favre was named the N.F.L.'s Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press for the second year in a row. "Honors are great," said the quarterback, "but what I'm after is the Super Bowl. If I don't win that, everything else will go by the wayside." With a victory in Super Bowl XXXI will come redemption--for Favre, for the Packers and for Titletown. What could possibly be more American than that?

--With reporting by Bob McGinn/Green Bay

With reporting by BOB MCGINN/GREEN BAY