Identity of Denial
MARK FAINARU-WADA: I think the NFL has done an incredible job at marketing itself and turning itself into a spectacle, a sort of cultural part of our lives.
I channel my nationalist impulses through green and gold.
Green Bay is the 268th largest city in the U.S., nestled between Temecula, CA and Everett, WA. Two of its top five employers are a trucking company and a Georgia-Pacific paper factory. “Titletown” is a much easier nickname to advertise than “The Toilet Paper Capital of the World.” In the city’s newspaper’s end-of-the-year “Best of the Bay” awards, Red Lobster won “Best Seafood” and Starbucks won “Best Coffee Shop.” When people think of cities known for their arts or high culture, Green Bay might be lower than 268.
It is known for football.
To be from Green Bay is to understand that when you tell people your hometown, you are painted immediately as a football fan, regardless of whether you are or not. You probably are, though. It’s not really anyone’s choice. The city’s “skyline” is two hospitals and Lambeau Field. Every school’s Spirit Week includes a Packer Day. We are palpably sad after a loss. I went to Vincent T. Lombardi Middle School, for god’s sake.
Before age 11, the Green Bay Packers are everyone I wanted to be, besides my father and Lance Armstrong. Responsibilities were disregarded every Sunday for the spectacle. Why would I rake, when Brett Favre could throw 5 TDs and/or INTs in a single game? When autumn comes, the sight of green and gold (which is really more of a maize, but whatever) feels so right.
There really isn’t a lot of questioning behind it all. The Packers are very important. We’re easily the smallest market in professional sports. There is no .01% owner. There is a president, and there are tens of thousands of stockholders. They’re a year older than the NFL. The Packers are more than just a football team.
I just started student-teaching in Richmond, VA. When I wear my Packers lanyard, I am making a statement about where I come from. I’m not just telling students of my football allegiance, but my regional allegiance. I wear the colors because I have no other colors to pledge to.
I watched League of Denial this week. Unlike a lot of NFL fans, I’ve been following the concussion crisis media coverage closely since it began to break in 2009 within the New York Times (when I began my freshman year and when I read the Times frequently because it was available on campus). It’s always seemed far away, a battle fought by a callous professional sports league’s administration and some muckrakers.
But something about the documentary brought it all home. An enormous portion of my hometown identity is built upon built-up tau. How many fathers and sons have shortened their lives as I’ve cheered or jeered? How much of my city/state pride comes from numerous collisions that utterly wreck the brain from the inside out?
I don’t know if I can separate the brain damage from those comforting colors for much longer. I worry that my financial support will continue to feed into the league’s complacence. What if football really does die out in the coming decades? Where will that leave Green Bay’s future? Its finances, its fans, its identity? Green Bay could be just another economically depressed, Midwestern post-industrial city with little to cheer for, much less treat 20-25 days like July 4, Halloween, and Thanksgiving combined.
I haven’t ever had needed anything else to define my hometown. Curly, Bart, Vince, Ray, Brett, Reggie, and Aaron have all done that for me.
