Packers, playoffs and a pandemic
Fans need creativity to capture late-season feeling
Lisa Conard isn’t a Green Bay Packers employee or related to one, so she wasn’t able to continue her string of attending every Packers regular-season, preseason and playoff home game dating to late 2000.
She works in government, so she wasn’t one of the 450 health care workers and first responders invited to attend the Packers’ 40-14 thrashing of the Tennessee Titans at Lambeau Field on Dec. 27.
But when the team begins its postseason run this month, the pull of Packers fandom will be so strong that she and husband James won’t be able to resist.
So they’ll park their car just west of Lambeau, watch the action on the south end zone video board
and add their voices to those of the limited number of fans who be allowed in the stadium. The team has yet to say how many spectators will be allowed at the playoff opener, but indicated earlier the number could eventually reach 12,000.
Diehard fans would like it to be much higher, but will take what they can get.
“I miss being part of the home-field advantage,” said Conard, a senior planner for Brown County, who last was inside a packed Lambeau Field for the playoff game against the Seattle Seahawks last January. “We sacked (Seattle quarterback) Russell Wilson five times that day. I’d like to think my well-timed yelling helped.”
Call it fanaticism — fan is short for “fanatic,” after all — call it a sickness, call it obsession, but a number of Packers fans say the need to be at Lambeau on a gameday can overwhelm the side of the brain that says it can be dangerous to sit with strangers in a crowded sports venue during a pandemic.
“Since the pandemic, our clinic has seen a steady rise in 40-somethingyear-old white guys, and so have my mental health colleagues across the country,’’ Darron Smith, an instructor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis, told USA TODAY Sports this summer. “The absence of football for this crowd will further disrupt their sense of normalcy and ritualistic bonding with other males through tailgating activities.”
Packers fans say they experience a feeling of loss by not being able to be part of the gameday crowds.
“There definitely was some depression for me early on,” said Scott Schwartz, a Pulaski-area general contractor who’s a leader of an informal band of 200-plus die-hards that tailgates each game in the lot near Lambeau’s Oneida Nation Gate.
Or they did until this year, when Lambeau’s lots remained closed.
“A small group of us tried to tailgate at (a convenience store) across Oneida Street,” he said. “But this has been a hard year … you can’t travel, you can’t hug — even at a funeral, you can’t give your friend a hug” because of the risk of spreading the virus.
As of Thursday, COVID-19 has been blamed for more than 4,800 deaths in Wisconsin, with more than 475,000 residents infected. COVID-19 has led to more than 342,000 deaths nationally, and 1.8 million worldwide, figures from Johns Hopkins University show.
Without the energy provided by thousands of other fans — both Packers supporters and those of the opponents — Schwartz’s alternative tailgate location didn’t catch on. Fans who annually travel crazy distances to watch their beloved Packers in person — Schwartz has a friend who travels from Scotland for at
Appleton residents Jamie and Dan Bernhardt rock their favorite NFL teams’ jerseys ahead of last season’s NFC championship game between the Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers. COURTESY OF JAMIE BERNHARDT
least one game each year — chose to sit it out this season.
Without the shared excitement of people across the state rooting for their team, Packers supporters felt a sense of … not loss, exactly, but of something missing, especially during the coldest and most isolating part of winter.
“I love how the excitement builds and pulls us through the long month of January,” said Karla Baierl, a Packers fan from Milwaukee.
In 2011, when the team caught fire during the playoffs en route to winning Super Bowl XLV over the Pittsburgh Steelers, “it marked a whole week of anticipation,” Baierl said.
“It would be wonderful having those games to look forward to this year,” she added, “but sad not to be able to share it with friends and family like in previous years.”
Appleton resident Jamie Bernhardt agreed. She said her mother, Jan, is loud enough at family Packers-watching events that she provides the energy of four people, but a fan-less stadium is a poor substitute for one jammed with 80,000 spectators.
“The whole experience of Lambeau is amazing,” she said. “But now, when a player scores a touchdown, he does the Lambeau Leap — into no one.
“The whole season kind of sucks. Things aren’t the same without fans.”
Like other fans 17 weeks into the season, Schwartz said he often finds himself on the phone on gamedays, talking with cohorts. They’re trying to make up some of what is lost because they can’t gather in groups at Lambeau to bathe in their shared love of an iconic team.
Ashwaubenon resident Nancy Selinsky said a text-message chain has helped take some of the sting out of being unable to attend games for her and 10 or so friends. The chain, labeled “Gameday” on Selinsksky’s phone, has taken on a greater importance in a season in which the group must watch from various locations rather than gathering at the stadium and watching together.
“We’re fortunate enough to have a parking pass for Lambeau, but, of course, (gathering there is) not possible, so we all get our phones and iPads out and communicate that way throughout the game,” she said via email. “The fact that we’re talking about the playoffs makes it worse that we can’t go to the game.
“But we’re in the playoffs at Lambeau,” she quickly added, “and that’s what matters more than anything.”