As Champions, They Face a Different Blitz

NEW ORLEANS —  Three thousand reporters, probably 100,000 football stories printed across the nation in the last week, and the last man being interviewed at Super Bowl XXXI Monday morning, following the day-after traditional sessions with the winning coach and MVP, was agent Leigh Steinberg.

All together now: “Show me the money,” and barring a modern-day sports miracle, say goodbye to those fuzzy adorable Packers that America has come to embrace.

Monday, the fresh-faced heroes were hailed in a Green Bay parade and welcomed by a sold-out Lambeau Field crowd. A year from now, the Packers could very well be the Dallas Cowboys.

It is time to get rich, which is the curse of any successful organization with designs on becoming a dynasty, and if it isn’t endorsements and commercials interjecting jealousy and arrogance into the Packer locker room--five Packers will be on the Wheaties boxes, 47 will not--it will be the NFL’s salary cap chipping away at the best team in the league.

Too bad. The Packers were the best thing to happen to the NFL this year. They were pure and sincere in their drive to help each other and damn the incentives. They talked about making it to the Super Bowl for the benefit of some of their long-time brethren, and they meant it.

They had one player who had won a Super Bowl, and that was Jim McMahon. And he was lost in his own world.

Stuck in an outpost in northern Wisconsin, they had to rely on their comrades, and to stay indoors and remind each other that only a Super Bowl victory would forever shut up the old-time Packer fans who always wanted to talk about Starr and Hornung and Lombardi.

Left alone for the most part by the media because of their remote location, the Packers remained fresh and eager to tell their stories. Shirley Temple’s movies were never as syrupy as the prattle these guys were putting out.

“I just want to see my family,” said Desmond Howard, the Super Bowl MVP, “and eat some of my mom’s caramel cake.”

They were the real thing, athletes who had yet to be tainted by success or appearances on “The Tonight Show.”

“We have a team of very high-character people,” said Coach Mike Holmgren, and just picture Dallas Coach Barry Switzer saying the same thing without laughing. “I think that helps you win games. I know it does.”

They were a team of superstars waiting to be discovered, a roster full of Steve Youngs, almost too good to be true.

They had a quarterback in Brett Favre, a regular throwback to the party boys in Green Bay who had played for Vince Lombardi, who had flung himself upon the mercy of the country after going public with his addiction to painkillers.

They had a defensive lineman in Reggie White, who hadn’t gone to Green Bay as a free agent because they paid him $17 million, but because God had spoken to him.

They had another defensive lineman in Sean Jones, a warrior who had been carried home on his shield after losing battles for the Raiders and Houston Oilers, willing to take a $900,000 pay cut to remain in the hinterland.

They had a woebegone wide receiver in Howard, a man on top of the world as the Heisman Trophy winner and then knocked down to near unemployment, who rose up to live every youngster’s dream as Super Bowl MVP.

They even had a controversy waiting to happen in Andre Rison, one of the league’s best-known egos. But when it was all over, Rison was talking like Mother Teresa.

“I felt the love,” he said. “I became part of the family here.”

But what happens to them now?

The Cheeseheads were a hoot this year; next year they become obnoxious. The vexing 29-year wait is over for Titletown, USA, and the ghosts of the past no longer must be appeased.

This year, the Packers were a charming story. Next year, the quest to repeat becomes business.

Less than 12 hours after winning Super Bowl XXXI, Holmgren was already being asked if there was some unfinished business with the Cowboys, a team Green Bay has failed to beat seven times in the last four years.

“I honestly didn’t think about the Cowboys at all during the game,” Holmgren said with a grin. “But before I’m finished coaching, I would like to beat them one time--that would be nice.”

While the Packers gear up to beat the Cowboys, everyone else will be pumping themselves up to dethrone the defending champions.

And in two weeks, Howard, Jones, Gilbert Brown, Dorsey Levens, Wayne Simmons, Chris Jacke, Don Beebe, Mike Prior and Frank Winters will be free agents--overpriced free agents, for the most part, because they are coming from a Super Bowl champion.

The Packers cannot keep them all, although they have already taken a bold step in protecting their future by extending White’s contract and working on a deal to extend the contract of General Manager Ron Wolf.

Wolf is completing a new contract for Favre that will allow Favre to buy all the cheese in Wisconsin. But that, along with White’s deal, will also make the Packers cut deeply into their salary cap and take away money to sign workmanlike players, such as Simmons, Jones and Brown.

And for players like Howard--forget it. Howard, like Dallas cornerback Larry Brown who was the Super Bowl MVP a year ago, will probably be offered more money than he’s worth to leave, and take it.

“The difficult thing is trying to keep your players together because they will have opportunities now to test the waters,” said Holmgren, a high school coach two decades ago, who has guided the Packers with a steady hand. “And, with success, that in itself creates some problems.

“I remember in 1990, going for a three-peat while I was with San Francisco. We lost to the Giants in the playoffs and went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, which was a nice consolation, but it wasn’t any fun. That’s crazy. It’s your life; you spend too much time away from family and friends and work too hard not to have fun.

“I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to let that happen here.”

Fun--what a novel concept. In hindsight, it fueled the Packers’ rise to prominence.

Can Holmgren keep his Packers from getting big heads? Can the players turn a deaf ear to agents urging them to renegotiate their contracts? Will the Packers remain a family within the locker room when the endorsements come to some, but not all? How do the Packers cope with the squeeze of the salary cap, and the damage imposed by free agency?

“I don’t have an answer for that,” Holmgren said. “I have had my hands full just trying to figure out what to do with zone blitzes. Right now we’re on top of the world, and I’m feeling very, very good about it.

“We’re gonna try and keep it going, try and maintain that same chemistry and unselfish play that my players have had the last couple of years. We’re going to have to talk about finding a way again to climb that mountain. But for a couple of days, I just want to enjoy this feeling that I have now.”

And there it is: you win a Super Bowl and you start to take it easy. A few days off, maybe a vacation. Maybe even a commercial shoot in some warm climate.

Do you think Barry Switzer is taking time off?