My dad wouldn’t drive a Ford if his life depended on it but somehow he knew a guy who knew a guy and he, my friend Rich, and I worked the Punt, Pass, & Kick trials in Milwaukee for a couple of years. PPK is a competition for kids where each kid gets to punt, pass, and kick a football and the one with the most total yardage wins.
We’d drive out to Hart Park and dad would track the distances while Rich and I would chase and return the balls. After a morning of that he’d would take us to the bar he bowled at on Wednesdays and we’d get burgers and bowl a few frames before heading home. Pretty fun Saturday. One year they let us keep a ball.
Traditionally the PP&K champions got to show their stuff at halftime of a NFL game (there’s famous footage of Kansas City coach Andy Reid participating in PP&K at the LA Coliseum). One year dad was pretty sure he had us lined up to work our PP&K magic on the field at halftime during one of the Packer games in Milwaukee (the Packers played some games in Milwaukee for many, many years). I was beyond excited as I had never been to a Packer game. I was a die-hard Packer fan as an eleven year old: I kept scrapbooks; I kept statistics real time during the games; and I wasn’t above launching a prayer or two should the Packers find themselves trailing in the fourth quarter.
We got to County Stadium super early. There was a snafu so dad and I waited at will-call. We got there early enough to see the Cleveland Browns arrive. I wasn’t much for autographs so instead I gave him the football card biographies of the players as they walked in (“That’s Paul Warfield, he went to Ohio State!”, “That’s the QB Frank Ryan, he’s a math genius!”, “There’s Lou The Toe Groza!”). Unfortunately Jim Brown had retired a couple of years before.
While my dad continued to wait, he let me walk around and take in the tailgaters. Tailgating is a serious sport in Wisconsin and I had never seen it up close and personal. I was wide-eyed the whole time.
Eventually it got to kickoff time and we had to reconcile with the fact we weren’t getting in. As we were driving out of the lot I heard the biggest cheer I had ever heard in my life to date. Turns out Travis Williams returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown.
My dad was super disappointed but that experience, despite going to dozens of Packer games subsequently, is one of my top memories of Packer football. Only surpassed when, some 25 years later, Rich, now living in New Orleans and I, now living in Minneapolis, reunited to see Brett Favre and the Packers win Super Bowl XXI.
